Screenings 5: Rush Hour
Saturday, October 17 2009 / 13:00 Filmtheater 't Hoogt, Hall 1 “I love my syncopated city. This is my fascinating rhythm I need my syncopated city. I love my sense of dislocation” – London Elektricity The city is the place where the forces and fruits of modernity meet: capitalist enterprise, mechanised industrialisation, the movement of anonymous crowds and fast vehicles, kaleidoscopic shopping windows for all tastes and colours. “A city made for speed is made for success” wrote Le Corbusier in 1920. This influential architect saw in speed and urban planning the keys to better living conditions, but failed to take into account the fundamental ambiguities of modern urban living: the simultaneous feeling of agitation and stress, opportunism and nonchalance, order and chaos. This contradiction appears to be the city’s essence. This is the central idea behind this screeningprogramme, in which urban surroundings are observed, dissected and transformed into matrices of energy and rhythm, surfaces and patterns, colour and design.  D.A. Pennebaker (USA, 1958, 35mm, 6:00 min) (works) “A short film for those with a short attention span”. A five-minute portrait of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway in New York City set to Duke ...  Marie Menken (USA, 1964, 16mm, 12:00 min, mute) (works) "Taken from a moving vehicle, for much of the footage. The rest uses stationary frame, stop-motion. In the harbor sequence, I had to wait for the right ...  Yo Ota (Japan, 2000, 16mm, 6:00 min) (works) “This film offers a metacinematic study of tempo and change and a figure of velocity. It consists of three interrelated parts or scenes that are unified by ...  Gordon Matta-Clark (USA, 1976, 16mm, 14:00, mute) (works) A formal investigation of New York’s urban architecture, it was planned to be projected on the exterior facade of a building. Employing mattes to segment the film ...  Nicolas Rey (France, 1996, 16mm, 10:00 min) (works) “Rey’s film uses a simple, classic trope of contemporary urban life: the moving walkway at the subway station becomes a dual symbol, an evocation of the human ...  Jim Jennings (USA, 2008, 16mm, 8:00 min, mute) (works) In a career that spans over three decades, Jim Jennings’ lyrical sensibility has thoroughly captured the environs of New York from its bridges, trellises, and elevated subway ...  Dryden Goodwin (United Kingdom, 1996, video, 5:00 min) (works) People observed in the street are a frequent subject in Dryden Goodwin’s films, drawings and installations. His video Hold considers the nature of memory, exploring the tension between ...  Michel Pavlou (Greece/Norway, 2009, video, 3:00 min) (works) A series of scenes shot in the Paris metro, edited to the rhythm of the trains’ automatic doors. The kaleidoscopic effect of viewing through the windows of trains ...  Mark Lewis (Canada, 2005, 35mm > HD video, 4:00 min, mute) (works) Shadows of pedestrians during morning and evening rush hour at a major urban intersection. Scenes of people scurrying to and fro, captured from a very different perspective: ... |
|
