Tag Archives: Bill Morrison

20th Etrange Festival

preview_EtrangeFestival 2014
20th Etrange Festival poster by Dom Garcia

L’Etrange Festival

4-14 September 2014

Paris, France

Etrange Festival website

The unique and wonderful Etrange Festival celebrated its 20th anniversary this year with a spectacular line-up, which, as always, defied categories with the latest offerings from Takashi Miike and Marjane Satrapi, special programmes picked by Godfrey Reggio, Jacques Audiard and Sion Sono, musical events, emerging talent, short films and an exhibition on Fumetti.

Among the freaky treats on offer, we loved Kim Ki-Duk’s extreme castration drama Moebius, Bill Morrison’s elegiac The Miners’ Hymns, the Mo Brothers’ action thriller Killers, Fabrice du Welz’s staggeringly intense take on the Honeymoon Killers story Alleluia, atmospheric Irish ghost story The Canal and offbeat Iranian vampire tale A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

Older treasures included Sergei Paradjanov’s sumptuously poetic Sayat Nova, Jerry Schatzberg’s seminal 70s road movie Scarecrow, Jörg Buttgereit’s ingeniously disturbing The Death King and Blaxploitation rarity Dolemite while the Pere Ubu Film Group’s did a live score to Carnival of Souls.

Marjane Satrapi’s dark animated killer tale The Voices won the audience award and we were particularly excited to discover David Robert Mitchell’s fantastical take on American sexual puritanism It Follows, David Wnendt’s uninhibited erotic comedy Wetlands, Nacho Vigalondo’s found footage thriller Open Windows, Austrian Western The Dark Valley, Aleksei German’s last film Hard to Be a God, hallucinatory French nightmare Horsehead and Austrian experimental dance film Perfect Garden.

To mark its anniversary, the programme also included a selection of the best of 20 years of the festival, including Nikos Nikolaidis’s demented noir homage Singapore Sling, Ian Kerkhof’s avant-garde documentary Beyond Ultra Violence: Uneasy Listening by Merzbow, Harmony Korine’s Gummo, Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions, the short films of the Quay Brothers, Duncan Jones’s Moon, Hungarian oddity Hukkle, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo and Ben Wheatley’s Down Terrace.

Flatpack Film Festival 2014: Preview

Flatpack_Matreyek_ThisWorldMadeItself_photocredit_Miwa_Matreyek_13-web
Flatpack 8 (photo: Miwa Matreyek)

Flatpack 8

20-30 March 2014

Birmingham, UK

Flatpack website

Birmingham’s brilliant Flatpack Film Festival returns for an eighth year for 11 days of inventive film delights, from 20 to 30 March. As always, expect a mind-stretching mix of new features, shorts and special guests, as well as avant-garde Austrian animation, a solipsistic installation, a Victorian magic lantern show, a psychedelic music night, walking tours and pop-up screenings in unexpected venues across the city.

Among the highlights:

&#149 PHONO-CINEMA-THEATRE, the first UK screening of short films, many of them in hand-tinted colour, which were made for the 1900 Paris Exposition and featured theatre and variety stars of the day. The films include Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet and a can-can by Gabrielle R&#233jane; many of them have original sound thanks to an ingenious gramophone system.

&#149 The UK premiere of THE GREAT FLOOD, a portrait of the devastation caused by the Mississippi floods of 1927 presented by experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison. Also screening are Morrison’s poetic take on archive footage of Durham miners’ lives from the 1900s to the 1970s THE MINERS’ HYMNS and his ode to cinematic decay DECASIA (we have an article on Decasia in our book, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, available from Strange Attractor Press).

&#149 CAF&#201 NEURO: a weekend of talks, screenings and activities that will exploit recent developments in brain-imaging and eye-tracking technology to explore what cinema does to our brains.

&#149 JAPANIMATION: a retrospective of Japan’s offbeat DVD label Calf including work by Mirai Mizue, Tochka Collective and Atsushi Wada.

&#149 DVD BANG, a Korean-inspired viewing lounge, where you can book in to watch a movie day or night.

Feature films include an immersive, semi-horizontal screening of Douglas Trumbull’s 70s eco-sci-fi movie SILENT RUNNING, electrifying Kathleen Hanna documentary that will make you happy to be alive THE PUNK SINGER, Haskell Wexler’s counter-culture classic MEDIUM COOL, fascinating, thoughtful UFO doc about disinformation and the creation of truth MIRAGE MEN, Ken Russell’s mind-bending ALTERED STATES, sensuous neo-giallo THE STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS, Krzysztof Zanussi’s 1970s exploration of the mind ILLUMINATION, F.W. Murnau’s classic silent horror NOSFERATU, part faux doc on East German 80s skate subculture THIS AIN’T CALIFORNIA and Eiichi Yamamoto’s amazing-sounding psychedelic anim&#233 BELLADONNA OF SADNESS, based on a French novel about medieval witchcraft.

Read our previous Flatpack coverage.

The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology: Reviews

The End: cover

Two great reviews of The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology have been published this month:

In the US magazine Cineaste, Mikita Brottman says: “What these essays all share is a certain sensibility – an informed, intelligent, playful, and slightly offbeat tone that is characteristic of Electric Sheep’s articles, reviews, podcasts and blog. This appealing, 250-page volume is beautifully designed. The essays are illustrated not only with stills from various films, but also with fabulous black-and-white illustrations.”

On the Critics’ Circle website, Laurence Boyce writes: “It’s this eclectic nature of both writing styles and design (the book is excellently laid out with some nicely illustrated pieces and a lovely end essay/poem dedicated to Bill Morrison’s Decasia) that make it such a fun and worthwhile [read]. Passionate yet informed about cinema, it makes one hope that The End does not live up to its name and that another volume is one the way.”

From the gutter to the avant-garde, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology brings together a mind-bendingly eclectic programme of films, authors, artists and directors, including Bill Morrison’s chemical ghosts, the bad girls of 50s exploitation films, apocalyptic evangelical cinema, the human centipede, Spanish zombies, Japanese nihilists, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s lost masterpiece Inferno and Ingmar Bergman’s visions of the end. A must-read for all film lovers and those who like to wander off the beaten cultural track!

To buy the book, go to the Strange Attractor website.

Read ‘Darkness Audible: Sub-bass, tape decay and Lynchian noise’ by Frances Morgan with illustrations by Lisa Claire Magee.

Take a look at some sample pages:

Contents
A Feast of Skeletons
Final Cut