The Avant-garde Edition
PRACTICAL INFORMATION:
The screening will take place on Sunday the 18th of December at Bubblan, Fiskhamnsgatan 41B Kajskjul 46, Göteborg. The screening will start at 7 pm (19:00) and the venue will open at 6 pm (18:00). We will serve some food for reasonable price.
The number of seats is limited so be sure to book by sending an email to: kuf.kontakt@gmail.com
Entrance fee is 60 SEK for film club members only: register to the club by leaving your name and email directly at the door, or through mail when you book your seat.
Here you can find the Facebook event.
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This time we are going to screen three crucial masterpieces of experimental and poetic cinema. Don't miss the opportunity to watch them on the big screen at Bubblan!
In screening order:
The House Is Black (1963) by Iranian filmmaker and poet Forugh Farrokhzad (14 min.)
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. (20 min.)
Wavelenght (1967) by Michael Snow (43 min.)
We will have a short break after the second film.
From American film critic, writer and journalist Jonathan Rosenbaum:
“The most powerful Iranian film I’ve seen is this 22-minute black-and-white 1962 documentary made by Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967), commonly regarded as the greatest 20th-century Persian poet. It’s her only film and its subject is a leper colony in northern Iran. Part of what’s so special about it is its seamless adaptation of the techniques of poetry to the techniques of film, in which framing, editing, sound, and narration all play central roles. At once lyrical and extremely matter-of-fact — without a trace of sentimentality or voyeurism, yet profoundly humanist — Farrokhzad’s view of everyday life in the colony (children at school and at play, people eating, various medical treatments) is spiritual, unflinching, and beautiful in ways that have no apparent Western counterparts; to my eyes and ears, it registers like a prayer.”
No Home Movies is proud to screen this gem which in this historical moment has a political poignacy. Iranian cinema has historically distinguished itself for its poetics, aesthetics and inventivness. The depth of this filmic language has no counterparts and can help us to better understand a country whose complexity is much deeper than its distorted image in the West and of the Iranian regime’s own attempt to shut it down!
We would also to like to recommend an incredible selection of Iranian films curated by the feminist journal Another Gaze.
https://www.another-screen.com/films-from-iran-for-iran
Alongside Un Chien Andalou (1929) by Luis Buñuel, Maya Deren’s Meshes of The Afternoon is the most widely known avant-garde film.
From the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA):
“Maya Deren conceived, directed, and played the central role in Meshes of the Afternoon, her first film and a work that helped chart the course for American experimental cinema. It was shot without dialogue or sound (a soundtrack by composer Teiji Ito was added later, in 1959) and in black and white. It runs for only 14 minutes. But within this relatively spare format unfolds an unsettling, fully realized narrative which blurs the barrier between the projections of the mind—thoughts, urges, emotions, dreams—and the external, waking world. Working with her then-husband Alexander Hammid, a leading documentary filmmaker and cinematographer, Deren sought to make a film that would portray “the inner realities of an individual and the way in which the subconscious will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.”1
Finally, an hypnotic experimantal journey. A 40 minutes long landmark of avant-garde cinema.
Again Jonathan Rosenbaum helps us to better understand this film through a keen observation of its structure and ambitions:
“If Wavelength both contains and largely comprises what might be construed as the most consequential zoom shot in the history of cinema, this is because it radically redefines not only the functions that such a shot might have, but also –- and perhaps more importantly — the field of potential interest that almost any representational shot of any film could have. With its rigorous, relentless and wholly functional logic, Wavelength proposes like few films before it a model of cinema as perceptual and philosophical investigation, and is witty and sensible enough about its own aim to phrase its journey partially within the contextual framework of a mystery thriller”
“The epoch-making fascination of Wavelength is that it explicitly makes ‘everything’ interesting, transforming every discernible element in its path into an object of significance.”
Join us for the last screening of No Home Movies film club’s second season!
We are very proud to have made this selection and give to the city of Gothenburg the chance to see these masterpieces on the big screen in a venue whose commitment to artistic expression without comprosimes has no rivarly!