Wrote about this and another 3D Jacobs feature for Not Reconciled.
I understand the temptation to dismiss this as a glorified music visualizer, especially since the blurb basically encourages that reading, but I think that’s wrong.
In the first place, the structuring foundation is an hour long field recording, which is interesting in and of itself. Through sound we get a wideranging snapshot of human activity, from technologies of transportation to music to conversation. All of this is a lot…
I wrote about this film and others by Ouayda for Ultra Dogme. You can watch this one now through 2/21 if you subscribe.
Here’s an excerpt:
The fictional strategy is fully embraced in The Secret Garden (2023), Ouayda’s latest work and her first shot on 16mm. As with her first film, it had its origin in a compulsion to film an aspect of the urban environment, in this case plants, that the artist had begun to obsessively notice, which she…
Avant garde proto-giallo that splits the differences between Antonioni and Twin Peaks. A portrait of the neoliberal city and the gendered violence of commerce/advertising dressed up in an Indecipherable web of signs and quasi-narrative.
That you can be deep into both giallo/euro horror and experimental political cinema and never hear about this (actually high production value and well-restored) film says a lot about how much (re)discovery Anglo cinephilia still has to do.
I paused this after the fourth chapter to take a break and a shower, and that’s when I learned of David Lynch’s passing. It feels tragically appropriate: who has added as much to a hypothetical next chapter?
RIP David Lynch.
RIP Jean-Luc Godard.
RIP Michael Snow.
RIP Jean-Marie Straub.
RIP David Bordwell.
RIP Fred Jameson.
RIP cinema, is what it feels like in this moment.
Deborah Stratman is one of the most important 21st century filmmakers working in the tradition of materialist doc/experimental essay film. Her works explore the ways that history and relations of power are written into landscapes and architecture and technology, and how the latter shape the former. Most of them also deal in some way with difference scales of time and seek ways to express these cinematically. Her works have particularly explored technologies of surveillance and the dystopian transformation of commercialized…
