Programming Ideas
From The Star And Shadow Cinema Wiki
JACK CHAMBERS HART OF LONDON Canada, 1970, 70 mins, 16mm "The Hart of London is... constructed out of a variety of material; newsreel, found footage and film shot by Chambers himself. Visually and thematically it shares much common ground with the work of Stan Brakhage, whose influence, when watching the film, is hard to ignore; Chambers postulates the primacy of light using a number of techniques, and uses his material of a Spanish slaughter house and the birth of a child (amongst other things) to riff on the themes of life and death, all to stunning effect. The maintenance of the film's tension, and its complexity of scope, however, pushes The Hart of London way beyond any reductive comparisons. Brakhage called it 'one of the few GREAT films of cinema'." - William J. Fowler "... Hart of London (1969-70), Chambers' last film, is a dense, feature-length, multi-image symphonic work whose scope is breathtaking. Without doubt it is a masterwork." - R. Bruce Elder - available...LUX ARCHIVE
PEGGY AHWESH & KEITH SANBORN THE DEADMAN USA, 1989, Sound, B&W, 37 mins, 16mm. 'The film manages to approximate the transgressive poetic prose of Bataille (a mixture of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendour) while celebrating female sexual desire without the usual patriarchal porn trimmings. Equally remarkable for its endlessly inventive soundtrack and its beautiful black and white photography, it already bears the earmarks of an authentic avant-garde classic. The relationship between the visual story-telling, the ornate printed titles, and the occasional voice-over is both subtle and complex, mixing tenses and cross-weaving modes of narration with a unique fusion of abandon and rigour.' - Jonathan Rosenbaum - - available...LUX ARCHIVE
PEGGY AHWESH & MARGIE STROSSER STRANGE WEATHER USA 1993, 50 mins, video A Fisher Price pixelvision camera follows four young junkies in a dark and gloomy subterranean underworld of drugs and addiction. Set in a black and white Florida constantly threatened by storms and hurricanes, Strange Weather takes us on an intimate and extraordinary journey, portrayed through ritualistic and claustrophobic close ups of ice cream, guns and drugs. - - available...LUX ARCHIVE
