Re:Voir

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senseabove
Joined: Wed Dec 02, 2015 3:07 am

Re: Re:Voir

#76 Post by senseabove » Sat Mar 28, 2020 5:16 pm

PSA: once you've created an account with a US shipping address and logged in, it shows you prices with VAT removed.

So make that set of Snow's Rameau's Nephew 58 euros instead...

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Re:Voir

#77 Post by knives » Sat Mar 28, 2020 9:44 pm

swo17 wrote:
Fri Mar 27, 2020 7:14 pm
If you like that, their Psychoecho DVD is worth picking up
I am definitely keeping it in the back of my mind for when money becomes a bit looser.

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furbicide
Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2011 4:52 am

Re: Re:Voir

#78 Post by furbicide » Sat Mar 28, 2020 9:56 pm

I got La cicatrice interieure! Was tempted to get Marie pour memoire too, but AU$90 was a bit hard to justify for two DVDs (and that’s with free shipping!)

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Re:Voir

#79 Post by zedz » Sat Mar 28, 2020 10:01 pm

Rameau's Nephew etc. comes in a big box with a great book, if it helps!

Next up:

JOOST REKVELD – 11 FILMS


DVD / BluRay set with a big, lavish book. The work ranges from 1992 to 2017, and tends to get better as is goes along, with some dazzling works in the latter half of the programme.

IFS Film: Silent film of animated dots that start out as swarms of atoms but progress to increasing complex geometric aurorae. Very beautiful, and highly reminiscent of the Whitneys’ 1950s computer animations.

#2: A tint ‘n’ print exercise using nature footage. There are some fleeting moments of beauty, but Rekveld’s unstructured “this, then that” form doesn’t sustain a film this length (14 minutes). There’s a colour theory flicker section that’s pretty old hat three decades after Tony Conrad and Arnulf Rainer.

#3: Rekveld’s next film is immediately more visually arresting, comprised of hyperactive neon swirls like the traces you can make in the air with a sparkler. This manic film has a compositional strength and kinetic energy missing from #2, and at five minutes it’s a hell of a lot more concise.

VRFILM: A fire in the wilderness at dusk, flashing apocalyptically through different colourways as we approach. Rekveld takes a single, simple, powerful image and goes wild on the optical printer, but the underlying strength of the imagery holds everything together, and the treatment of it reflects and enhances the disturbing, surreal nature of the content.

#5: A three screen triptych that overlays frames of shifting colours, which soon become neon swirls of the kind we saw in #3. It’s an interesting experiment, particularly because its effectiveness varies drastically throughout. When the filmic content is too dense (e.g. solid blocks of colour), it’s just three screens, overlapping flatly, but the darker the constituent images (i.e. the more black background), the less apparent the individual frames become and the more three dimensional the imagery. At its best, the film makes you feel like you’re immersed in an electric squall.

#7: Mouldy black and blue blotches become infected by other colours. After five minutes, grids appear and become and intrinsic part of the visual soup. It carries on in this fashion for more than half an hour, becoming psychedelic at (all too) brief moments. The visual activity speeds up towards the end, with the last ten minutes being the most excited / exciting, but Rekveld’s structural ideas at this stage are still too rudimentary to sustain extended works. This was soothing eye candy (a kind of retinal sorbet between more demanding films), but it didn’t break any new ground and was not a top notch example of this kind of thing.

#11 – Marey <-> Moiré: Simple overlays of glancing rays cycling through different colourways don’t promise much, though some of the colour combinations are very attractive, but after seven minutes things heat up as more complex moiré patterns emerge, with the film becomes spectacular and psychedelic at the nine minute mark before calming down a few minutes later. That middle section is great, but it renders what came before and comes after it a bit redundant. (Rekveld is still struggling with structure in his longer works.)

#23.2 – Book of Mirrors: Blah. Blurry spring imagery, more moiré effects, but without the visual drama of #11. The screen is often a gold / orange smear with little visual action or variation, and the whole thing is accompanied by an ill-fitting ominous modernist / horror soundtrack.

#37: This is more like it. A sea of static is enlivened by moiré effects, which eventually become prismatic, crystalline and mandala-like. This painterly film has a much slower, more deliberate pace than the earlier works, and at times the screen seems motionless (though it never actually is). It seems that Rekveld has finally resolved his structural issues by mastering pace as an organizational element, and in this film it’s finessed with great precision, the distinction between “leisurely”, “slow” and “glacial” being key to the rhythm. The droning / buzzing soundtrack is a much better fit with the imagery than we had in the previous film.

#43.6: Black and white frames within frames are slowly, steadily, repeatedly overtaken by what seem to be digital mould spores (which, probably not coincidently, come to resemble the Mandelbrot set). Quite hypnotic.

#67: What initially appears as a watery vortex ultimately resolves into distorted images of traffic rendered in hundreds of ghostly fibres. It’s like looking at the world from the inside of a haunted candy floss machine. Brilliant!

A couple of bonus films are included as well. #43.4 is a one minute piece of green and orange eye candy, and #57 is something of a noble failure – quarter of an hour of op art imagery inspired by glitchy VHS, like a TV test pattern gone feral. The idea is intriguing, but the film is overlong and just plain ugly.

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Re:Voir

#80 Post by zedz » Tue Mar 31, 2020 6:05 pm

LANDSCAPE DISSOLVES – Paul Clipson

A fine collection of work that would probably play better drip-fed than watched en masse as I did, as there are a lot of similarities between films that play a bit repetitively in one big clump.

Chorus: Nifty night film in which the camera zooms in on various light sources, becoming more frenetic and superimposed as the film progresses. If you liked this film, I have good and bad news, as this is a technique that comes back again and again and again in the subsequent films, often as an easily ‘spectacular’ climax.

Light from the Mesa: A journey through the secret life of plants. Prismatic, trippy film of close-up flora and miasmic bare branches. The apocalyptic guitar soundtrack contributes greatly to the mood, but in a somewhat underhand, unearned way – a problem I’ll have with a number of the soundtracks to Clipson’s films.

Absteigend: Artsy black and white footage, stark and angular, of urban sites, harking back to many early American experimental films. The film evolves from static shots, through reflections in water, to travelling shots and jittery superimpositions, giving the film a basic shape and structure.

Landscape Dissolves: A beautiful, varied film that takes the fragmented (mirrored?) technique from the end of the previous film and explores it further, while also recalling the imagery of the previous works (bare trees, lights in the dark, urban geometry), all tied together with a throughline of reflected light. A very satisfying summing-up film (whose impact is somewhat blunted by the subsequent reappearance of much of this same material in the same combination).

Origin: And now, for something completely different: the human form! There’s more than a little of a Maya Deren / At Land vibe to this film. It’s based around the image of a woman, seen from behind, in silhouette, by the seashore. Lots of shimmering superimpositions and optical printer futzing, but the simple image (sometimes it’s the silhouette, sometimes it’s the shadow) is strong enough to sustain this kind of visual play. This is the first film in the set that doesn’t have a frenetic ending, and it’s all the stronger for that.

Pulsars e Quasars: Music video for the neo-psych song by Arp. Nothing really new for Clipson here - whip pans and multiple superimpositions of a beach, extreme close-ups of an eye – but it works well enough as a video.

Void Redux: The sinister soundtrack in the style of early-eighties Cabaret Voltaire is the most interesting thing here. Familiar train imagery (now rendered orange) becomes more frenetic and abstract before dumping us back where we started. Literally, as the ending is a retread of Chorus from four years earlier. A bit of an aesthetic dead end, I’m afraid.

Bright Mirror: Fortunately, Clipson comes back with his best film so far. The crucial additional element here is drama, even if it’s of the most vestigial and abstract kind. A woman moves past a window, over and over, becoming increasingly panicky as the film itself becomes more and more panicky. A great film, and one where the tendentious music of Clipson’s other works is perfectly suited to the content.

Light Years: Found patterns of parallel lines and grids. This film is thoughtfully composed and constructed, but it’s disappointing to see Clipson once again resorting to Chrorus redux for his climax (though this may well be the best realization of that idea so far).

Disporting with a Shadow: A similar idea as Bright Mirror, based around a fragmented human figure, with random elements of other films interspersed. Fetching in isolation, maybe, but too much of a retread at this place in the programme. And here it comes: the Chorus climax yet again.

The Liquid Casket / Wilderness of Mirrors: Once more through the mixmaster. It’s getting hard to tell these films apart now, though this would be nice enough on its own.

Made of Air: Much better. Althoough this is another delve into familiar imagery, it’s slower-paced and more selective than the kitchen-sink approach of the past couple of films. The more constrained and considered approach allows Clipson to build ideas rather than flit from image to image, as when the superimposition of lapping waves onto sidewalks precedes shots of the city skyline engulfed by the ocean. Once more, it’s the vestige of a narrative informing the imagery that adds a supportive dimension that distinguishes this film from Clipson’s surrounding work.

Lighthouse: Shadows and grids scramble; the lines of skyscrapers are orchestrated in multiple dimensions. This is the most abstract film in the programme, and it’s all the better for it. It almost feels like what several of the other films were striving for but afraid to leap into.

Feeler: A sleeping woman is dreaming. What is she dreaming? Who’d have guessed: A typical Paul Clipson film.


BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST – Holly Fisher

My least favourite of the recent Re:Voir collections to date, but it still had its delights.

The main attraction is the feature-length Bullets for Breakfast, which combines found footage, on-screen text, multi-screen overprinted collages (by far the most enchanting of the components, and a Fisher signature), an interview with a pulp western writer, and lots and lots of extracts from My Darling Clementine. For me, while most of these components were intriguing in their own right, they never cohered into a compelling whole, and never justified the length of the film.

From the Ladies: Kind of the same criticism. This is an intriguing idea: a film shot inside the ladies’ powder room of a New York Holiday in 1977. Lots of reflections of reflections, a soundtrack of gossiping women, but the film runs out of steam about halfway through its twenty minutes.

Glass Shadows: A quiet and fascinating film built up from silhouetted windows and their reflections, and obscured naked bodies, with a dripping water soundtrack.

This Is Montage: This is not montage, but rather a single shot of somebody typing (badly) a report on ancient Chinese hieroglyphs, and how they can combine (or copulate) to create new meanings (hence the invocation of montage). It’s an extended gag that’s not really worth the labour, but the film does have a capper that’s pretty funny.

Soft Shoe: In this film, the technique of overlaid film strips we’ve seen Fisher explore piecemeal in other films takes centre stage and engenders her best film in this programme. Fisher extracts found movement (Muybridge gets a visual acknowledgement) from what seem to be her holiday films (a woman sweeping, swaying udders and so forth) and enhances them with her kaleidoscopic technique. Brilliant insect-eye cinema.

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Re:Voir

#81 Post by zedz » Fri Apr 03, 2020 11:27 pm

PLUNGE Vivian Ostrovsky

A wonderful two-disc deep dive into the work of multinational filmmaker Vivian Ostrovsky, whose predominant mode is witty visual and audio collage. The films are thematically organised. Eat presents hordes of outdoor diners, human and animal; Ice Sea juxtaposes beach and resort imagery with polar footage (and opens with an extract from a bizarre Soviet film that can only be described as Jaws, but with a tiger instead of a shark); Tatitude combines footage from M. Hulot’s Holiday with modern footage shot at the same location (it’s credited to “Ostrovstati”); Public Domain matches shots of people engaging in open air recreation with overheard conversations; The Title Was Shot is a rhyming cinematic grab-bag comprised of The Letter (watched in a cinema by a Tex Avery wolf), The Incredible Shrinking Man, The General, Eyes without a Face, Monty Python and much else.

The casual associative flow of the films is seductive, and perhaps works best in Ostrovsky’s “holiday” films. A number of films in this collection seem to be assembled from visits to specific countries and home movies. Copacabana Beach and Wherever Was Never There evoke her early years in Rio. Uta Makura (Pillow Poems) presents images of modern Japan (such as garden workers) against texts from the Pillow Book. Allers Venues presents a sort of lesbian nirvana, with a group of French women on the kind of summer holiday (clothes optional) you’d see in a Rohmer film or Du cote d’Orouet. That film also has a memorably eclectic soundtrack, comprising Hawaiian songs, Opera, exercise records, mu’adhins and a snatch of Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Silent Command.’

The outliers in the set are a couple of recent portraits of fellow artists, P.W.: Paintbrushes and Panels (the painter and mosaicist Paulo Wereck) and Correspondencia e Recordacoes (artist Ione Saldanha), and Losing the Thread, a terrific archival collage film on the subject of fashion.

CITYSCAPES Dominic Angerame

Great collection of city films from the 1980s and 1990s (with one, lesser inclusion from 2010 that doesn’t offer much advance on the earlier films).

The 1980s films, A Ticket Home, I’d Rather Be in Paris, Honeymoon in Reno and Continuum, all have the blinking, twitchy rhythm of Jonas Mekas’ film diaries, and feel as personal, though technically the dominant technique tends to be superimposition rathe than stop-start jump cuts. Continuum is the most developed of the four early works, and as the title promises, offers us a chain of associative imagery (e.g. pavements – road workers – road painter – house painter – house waterblaster – fountain – water – bridges – roads – railways), finally leading us to an extended consideration of workmen tarsealing the roof of a building. This is the first film in the programme entirely in black and white, as all subsequent works will be.

The 1990s films explore a much more tightly defined topic: the urban landscape in decline.

Deconstruction Sight begins by looking at abandoned industrial sites, construction workers, firemen, demolitionists. The second act of the film, with a more rhythmic soundtrack, is focussed on the demolition, with diggers stripping out a building like the bugs stripping a corpse in a maceration room.

Line of Fire examines the trash and textures of a burned-out building, sometimes accompanied by distorted military music.

Premonition and In the Course of Human Events are a matched pair, and probably the best films in the programme. The former is an eerie look at a depopulated San Francisco, based around a deserted freeway. The ominous soundtrack by Kevin Barnard and Ray Guillette enhance the post-apocalyptic vibe. In the Course of Human Events is an inevitable sequel documenting the destruction of that same abandoned freeway. As the tons of concrete are beaten away, the twisted steel that remains look like the rampant supplejacks of an urban jungle.

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Re:Voir

#82 Post by zedz » Thu Apr 09, 2020 1:10 am

VIRGIL WIDRICH SHORT FILMS

Fantastic collection of short, sharp experiments with the kind of imaginative toying with the assumptions of filmmaking you find in the best of Michel Gondry’s music videos.

The two best films on here are the two I’d seen before: Copy Shop and Fast Film.

Copy Shop employs the insanely labour-intensive method of replicating every frame of the film as a photocopy for rephotographing, which adds not only a distinctive texture to the image, but the chance element of crinkles, tears and so forth. The content is no less complicated, as it concerns a worker in a copy who who inadvertently manages to copy himself into infinity. All of this in enhanced by a deliberate silent film aesthetic and fine comic timing.

Fast Film takes the labour-intensive “works on paper” idea of Copy Shop and blows it through the roof. It’s a collage film, in the sense that it’s made up of lots of old movie footage, but also in the sense that it’s literally a collage, as the film footage is reproduced, frame by frame, on glossy paper that is then folded, torn or cut to create every frame. The film collage is a witty chase film which would be a heck of a lot of fun even if were conventionally compiled by digital means, but it’s also a self-reflexive comment on its own bizarre method of production, as its protagonists are simultaneously human and paper, and thus vulnerable to crumpling, tearing, or refolding into different shapes.

Make / Real and Warning Triangle are more traditional, though no less delightful, old film montages, created for a couple of exhibitions on robots and car fetishism respectively, and Back Track is a 3D movie collage constructed from 2D footage and mirrors. Light Matter is a rather academic flicker film, and the least interesting thing on the disc.

The programme opens with two extraordinary works employing the TX Transform technique which swaps time with space. That’s literally what it does, but that can’t convey the disorienting visual effects Widrich and co-conspirator Martin Reinhart achieve. TX Transform (1998) is, fittingly, a reenactment of an illustration of the theory of relativity. As for TX Reverse (2019): remember that time you went to the cinema and it momentarily turned into the stargate from 2001? Well, Widrich and Reinhart were there and they filmed it.

EXPERIMENTAL FILMS FROM THE LOWLANDS

One older Re:Voir title I’m just now checking out is this grab bag of Dutch experimental work from the 90s, mostly Super8. It’s not that good, I’m afraid.

There’s one great film here, however: Joost can Veen and Roel van der Maaden’s Steen, which has a Svankmajer / Rybczinski vibe. It’s strikingly shot in high contrast black and white and features accelerated phantom rides through the narrow streets of an old village and the surrounding wilderness. No idea what it means (there’s a guy who keeps finding the same rock with a kind of face on it), but it had a flair and kinetic energy the other films in the collection lack.

After that, it ranges from the good, if unexceptional (Energy Energy is a middling rhythmic montage of old industrial footage, Departure on Arrival is a grainy mood piece that’s a little too random for its own good), to the failed but interesting (Haar juxtaposes pixillated footage of the filmmaker and her hair with shots of trees and blurry fireworks, in search of visual rhymes that are either too vague or too poorly executed to pull the film together; De Hand consists of the filmmaker filming his outstretched hand as he walks down the street and passersby shake or shun it – as a social experiment it’s way too loaded to be of any value and as cinema it’s way too dull), to the dreadful (after an interesting start of walking feet with a highly artificial soundtrack, Voeten turns into a really lame sex gag; Herts offers appealingly grainy footage of a road worker that gets more and more violently shaky as it goes on – that’s it!)

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swo17
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Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:25 am
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Re: Re:Voir

#83 Post by swo17 » Thu Apr 09, 2020 1:32 am

Many thanks for keeping up the reviews. Steen does look intriguing enough on its own to perhaps consider even that release

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brundlefly
Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2014 12:55 pm

Re: Re:Voir

#84 Post by brundlefly » Thu Apr 09, 2020 8:33 am

zedz wrote:
Thu Apr 09, 2020 1:10 am
VIRGIL WIDRICH SHORT FILMS

Fantastic collection of short, sharp experiments with the kind of imaginative toying with the assumptions of filmmaking you find in the best of Michel Gondry’s music videos.

The two best films on here are the two I’d seen before: Copy Shop and Fast Film.

Copy Shop employs the insanely labour-intensive method of replicating every frame of the film as a photocopy for rephotographing, which adds not only a distinctive texture to the image, but the chance element of crinkles, tears and so forth. The content is no less complicated, as it concerns a worker in a copy who who inadvertently manages to copy himself into infinity. All of this in enhanced by a deliberate silent film aesthetic and fine comic timing.

Fast Film takes the labour-intensive “works on paper” idea of Copy Shop and blows it through the roof. It’s a collage film, in the sense that it’s made up of lots of old movie footage, but also in the sense that it’s literally a collage, as the film footage is reproduced, frame by frame, on glossy paper that is then folded, torn or cut to create every frame. The film collage is a witty chase film which would be a heck of a lot of fun even if were conventionally compiled by digital means, but it’s also a self-reflexive comment on its own bizarre method of production, as its protagonists are simultaneously human and paper, and thus vulnerable to crumpling, tearing, or refolding into different shapes.
Had more fun with these when they leaned on the papercraft. I wanted "Copy Shop" to get more "Duck Amuck" but it too often seemed to be settling for "Sorcerer's Apprentice." And while I wonder how much of my enjoyment of "Fast Film" I should chalk up to playing spot the movie (it's funnier, knowing what James Woods is really looking down at), it playfully and frantically (maybe exhaustively) found pleasing ways to fold itself up and rip itself apart.

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dda1996a
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2015 6:14 am

Re: Re:Voir

#85 Post by dda1996a » Mon Apr 13, 2020 10:41 am

Zedz, have you seen David Perlov's Diary? It is available through Re:Voir. I just finished it and it is by far one of the greatest documentaries I have seen, even more opetic and personal than most of the Mekas I have seen.
(Personal confession, Yael, one of the daughters in the film, is my editing teacher - but while we have a good student/teacher relationship I am 100% objective in my opinion)

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barbarella satyricon
Joined: Fri Jun 21, 2019 7:45 am

Re: Re:Voir

#86 Post by barbarella satyricon » Wed Apr 22, 2020 6:22 am

Re:Voir VOD has made Adolfas Mekas’ Hallelujah the Hills! free to stream until Sunday, in memory of Peter Beard.

The code is the same STAYHOME one that was used during their recent quarantine series. This one’s not available in the US, though, likely because it’s licensed by Kino.

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neilist
Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2011 5:09 am
Location: Cambridge, UK

Re: Re:Voir

#87 Post by neilist » Mon Apr 27, 2020 5:14 pm

More free video on demand, starting today...
𝙁𝙧𝙚𝙚 𝙍𝙖𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡𝙨, Pip Chodorov - one day free on April 27
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/freeradicals (promo code STAYHOME)

𝘾𝙞𝙩𝙮𝙨𝙘𝙖𝙥𝙚𝙨, Dominic Angerame - one day free on April 29
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/cityscapes (promo code STAYHOME)

𝙃𝙤𝙩𝙚𝙡 𝙏𝙪𝙗𝙪, Buharov Brothers- free until the end of the month
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/buharov
Note that there's no promo code needed for Buharov Brothers' 5 minute short 'Hotel Tubu'. Just go to the link above, scroll down to the short and click the 'free' button next to it.

Glowingwabbit
Joined: Wed May 01, 2013 1:27 pm

Re: Re:Voir

#88 Post by Glowingwabbit » Mon May 11, 2020 4:24 pm

Just curious if anyone else in the US is still waiting for their order?

TheDoman
Joined: Sun May 18, 2008 6:19 am

Re: Re:Voir

#89 Post by TheDoman » Wed May 13, 2020 7:38 am

Glowingwabbit wrote:
Mon May 11, 2020 4:24 pm
Just curious if anyone else in the US is still waiting for their order?
I did see some posts on their Facebook page to say that some items are delayed, as they are having issues with the couriers and postal companies lately; but that was more of a worldwide related post.

With the exchange rate aside, I always found Re:Voir fairly priced compared to some of the stores I would get the films from in UK, e.g. BFI or Lux. It often works out cheaper for me to buy them from Re:Voir direct and that's including international shipping to the UK. I would always usually prefer buying from the original studio direct anyway and not a reseller.

Thanks to zedz for the reviews; need to pick up a few of their recent releases soon. The last releases I got from them were the Perconte Blu-ray and Clipson DVD (I had literally all of those films from DVDs Paul sent me direct, but was missing one film). Some of the DVDs I bought from them got recently released in HD on the VOD service too, which was a nice surprise.

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neilist
Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2011 5:09 am
Location: Cambridge, UK

Re: Re:Voir

#90 Post by neilist » Thu May 14, 2020 6:22 pm

Apologies for the late posting of this, but if you're quick you might just be able to get yourself a free 48-hour rental on Re:Voir's Vimeo page of 'Jonas Mekas - The Sixties Quartet' with promo code 'STAYSAFE'.

The opening Warhol film sets the tone well for the quartet, since they're all Warholian fests of art-world celebrity spotting ("Oh, it's The Velvet Underground!", "Oh, it's Joe Dallesandro!", "Oh, it's Günter Brus!", "Oh, it's Shirley Clarke!", "Oh, it's Jackie O.!", "Oh, it's Big Edie and Little Edie!", &c.).

Highly enjoyable!

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the__projectionist
Joined: Wed May 22, 2019 10:39 am

Re: Re:Voir

#91 Post by the__projectionist » Fri Apr 02, 2021 8:54 am

Image

After the first DVD edited by Re:Voir by Robert Kramer, GUNS - Vol. 4, two new volumes in Blu-Ray & DVD format will join the collection during the spring. A first box set including IN THE COUNTRY, VIDEOLETTERS, TROUBLEMAKERS (Vol.1) and a second with THE EDGE and ICE (Vol. 2). The editions are the result of new digital restorations and accompanied by unpublished texts in bilingual booklets.

Available May 25.
from the latest newsletter.

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Red Screamer
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Re: Re:Voir

#92 Post by Red Screamer » Thu Jan 27, 2022 5:22 pm

How's the AV on Re:Voir's blu-ray releases? I can't find many reviews.

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swo17
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Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:25 am
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Re: Re:Voir

#93 Post by swo17 » Thu Jan 27, 2022 5:43 pm

All the ones I've seen have shown the expected bump in quality. I wouldn't hesitate to buy

WmS
Joined: Mon Nov 30, 2015 9:46 pm
Location: Columbus, OH

Re: Re:Voir

#94 Post by WmS » Thu Jan 27, 2022 11:43 pm

Yeah, their Blu-Ray PQ is great. Not big on menus or extras, though. I haven't watched it lately but the excellent Anticipation of the Night blu-ray I think just plays when you put it in. Either that or it has a one-button screen? Fine with me!

They have plenty of stuff on demandd at their vimeo page https://vimeo.com/revoir/vod_pages if you want to preview. Some DVD-only releases are in HD, too.

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Re:Voir

#95 Post by zedz » Tue Mar 01, 2022 3:44 pm

I had been very remiss about keeping up with this label during the Plague Years, what with international shipping being such a nightmare, so I placed a catch-up order so large it arrived in a small casket suitable for burying a beloved Labrador. Let's dig in.

Films Imaginaires – Maurice Lemaitre

Image

Collection of five shorts by the Lettrist filmmaker. The production time ranges from the sixties to the nineties, but stylistically these are squarely in the 50s / 60s Lettrist sweet spot. Although these films all come well after the most celebrated cinematic Lettrist text, Isou’s 1951 Traité de bave et d’Eternité, Lemaitre was also there at ground zero with his first feature Le film est déjà commencé?, made in the same year (also released by Re:Voir and waiting in my kevyip.)

Au-dela du declic (1965 – 1978) is closest to the Isou, a collage of sound poetry, stills, drawings and text. Competing lines of communication are very much to the fore, but this is a rather static and standard example of Lettrism. Un Navet (A Flop, 1975-77) is a lot more playful and self-reflexive, a collage of found footage layered with a scribbled and scratched critique while, on the soundtrack, Lemaitre reviews his own film (allegedly the one we’re watching), alternatively praising and lambasting it. Films imaginaires (1985) is a film record of a performance event commenced in the mid-seventies in which spectators were given cards with instructions for making their own films. It’s a nifty idea, but it’s one he nicked from Yoko Ono, and her imaginary films are better than his!

The most recent film on the disc, L’Ayant-droit (1991) is the most straightforward and the most fascinating. Over footage of a 1967 press conference with Charles de Gaulle, correspondence is read out. The correspondence is from Lemaitre to the rights-holder of the footage. He is seeking a copy of it, because he’s in it, and allegedly his elaborate question predicted the goings-on of May 1968 a year in advance. The response is evasive: the footage is lost, or some of it’s missing, or it’s all there but neither him nor his question are in it (is he sure he has the right press conference?) The letters ping pong back and forth while the disputed footage plays on, changes colour, and slows down to show the few frames of Lemaitre in the audience. It’s only when Lemaitre confronts the archive with a contemporary newspaper report confirming what he says that the footage, and Lemaitre ’67, and his controversial question, miraculously turn up. By this time, our understanding of the “conspiracy” has deepened, and we are aware that this is not just a long post-facto cover-up of a trivial embarrassment, but one that started on the day of the event. Only the first broadcast of the conference had been complete, and the rebroadcast later that day was censored to remove Lemaitre’s awkward question. And all contemporary newspaper reports had reflected that instant new reality, except for the one Lemaitre had tracked down, which addressed both the provocation and its attempted cover-up in real time. It’s probably more interesting as a contentious fragment of history than as a film, but this is a good instance of the Lettrist deconstructed separation of text and image being the ideal form for this specific subject.

More info and trailer here.

Fog Line – Larry Gottheim

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A great collection of early minimalist shorts from 1970 and 1971. Fog Line is probably the best known of them, having been included in one of those Treasures of American Film Archives sets way back when. The other films are in the same vein: single shots which capture changes in states within a static frame. In Fog Line, it was islands appearing and disappearing in the mist. In Blues, we watch a big blue bowl of blueberries in milk that slowly disappear as the filmmaker eats spoonful after spoonful after (slowing down) . . . spoonful . . . after . . . (pause as the filmmaker crawls off to puke) spoonful until the bowl is empty. Gottheim doesn’t make the same mistake again, so in Corn we witness the husking of several ears of corn, then just the husks as the filmmaker and the corn cobs leave the scene of the crime, then, eventually, the triumphant return of the corn, cooked and steaming.

Harmonica is the action movie / music video variant, as we view a guy in the back seat of a car playing the harmonica as the landscape speeds by in the open window. At times, he allows the air rushing past the car to play the harp for him. So this is another fixed frame film, but because it’s a fixed frame in a moving vehicle plus a guy performing in the foreground, it’s full of incident and noise. This idea is followed up in the punningly titled Barn Rushes, the only multi-shot film in the collection. It's a compendium of multiple shots from a moving car of the same big red barn, at different times of day. Sometimes there’s a ladder up against the barn, sometimes the grass between the road is high enough to partially block the view.

The remaining two films form something of a pair, in that they both explore a snowy landscape via a very, very slow leftward pan. In Doorway, the film is defined by the fuzzy frame of a doorway at the start and end of the shot, even though the bulk of the film is an unconstrained, Brueghelian expanse. Thought is almost exactly the same, but here the witty surprise in store for us isn’t the concealed frame, but the concealed colour. As the camera moves, the black and white snowscape turns out to be colour footage. It's the filmic version of a William Carlos Williams poem.

This is a really lovely collection of gentle, poetic and witty films. Here’s hoping Gottheim’s Elective Affinities tetralogy is in the pipeline from Re:Voir as well.

More info and trailer here.

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swo17
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Re: Re:Voir

#96 Post by swo17 » Tue Mar 01, 2022 3:58 pm

More please!

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zedz
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Re: Re:Voir

#97 Post by zedz » Tue Mar 01, 2022 4:05 pm

There will be. I intend to review every disc, even if they're terrible.

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Re: Re:Voir

#98 Post by zedz » Wed Mar 02, 2022 6:03 pm

La Cité des neuf portes – Stéphane Marti

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A somewhat quaint 1977 portrait of decadent youth (Sequins! Costume jewellery! Nail polish!) that no doubt felt incredibly transgressive at the time. It’s only in the second half that we finally get any cocks or intimacy. It’s basically the kind of “exploring the universe within your student flat” project in the tradition of Jack Smith and Pleasure Dome Anger that Derek Jarman was taking a lot further at the same time. Emblematic shot: the camera zooming in and out of some guy’s denim crotch, posed against a tinfoil backdrop, while Thelma Houston belts out ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ on the soundtrack. The music is the film’s MVP, both found (Houston, Lou Reed’s creepy ‘The Bed’) and scored, with Berndt Deprez’s atmospheric mix of Popol Vuh, early Cabaret Voltaire and sound collage adding a lot of tension that the film on its own doesn’t especially earn. I enjoyed it well enough, but this feature is probably more valuable as the document of a scene (which may not have extended far beyond its on-screen participants) than as a film.

This was a limited edition DVD and unlike all other Re:Voir editions I own, which are lavishly contextualized, it had no booklet at all.

More information and trailer here.

Mythology for the Soul – Storm de Hirsch

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A solid fifteen film survey of De Hirsch’s film work, focussing on the 1960s. This is a wide ranging collection stylistically and some of it is frankly not especially compelling. Deep in the Mirror Embedded (1965) is lots of blurry Super 8 footage of the filmmaker’s garden: yes, it’s that old experimental film stand-by, filming one’s own acid trip! The Recurring Dream (1965) is more of the same, but by this time she’s moved to her patio. The same technique somehow becomes more interesting when the context is shifted to a public space with its own inherent architectural interest in Malevich at the Guggenheim (also 1965).

Most of the films are silent, and where sound is used it’s somewhat ham-handed and even borderline offensive. Divinations (1964) juxtaposes jew's harp and decontextualized whaikorero, the latter co-opted for no good reason other than to emblematize exotic “ritual.”

The earlier works on this disc are the clunky ones, and it gets better as it progresses. For me the highlights were:
September Express (1973) – a visually complex and effective travel film in which images of a train ride are layered with the reflected images of the travellers.
The Tattooed Man (1969) – The longest and most elaborate film here, a busy, genuinely psychedelic experience.
Shaman (1967) – Lotsa drummin' and scratchin'.
Third Eye Butterfly (1968) – a cool, colourful multi-screen cacophony.

More info and trailer here.

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zedz
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Re: Re:Voir

#99 Post by zedz » Wed Mar 16, 2022 5:48 pm

I've nearly watched all of my Re:Voir titles now, so I'm way behind on reporting back!

The Flower Thief - Ron Rice

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A New American Cinema classic, with everybody's favourite scenester Taylor Mead frolicking around the highlights and lowlights of 1960 San Francisco counterculture. It's a bit of a time capsule, both in stylistic nd documentary terms, but it's light and fun and fascinating.

The disc also includes three other short films. The Jack Smithian, proto-psychedelic Chumlum featured on one of the American Film Archives sets, as I recall. The Mexican Footage and Senseless are more experimental documentary in form. It's all good stuff.

More info and trailer here.

Diary - David Perlov

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This title always seemed daunting to me: a seven-disc monolith containing the personal film journal of somebody I'd never heard of, but I was convinced to give the fleshy fungi a whirl after dda1996a's rave above, and I'm so glad I did. Perlov was an off-and-on filmmaker whose career seemed to have stalled by the early 70s, and he had become reliant on dull official commissions that didn't really interest him or give him much opportunity for personal expression. So he decides to start making a film diary to keep his hand in. A home movie with pretensions, really, but one that just happened to coincide with the Yom Kippur War. All of a sudden, Perlov's hobby film becomes a historical document, and he begins to struggle with its form and his role: is he a filmmaker or a journalist? Does the diary form have any validity as a means of recording events on a completely different scale? Is this a finite project or an ongoing process? The set is divided into six hour-long chronological segments. By the second hour, Perlov has figured out that the form he's stumbled across is his new mode of filmmaking (the outside offers are still sparing and unrewarding, and it doesn't look like the Arab-Israeli conflict is going to settle down any time soon) and Diary will be his magnum opus, so for the rest of the journey we get the familiar 7Up / McElwee pleasures of seeing people we've come to know age and develop, alongside an ongoing monitoring of the political situation from Perlov's Tel Aviv base. The six hours of Diary take us up to 1983. A seventh disc hidden in the huge accompanying book offers a separate hour-long film based on Perlov's stills.

More info and trailer here.

Hotel New York - Jackie Raynal

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I relly like Raynal's 1969 Deux fois, made when she was part of the Zanzibar group (Serge Bard, Philippe Garrel et al.), but this much later American satire is pretty weak. The fish-out-of-water comedy is broad, the satirical insights flaccid, and the acting generally mediocre. Things perk up a little in the second half when it becomes an odd-couple romance between Raynal and Sid Geffen, mainly because Geffen is by far the best actor in the film. It gets a little screwball at this point, as Sid has to try and find his wife Loulou (Raynal) a lover off the streets of New York. It's still not great, but at least this part of the film has some lively absurdity.

The accompanying short, New York Story, is more a drastic re-edit, cutting the feature down to the bits that worked best (i.e. the story with Sid).

More info and trailer here. Caveat emptor: this trailer makes the film look much more abstract and interesting than it actually is!

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Re: Re:Voir

#100 Post by zedz » Thu Mar 24, 2022 11:54 pm

Various Films by Robert Kramer

Kramer is an American director of earnest underground feature films who has traditionally been more celebrated in France than in his homeland, and ultimately relocated there. Partly, I think that his highly engaged mode of filmmaking is more aligned to continental traditions, and partly I think it's because the language gap worked in his favour.

These are the first three discs in a series of his works from Re:Voir, and they're beautifully produced DVD / BluRay sets in digipacks with extensive books. They cover his three earliest features, and the 1980 French production Guns.

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His first feature, In the Country (1966), is barely a feature, and only squeaks in over an hour because at the start there are several minutes of black leader accompanied by "classy" piano music. And the film is all downhill from there. The film layers documentary footage with poorly acted sections in which an off-brand Jack Nicholson angsts that he can't make sweet, sweet love to his old lady because of The War, Maaan. The narrative is conveyed through banal, overwritten interior monologues that it sounds like the poor actors are reading for the first time, and more of that classy piano music, to prove that this is Art. It's listless and pretentious and feels much longer than an hour.

Also on the disc are a series of Kramer's video letters from the 90s (exchanged with Stephen Dwoskin). Different War; Same Angst. Kramer's writing is as earnest and purple as ever, but I found this material slightly charming, particularly when he backed off from the big statements and instead talked about his awesome rustic atelier or other personal stuff. Finally, there's a fascinating 1965 how-to (organize domestic dissidence) documentary in which Kramer appears. The documentary / time capsule element is the most interesting thing in Kramer's films, and Troublemakers is all time capsule, so I found it the most engaging thing on the disc.

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The Edge (1968) is an advance on In the Country, but that's not saying much. It has an interesting premise - one member of a loose group of US dissidents threatens to kill the president; another threatens to blow the whistle on him - but it''s completely bogged down by bad, florid writing and even worse acting. It's not bad acting by non-actors, it's that rarer and much, much worse strain: bad acting by amateur actors. The whole film is like a mediocre improv performance based on a Rivette film, and the intrinsic tension of the premise is utterly deflated by the fact that:
SpoilerShow
the opening sequence establishes that the entire group is already under government surveillance, so there's no chance of the assassination plot ever coming to fruition and no opportunity to make the B-plot of potential betrayal even pertinent.

I'm generally quite indulgent of films that strive to have a collective protagonist, as it's a really difficult feat to pull off and has the potential to fail in interesting ways, but The Edge fudges it by having most of its large cast simply reacting to the two characters with any arc, and when those two characters aren't around, it's just dead air. Kramer generally has a decent eye, so the film is fitfully attractive.

This disc also includes Kramer's subsequent, more accomplished, Ice (1970), but I already had that on DVD and didn't rewatch it.

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Guns (1980) is the most successful of the features in this batch. Kramer's chops have improved, and it's in French (so maybe I'm just not accurately clocking how bad the dialogue is?), and the likes of Patrick Bauchau and Juliet Berto are much better actors than anybody in those earlier films. So the film delivers a reasonably watchable personal / political thriller against a backdrop of international gun-running. The disc also includes two shorts, of which Naissance (1981) is substantial and quite good.

Links to the discs and trailers here.
Last edited by zedz on Fri Mar 25, 2022 2:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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