Figuring Grounds – like Tale Enclosure, 1985 – was edited from three hours of recordings made at the Stained Glass Studio in Barrytown, New York, where Hill’s Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come On Petunia), 1984, was also taped. Facing one another, Quasha and Stein begin vocalizing from the very grain of language, and the improvisational search for voices passes through recognizable swarms of phonemes with a possible word or phrase briefly coming into focus now and then. Camera movements and continual focal play mirror the highly nuanced vocal expression, tightly coupled with body and facial movements. The voices build upon one another, rising and falling in volume and pitch, sometimes in unison, other times in “conversation,” in a seeming attempt to let the primary roots of language speak for themselves.
John Legend: Live from Philadelphia actually constitutes a two-disc set, with an album and a disc of concert footage culled from r&b and neo-soul demigod Legend's Philadelphia engagements on his "Show Me" tour.
Chris Jackson is a taxi driver with a childhood trauma. The trauma has made him a portal for obsessions to pass from the mind to the physical world and hence disrupt the world's multiple planes of reality.
Three small films for as many reflections on the senses and human knowledge. In the first episode, Emmer reviews with anthological and didactic intent the precepts of ancient philosophy, from Greek to Roman civilization; in the second, working as he did at the beginning of his career on a vast repertoire of pictorial and non-pictorial images, he analyzes the “history of the gaze” in the visual arts, from prehistoric graffiti to medieval altarpieces, from Impressionist and Cubist paintings to modern-day advertising posters; finally, in the third, recounting with irony and lightness a day of solitude in his mountain home, he reflects on the intellectual thinking of writers and great thinkers, relating to his own individual experience as much the words of oral tradition and popular culture as the writings of geniuses such as Shakespeare, Spinoza or Gogol.
A documentary on Paul Watson, who takes the law into his own hands on the open seas, confronting, by any nonviolent means necessary, the hunters who indiscriminately slaughter whales, seals and sharks, along with complicit governments and environmental organizations.
A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and even horror genres, Craig Baldwin's Mock Up On Mu cobbles together a feature-length "collage-narrative" based on (mostly) true stories of California's post-War sub-cultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions, and Beat lifestyles.
Far into the future after the world has brought about the apocalypse what remains of humanity has split into two warring tribes - the Plaebian and the Huron.
Comments
Have you watched Figuring Grounds yet? What did you think about it?