Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. When filmmaker Lynne Sachs turned 50, she had an impulse to look back and examine her life. (This impulse to take […]
Film Scratches: Channeling Visions Through Machinery – Robot Pavlov Sputnik (2014)
January 17, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Robot Pavlov Sputnik is a complex and gorgeous eight-minute animation by Oliver Hockenhull. The video derives inspiration (and a main layer […]
Film Scratches: Never-ending Metamorphosis – A Cherenkov Radiation Jewelry Box Meltdown (2015)
January 17, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. A Cherenkov Radiation Jewelry Box Meltdown is a three-minute computer-animated short of radical beauty by Oliver Hockenhull. It can be classified […]
Writing Our Future: The Inauguration, Alternate Inauguration Ball, and Protests
January 14, 2017
January 19th to the 21st will bring Trump’s inauguration, a Peace Ball (with Angela Davis and Solange), and street protests, including the Inauguration Day Freedom Protest on Freedom Plaza, DC, the Bridge Together in Golden Gate Park, and the 200,000 Women’s March. How can we quickly document and analyze these […]
Festival of Ghibli at TIFF: A Quick Take with Chance Huskey of GKIDS
By Tom Ue. From 24 December to 10 January, the Toronto International Film Festival screens Spirited Away: The Films of Studio Ghibli, a programme of 22 feature films from one of the world’s most influential film studios. In what follows, I discuss the enduring appeal of Ghibli films with Chance […]
Film Scratches: Eloquence Without Words – The Kingdom of Shadows (2016)
December 14, 2016
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. A family group sits, nearly motionless, yet seething with tension, in a living room with peeling wallpaper and dead leaves blowing […]
Film Scratches: Ghosts in the Machines – Before She Leaves Her Body (2015)
December 8, 2016
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Before She Leaves Her Body, an ambitious and absorbing feature film by brothers Ryan and Tyler Betschart, begins with two allegorical […]
Film Scratches: Love Letter to Bohemia – Mirror and Missal (2014)
December 8, 2016
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. The prolog to Mirror and Missal, Emmett Casey’s beguiling feature film, announces unequivocally that we are in the realm of myth. […]
Liverpool Radical Film Festival 2016
By Anthony Killick. The election of Donald Trump is the latest occurrence signalling neoliberalism’s transformation into some form of neo-authoritarianism constituted by a renewed commitment to upholding corporate interests and a frightful endorsement of racism and misogyny. How should those involved in the production, distribution and exhibition of film culture […]
Film Scratches: Digital Lyricism – The Film Poems of Bobie
November 15, 2016
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Bobie (Yves Bommenel) is a French poet and composer who has created a series of inventive, invigorating videos of some of […]