Secret Life

Secret Life from ⓇⓇ Artstudio Reynolds on Vimeo.

Secret Life by REYNOLD REYNOLDS, portrays a woman trapped in an apartment with a life of its own. Transcending the narrative horizons of human desire, the film visits upon us a glimpse of a shared and sacred reality. A work that defies the ultimate metaphysical taboos of temporality by combining novel technique with intrepid philosophical vision; and daring to present that which is seldom, if ever, portrayed in any artistic medium.
Impossibilities are made possible through Reynolds’ signature aesthetic, a lens that can fill one with reverence for the mundane.
Have you ever wondered what time sees, experiences? Without mortal assumptions about time, the occupant of the apartment is no longer limited even to unique location, but here, seen through the eye of time, space itself is now become alive. Without the context of space and time, the woman’s mind collapses and neglects the organization of her experience, leaving her only with sensations. The viewer may ask: Is it her mind or is it time itself that creates the uncontrolled and uncontrollable environment? The work suggests that all living things are endowed with consciousness, meaning all living things have awareness. While the space increases in its activity, the woman becomes an ever more passive element in her world. She moves at a mechanical speed and her mind is like a clock whose hands pin the events of her life to the tapestry of time, all the while, the truth is transcendentally reflected in the mechanical eye of the camera. Her thoughts escape her and come to life, growing like the plants that inhabit the space around her: living, searching, feeling, breathing and dying.

HD video transferred from 16mm and photo stills

single channel HD projection 10 min or 2 channel HD projection each 5 min.

Synopsis:
Secret Life is the first of the Secrets Trilogy; a cycle exploring the imperceptible conditions that frame life and is followed by Secret Machine (2009) and Six Easy Pieces (2010)

You are a country if you say you are

President Kevin Baugh of Molossia, still from How To Start Your Own Country by Jody Shapiro, 2010, 72 min

What makes a country a country? What makes a state a state? A nation a nation? And what’s to stop you from starting your own?

In a globe-hopping search for an answer to these fundamental but little understood questions of sovereignty, How To Start Your Own Country visits six micronations – unrecognized self-declared sovereign entities that you will not find on a political map.
Meet Prince Leonard and Princess Shirley of the Hutt River Province Principality, the second –largest nation on the continent of Australia; Salute President Kevin Baugh, the absolute ruler of the Republic of Molossia, entirely surrounded by the state of Nevada; say “buon giorno” to good folk of Seborga, a 1200-year-old principality which claims to have been included in Italy by mistake.

Through the lives and experiences of these micronational pioneers – whether farmer, artist, pirate or inventor -- the film lays bare the ephemeral nature of statehood while interviews with diplomats and experts in international law expose a revelation: there is no legal definition of a country in international jurisprudence. You are a country if you say you are.

But declaration does not guarantee recognition.

Along the way we learn of the exclusionary membership terms of the United Nations, the ultimate country club. We realize that the maps that shape our self-image as citizens are mere representations, the boundaries they delineate relative. Wherever you look in the world – from the high seas to forsaken desert -- there is someone with a different idea of what constitutes home. And an urge to put themselves literally on the map.
From the outback soil of the Hutt River Principality to the futuristic ocean cities of The Seasteading Institute, these visionaries are challenging the status quo, setting their own course and creating nations that you will not find in an atlas… at least not yet.
How To Start Your Own Country explores a concept most of us take for granted: the countries we call home. See the trailer here, read a review from the The Toronto International Film Festival after the jump.

MUSE: A Savage Cocktail (with a Dash of Bitters, Please)

Kudos all around for Massimo Salvato’s Muse, which keenly interposes the almost sepia-soaked world of earnest creativity with the LED-infused shock of the lean, mean and too clean new century that each of the two writers inhabit.

We see the story unfold with the three principal characters locked in the uncomfortable embrace of creative exploitation, resignation and cynicism.

Jules Mallory Skinner’s “Monty” is a reclusive poet spurred toward creative resusitation by Ludmilla (played erratically by Julia Krynke); a woman besotted with her role as the inspirational force behind two very different men. Equally obsessed is Richard Elfyn’s “Walter”(a personality best summed up by the description “wide lawn, narrow mind”).

It’s Elfyn who strikes the most plausible note here in his standout performance. His emotional directness sears as he stares unflinchingly into the camera – his gravel-tinged confessional a perfect complement to the oppressive psychological atmosphere.

Krynke’s “Ludmilla” seems more sterile than the piece requires – alternating a firm lock on her character with intermittent lapses, as the script also exposes bouts of incontinuity breaks in flow and style. There are however several instances of greater flavour added to the written pot.

Adam Harvey’s musical scoring shows admirable restraint, subtly supporting the entire paintbox of colour that Salvato brings to life in an understated surge at the film’s conclusion.

Muse seduces again with the weaving of darkness and light and turns their standard symbolism on its head in a reversal of value. The scene changes are arrestingly crisp and fresh and we are treated to a sumptuous visual feast of images; a snail crawls toward the high set keys of an old typewriter, a tank sits amidst the scrabble of a trodden field, an aerial view of divided farmland stretches out like
gauzy velvet before us.

All said, this is a high level offering. Fine editing and deft cinematography contribute toward making the viewer wish to see this long short expanded into a feature length (indeed it does strike one as a clip from a lengthier effort), as a desire to remain longer in the world that has been created.
One is ultimately left with a strong interest in seeing what will be up Massimo Salvato’s creative sleeve next.

-Angela Turk

MUSE by Massimo Salvato GB 2010 20 min | Screened in European Premiere at the 7th Berlin International Directors Lounge

Photo: Julia Murakami and Massimo Salvato at the 7th Berlin International Directors Lounge

Thorsten Fleisch | 26th March | Berlin | Scala 9pm

Personal show by film and videomaker Thorsten Fleisch

followed by a music performance of his band
Malende

On first sight, his films are very abstract and conceptual. Thorsten Fleisch is working directly with materiality, which can be as analogue and direct as skin impressions or crystals growing on the surface of film surface (16mm), or as digitally generic as a reciprocal math formula that creates 4-dimensional forms, inter-cut with 3 dimensional space and finally shown on the 2-dimensional space of video screen. Material in that sense could also be the electric discharges and their traces on photographic paper. Thus following his workflow, it becomes evident, the author is working with a hybrid combination of analogue and digital image processing. However, and as he tells me, the analogue, or better saying material processes are allowing him to also use chance operations and mistakes (like a light flair on film stock) during the working procedures, whereas with code (or programming) a mistake will just result in a script-error, which has to be eliminated scrupulously instead of being able to be integrated in the creative process.

Just by reviewing the titles of his work, such as “Blutrausch” (blood rush), “Videohaut“ (video skin) “Friendly Fire”, “Kosmos” (cosmos) and “Gestalt” we may realize, on the other hand, that something more is going on with and within the artist’s working process. Without any pathos and drama in his making of, Thorsten Fleisch is lingering (or, shall we say loitering?) on existential and creational themes: light through the literally on film grown minerals are producing a pictorial cosmos, or the blood drawn from his own body is creating a (maybe delirious) rush of images. Trying to put it into a nutshell, one could say, body, creation and space are the themes of his work.

By taking an even closer look, one may also discover that the filmmaker is focusing onto a third yet to mention aspect: It is the sensuality in images that triggers his interest both in his own and in the work of others. One may call it old-school, it sometimes takes as much as a couple of years for its execution, and it may be similar to the meticulously composing and editing of the early Stan Brakhage (classic avant-garde filmmaker who combined all kinds of lens and lens-less effects with camera images to visual compositions), but it is that quality of painstakingly controlling the composing and composition towards pictorial expression that creates the quality of his films. What is new and contemporary in his work, Thorsten Fleisch uses any kind of hybrid techniques, thus challenging the meaning of the “expression of material.”

I prefer old-school and handcraftship to cold calculated superficiality, it makes me read the work on different levels while at the same time enjoying its pure sensations. In fact, Thorsten Fleisch’s work has been screened widely in galleries and on festivals including Directors Lounge.

Thorsten Fleisch will be present and available for Q&A after the screening.
Following the screening, the band … will give play …

program starts at 9 pm
doors open 8 pm

See you at the Scala, Friedrich Str. 112 A, 1st floor

Underworld Cinema: The Life and Work of J.X. Williams

"Peep Show"

J.X. Williams: Wrapped in an Enigma. If the filmmaker J. X. Williams didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him..
An exploitation filmmaker with a storied past, Williams is credited as director of the 1965 documentary “Peep Show” - a kind of spiritual vortex of sub rosa Americana surrounding the Kennedy assassination. After supposedly being suppressed for decades, it was recently shown at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Film Forum in Los Angeles and a handful of other museum, gallery and festival settings throughout the United States and Europe…

still from "Peep Show"


Shot in stark black-and-white and augmented with copious archival film, “Peep Show” tells a tangled tale of a rigged 1960 election, secret C.I.A. training camps in the Florida outback, sex stings in Mafia hotels and a little-known Mob plot to addict Frank Sinatra to heroin.
Noel Lawrence, who offers his title as curator of the J. X. Williams Archive in San Francisco serves as a kind of one-man advocate for Williams. According to Mr. Lawrence’s spiel, Williams’s résumé reads as a RKO mail-room flunky, closet Communist, abortive House Un-American Activities Committee witness, Mafia gofer, pioneer of mobbed-up stag loops, ghostwriter of some of the blacklist era’s greatest films and incidental avatar of experimental cinema. Williams, as the story goes, has spent the last quarter-century in Zurich in self-imposed exile, leaving Mr. Lawrence to serve as a Robert Maheu figure to his shadowy late-stage Howard Hughes.
(NY Times)


Psych-Burn (1968)

J.X. Williams’ lost masterpiece “The Virgin Sacrifice” (1970)

Tomorrow, Sunday 8th, film curator and archivist Noel Lawrence will share a few of the surviving artifacts of Williams´ tawdry career at the 5th Berlin International Directors Lounge. He also will be previewing excerpts from his forthcoming documentary, "J.X. Williams L.A." which chronicles the misadventures of the mad auteur in Hollywood.