Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature" and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.
In this "beautifully intimate and utterly unique piece of cinema", Toby Amies crosses the line between filmmaker and carer, trying to cope with the strange and hilarious world view of the fragile eccentric, Drako Zarharzar.
An accurate depiction of the basic tenets of northern Mahayana Buddhism, cast into living or "experiential" form, consistent with powerful mantras heard on the soundtrack of the film.
EMPATHY (a digital love letter) is a short essay documentary, a heartbreaking comedy about a break-up, an attempt to concretize emotion and evoke empathy from a writer’s approach.
In this tape, Ko Nakajima and Video Earth Tokyo interview a homeless man. The subject is initially angry and frustrated, but gradually opens up and shares stories about his life.
Openland is an art film guided by issues surrounding micro states and its derivative definitions. Through intertwining interviews, meta-narratives, and digital landscapes, Openland unfurls a dialogue between consciousness, individuality and collectivity.
Daniel Eisenberg's film (or "memory essay," as theorist Nora Alter referred to DISPLACED PERSON) is a challenge to a conventional view of history, a provocation using traditional documentary forms: found footage, newsreels, a radio lecture of French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss and Ludwig van Beethoven's "Razumovsky" quartets.
Popular movie trailers from 1996
These some of the most viewed trailers for movies released in 1996:
Fearful that the Russians would continue their lead in the space race and be the first to put a man on the moon, NASA felt an enormous pressure to push the Apollo Program forward as quickly as possible, though they knew that pushing too hard could lead to the ultimate disaster.
BEAUTIFUL FUNERALS is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes AND 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-crossed by black "brushstrokes" and hard-edge straight black and white lines.
The true story of a Prussian aristocrat working for German military intelligence during World War II, who, with a group of fellow devout Christians, plotted to assassinate Hitler with a bomb in his briefcase.
A family, trying to pull themselves together after losing their infant son, moves into a new home, where, almost immediately, the mother begins experiencing paranormal phenomena.
Director Mohsen Makhmalbaf claims to have never seen a movie before making his first film. Doubtful as it sounds, this boast matches perfectly with the controversial artist's personae.
Set on May 18, 1993—the day on which Denmark voted to join the European Union, just a few months after they'd voted not to do so—the film follows eight or so disparate Danes (an escaped mental patient, a newly-famous singer, a business executive, and their assorted families and cohorts) as they unwittingly alter one another's lives, for better and for worse.
Australian-born filmmaker George Miller offers a personal view of Australian films. He suggests that they can be regarded as visual music, public dreaming, mythology, and song-lines.
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Have you watched Animal Charm: Golden Digest yet? What did you think about it?
