The Second Cinema

-Using the internet as a subcultural movie theater - A depository for interesting movies/films/cinema/moving image media available online

[thesecondcinema]

Kenneth Anger, Rabbit’s Moon, 1950

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Anger

Filmed under a blue filter and set within a wooded glade during the night, the plot revolves around a clown, Pierrot, his longing for the moon (in which a rabbit lives – a concept found in both Japanese folklore and Aztecmythology), and his futile attempts to jump up and catch it. Subsequently, another clown (Harlequin) appears and teases Pierrot, showing him Columbina, with whom he appears to fall in love.

[thesecondcinema]

Paul Clipson, light year, 2013

http://www.withinmirrors.org/films/index.html

“The film showcases Clipson's extraordinary treatment of the complex natural and cultural systems in the urban landscape, from the ephemeral rhythms of light and water to the rigid order of crosswalks and skyscrapers.”

[thesecondcinema]

Title: Roswell

Filmmaker: Bill Brown 

"Bill Brown's Roswell...takes a fanciful...look at the supposed crash of a flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, an 'event' UFO types cite to this day as evidence of a massive government cover-up. Brown...seems to take the event seriously. He wonders what the craft was doing in Roswell of all places, speculating that it was piloted by a 'star boy...joyriding through the cosmos' who 'got lost and lost control.' But Brown also sees his subject playfully, as if through a child's eyes-- objects suggest others, nothing has a stable meaning... The fish-eye lens used for some landscape shots curves the horizon line, making the sky seem enclosed-- navigable, traversable. In the film's strongest image, Brown stands facing the camera with a sheaf of papers in hand, as an animated drawing of a spaceship scoots across the paper, suggesting a connection between UFO fantasies and the magical possibilities of cinema." -Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

Website

[thesecondcinema]

Title: Night Scene Chinatown (2008)

Filmmaker: Jem Cohen

Filmed entirely MOS on 16mm film Musique Concrete soundscore created by T. Griffin with Jem Cohen from field recordings made in Chinatown, New York.

website

[thesecondcinema]

Title: Golden Hour (2014)

Filmmaker: Ross Meckfessel

vimeo

[thesecondcinema]

Title: Un Chant d’amour  (1950)

Filmmaker: Jean Genet

Un chant d'amour  (English: A Song of Love) is French writer Jean Genet's only film, which he directed in 1950.[1] Because of its explicit (though artistically presented) homosexual content, the 26-minute movie was long banned.

wiki

[thesecondcinema]

Title: Witch’s Cradle

Filmmakers: Maya Deren, Marcel Duchamp

An unfinished, silent, experimental short film written and directed by Maya Deren, featuring Marcel Duchamp, and filmed in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery

wiki

[thesecondcinema]

Title: Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

Filmmaker: Maya Deren

By her fourth film, Deren discussed in An Anagram that she felt special attention should be given to unique possibilities of time and that the form should be ritualistic as a whole. Ritual in Transfigured Time began in August and was completed in 1946. It explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression in abandoning ritual, looking at the details as well as the bigger ideas of the nature and process of change.

wiki

[thesecondcinema]

Title: A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945)

Filmmaker: Maya Deren 

In the spring of 1945 she made A Study in Choreography for Camera, which Deren said was "an effort to isolate and celebrate the principle of the power of movement."[5] The compositions and varying speeds of movement within the frame inform and interact with Deren's meticulous edits and varying film speeds and motions to create a dance that Deren said could only exist on film. Excited by the way the dynamic of movement is greater than anything else within the film, Maya established a completely new sense of the word "geography" as the movement of the dancer transcends and manipulates the ideas of both time and space.[5] Running at just under 3 minutes long, A Study in Choreography for Camera is a fragment but also a carefully constructed exploration of a man who dances in a forest, and then seems to teleport to the inside of a house because of how continuous his movements are from one place to the next. The choreography is perfectly synched as he seamlessly appears in an outdoor courtyard and then returns to an open, natural space. It shows a progression from nature to the confines of society, and back to nature. The figure belongs to dancer and choreographer Talley Beatty, whose last movement is a leap across the screen back to the natural world. The edit its broken, choppy, showing different angles and compositions, and even with parts in slow-motion, Deren is able to keep the quality of the leap smooth and seemingly uninterrupted.

wiki

[thesecondcinema]

Title: At Land (1944)

Filmmaker: Maya Deren

a 15-minute silent experimental film written, directed by, and starring Maya Deren. It has a dream-like narrative in which a woman, played by Deren, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey encountering other people and other versions of herself. Deren once said that the film is about the struggle to maintain one's personal identity.

wiki

[thesecondcinema]

Title: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Filmmaker: Maya Deren

Meshes of the Afternoon is recognized as a seminal American avant-garde film. It is the first narrative film in avant-garde American film, which critics have said took on an autobiographical tone - for women and the individual. Originally a silent film with no dialogue, music for the film was composed by Deren's third husband Teiji Itō in 1952. The film can be described as an expressionistic "trance film," full of dramatic angles and innovative editing. It seems to investigate the ephemeral ways in which the protagonist's unconscious mind works and makes connections between objects and situations. A woman, played by Maya Deren, walks to her friend's house in Los Angeles, falls asleep and has a dream. The sequence of walking up to the gate on the partially shaded road restarts numerous times, resisting conventional narrative expectations, and ends in various situations inside the house. Movement from the wind, shadows and the music sustain the heartbeat of the dream. Certain symbols recur on the screen, including a cloaked, mirror-faced figure, and a key, which becomes twinned with a knife.

The loose repetition and rhythm cuts short any expectation of a conventional narrative, heightening the dream-like qualities. The camera initially avoids her face, which precludes identification with a particular woman's face. Multiple selves appear, shifting between the first and third person, suggesting that the super-ego is at play, which is in line with the psychoanalytic Freudian staircase and flower motifs. Very aware of the "personal film," her first piece explores a woman's subjectivity and her relation to the external world. Georges Sadoul said Deren may have been "the most important figure in the post-war development of the personal, independent film in the U.S.A."[5] In featuring the filmmaker as the woman whose subjectivity in the domestic space is explored, the feminist dictum "the personal is political" is foregrounded. As with her other films on self-representation, Deren navigates conflicting tendencies of the self and the "other," through doubling, multiplication and merging of the woman in the film. Following a dreamlike quest with allegorical complexity, Meshes of the Afternoon has an enigmatic structure and a loose affinity with both film noir and domestic melodrama.

Wiki

[thesecondcinema]

Title: Hotel Monterey (1972)

Filmmaker: Chantal Akerman

Under Chantal Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux.

[thesecondcinema]

Title: La Chambre (1972)

Filmmaker: Chantal Akerman

In Chantal Akerman’s early short film La chambre, we see the furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back at us. This breakthrough formal experiment is the first film the director made in New York.

wiki criterion

[thesecondcinema]

Title: Convalescing (super-8 to 35mm, 2000, color, 3 min)

Filmmaker: Barbara Meter

'Convalescing, when you don't have to participate in the world. Time to read, to dream, to look - the blue, the light of the television, the blue, the book, the patterns the light, the blue. Time to appreciate how much that really is.'

Website 

[thesecondcinema]

Title: Exterior (excerpt, not full film) 1970

Filmmaker: Barbara Meter

Barbara Meter's first experimental film. From outside, the handheld camera surreptitiously peers at life in the living rooms of nocturnal Amsterdam. Shots of lamp shades, plants, chairs, faces and pets. A poodle stares out of the window.

"FROM THE EXTERIOR is eight color minutes of spontaneous searching, looking at peoples lives through open-curtained windows, from the outside-in. The film moves, blinks, grasps (lyrically) at the fragments of (room) reality; patches of color, the edge of a plant, a man sitting camouflaged within his surroundings, blinking TV sets, etc. It's a vision at un funny high-speed (shot at 8fps) of moments lost, passed too quickly for accurate memory-impact to be formed. Thus the film must be seen and reseen; people exist in a non-linear time, they just are. Their situations are, unobtusively; simply, those of Giacometti-like existences, focussed on for moments only, then left to themselves. Gesture (the film-maker's and the subjects') becomes the form content of life and film. Sometimes existences overlap (physically through superimposition), as patches of shape in a defined space, specific yet timeless." --Peter Gidal 

Website

[thesecondcinema]

Title: YOU CAN DO IT TOO, Ep.2: Doomed

Filmmaker: Lindley Elmore

[thesecondcinema]

Title: YOU CAN DO IT TOO, Ep. 1: Drip Music

Filmmaker: Lindley Elmore