Saline bodies, water. Buckets, film. Materiality, memory. Erosion, elision. Time, travel. Spiral, Jetty. Salt Lake, Dead Sea. Jennifer West’s fervent materialism is by now well documented—strewn as her films are with materials, which she then indexes in her paragraph-long titles—as are the dialectical relationships she plumbs with awesome hallucinatory fever. Likewise, her films Spiral of Time Documentary Film and Salt Crystals Spiral Jetty Dead Sea Five Year Film (both 2013) materialize—no, metabolize—more of these things. Travelogues in the elliptical way that Tony Conrad’s black painted frames on paper, his seventies-era “Yellow Movies,” were movies, West’s recent films are admixtures of shot images and abstract, material traces, in the acid-y palette that is her signature.
Two lost souls visiting Tokyo -- the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial -- find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.
In Los Angeles, a gang of bank robbers who call themselves The Ex-Presidents commit their crimes while wearing masks of Reagan, Carter, Nixon and Johnson.
In 1953 the Canadian government relocated Inuit families from Northern Québec to the High Arctic, promising an abundance of game and fish and assuring them they could return home after two years if things didn't work out.
When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.
A drama teacher's taboo relationship with an unstable student strikes a nerve in her jealous classmate, sparking a vengeful chain of events within their suburban high school that draws parallels to "The Crucible".
Hamdan is a former Palestinian leader who spent 15 years locked up in the old Israeli prisons. In 1973, while living in Syria, he was given a mission to smuggle explosives across the border and train a person he trusted.
What does it take to say a word of love? How long and how much strength does it take for the heart to speak? How many streets at night? How fast? How many faces in how many bars? What tenderness? What pain? What music? What images in the mind? And where does it come from? Is it in the darkness of a closed park at night? In the back room of a Chinese bar? In the bottom of a beer? In a collective dance? In a sister's laughter? When does it finally happen? For the soul to let go.
Comments
Have you watched Spiral of Time Documentary Film yet? What did you think about it?
