32) LIMITE directed by Mario Peixoto (1931, Brazil, 120 min.)

For a film made in 1931, an incredible attempt to create music and sense through image and movement. The vocabulary/syntax of this 2 hour dream is far vaster than what may constitute an "experimental narrative" now: tilts, traveling shots, double exposures, cross fades, all with specific and purposeful affect. These techniques along with long sequences of close-ups, dancing water, surfaces textures and faces. The incredibly poetic montage places humans in the combine of forces beyond their control. Once one gets beyond the sometimes excessively expressed scenes of despair and we enter into the dynamics and wonder of the games of time, space and affect, it becomes evident that this little known avant garde feature is deserving of far greater recognition.

The film nearly disappeared, was restored as best possible but is missing several scenes. Could do without the illustrative Debussy soundtrack.

The plotline " In a drifting small boat, two women and a man recall their recent past. One of the women escaped from the prison; the other one was desperate; and the man had lost his lover. They have no further strength or desire to live and have reached the limit of their existences."Claudio Carvalho

47) John Gianvito's "Profit Motives and the Whispering wind" (2007)

And the belief in material presence and the capacity for "non-living" filmed objects to tell their own history is strong in Haunted landscapes as with John Gianvito's "Profit Motives and the Whispering wind" (2007). Portraits of gravestones and other historic sites, be they along highways, in graveyards, un marked fields, nearly all with the original sound which is recorded with far less care than the image. That said, the sound and image construction goes well beyond any sort of narrative template. The end of the film is unfortunate as it switches into the overused cliché in militant films of beat heavy music accompanying demonstration footage. A breath of fresh wind in any case-thanks Mr. Gianvito.

makes one think of...
a cinema which dreams the periphery...


Lincoln in the center (he certainly was not on the left!)

"And around them? People standing in looser and looser concentrations, until finally - their attention turns away from history and focuses on the abiding interest of alost anything else. And this is somehow the inherent bias of the camera. It always directs us toward the center of attention, never away to the periphery, even though that is where our attention eventually wanders." from VK for NYT

26) Artavazd Pelechian's (Peleyshian) "Our Century" (35mm, 1983, 47 min.)

In essence one of the most unforgettable uses of found footage. Primarily Soviet and US footage is brought together in this race to space, this effort of man to climb and fall, the efforts are one and the same we realize and the gravity of the desire vibrates in every shot of this incredible film, soundwork and perspective. Absolutely mind boggling.

103) HIC ROSA by Anne-Marie Faux
Filmed in Corsica in super-8, letters of Rosa Luxembourg's impressions of her time on the island, far from the illusions of a tourist. A precious, maybe too precious impressionistic 'partition' graced well chosen excerpts. She's got the birds on her side and a capitalist regime(France) financing her film inspired by an anarchist. Choice of landscape is a head scratcher, much are not the landscape which Luxembourg speaks of nor the dominant and astounding textures and spaces which even a short walk in the mountain yields. Please, somebody try the same thing with Xenakis who was inspired by the jagged coasts of Corsica for his audio compositions...

16)WERNER HERZOG's "ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2007)
With "Encounters" and "Grizzly Man" Herzog seems to be applying meaning where once he found it. It is no longer the spaces, times, and people that which carry the meaning such as in some of his classic docs such as "In the Land of Silence and Darkness"(1971). Now it is Herzog, telling us of man's condition instead of allowing us to understand it and absorb it. In Encounters, Herzog heads to the South Pole and records the scientific work taking place there. He also strikes up some interesting conversations with the people who work in McMurdo. This project was like squeezing water from a stone for Herzog. One doesn't have the impression that the material that made the cut is just the tip of the iceberg, this was a tough one to pull his sublime "man vs. nature" themes out of. At one point Herzog's voiceover cuts off a linguist speaking about languages facing extinction to pose the question of why we worry so much about plants while languages disappear... nuff said.