Fourth session on this cycle of masterpieces of avant-garde American experimental cinema, in this ocassion with films by James Broughton, Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth, Kenneth Anger, Ian Hugo, Jim Davis, Hy Hirsh, Marie Menken and Francis Thompson.
The fifties ebbed and flowed between two poles: on one extreme, the persistence and enrichment of abstract experiments that spanned Abstronic, Evolution, Gyromorphosis and N.Y, N.Y., and on the other, the playfulness and ritual of erotic desire present inFour in the Afternoon and Eaux d'Artifice, where water takes on an abstract and oneiric role. In Bells of Atlantis the mythopoeic references, akin to an exercise in automatic confessional writing, operate as an exploration into subconscious and intrauterine recollections. The interplay between organicism and abstraction reappear, once again with an undercurrent of desire in Hurry, Hurry! as microscopic images of sperms are juxtaposed with others from men anxiously seeking a sexual partner.
Fourth session on this cycle of masterpieces of avant-garde American experimental cinema, in this ocassion with films by James Broughton, Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth, Kenneth Anger, Ian Hugo, Jim Davis, Hy Hirsh, Marie Menken and Francis Thompson.