By Nikola Gocić Dreamplosion /driːmˈpləʊʒən/ [noun] A series of thoughts, images, and sensations collapsing violently inwards in a person’s mind during the active watching of films emerging from the workshop of the Experimental Film Society (hereafter, EFS). This fictitious word and its paronyms are particularly suited to address two features by Maximilian Le Cain –…
By Nikola Gocić Iranian-born, Dublin-based visual and performing artist Atoosa Pour Hosseini could be called ‘a memory weaver’ of the Experimental Film Society. The ‘memories’ which she gently weaves into dreamlike, crystalline existence are as fragile and volatile as one might assume, yet they possess the undeniable quality of timelessness, whether they are ‘captured’ on…
By Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick Rouzbeh Rashidi’s otherwise wordless Phantom Islands begins with a quote from Sheridan Le Fanu’s The Tenants of Malory, a novel published in 1867 about a long-abandoned house that is unexpectedly occupied by residents whose arrival triggers a series of strange and macabre episodes. Best known for his work in…
By Adrian Martin Somewhere a phantom islandCan be reached in phantom ships.– April in Paris (1952) One island or many? It is easy to become geographically lost while watching Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Phantom Islands (2018). There are glimpses provided of the film’s own fabrication – make-up blood poured over a body, a couple of crew members trundling about –…
By L'emergere del possibile Phantom Islands (Ireland, 2018, 86’) is the overturning of the neo-pagan occultist Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels paradigm, in which anthropognosis is at the beginning of the search for God. Rouzbeh Rashidi moves from the principle that nature exists, that nature comes no matter what, to manifest itself and to give itself;…
Phantom Islands (2018) – Rouzbeh Rashidi Making Cinema for Rashidi means first of all talking about Cinema, and how it can relate to what we define as real; how, basically, a modern filmmaker can develop certain concepts, by situating himself in the space between a documentary approach and a purely fictional one. This is what the promotional…
By Nikola Gocić The history of cinema has seen its share of the unforgettable director-actor collaborations, such as Akira Kurosawa & Toshirō Mifune, Alfred Hitchcock & James Stewart, Ingmar Bergman & Max von Sydow, Werner Schroeter & Magdalena Montezuma, Abel Ferrara & Christopher Walken, David Lynch & Laura Dern / Kyle Maclachlan, as well as…
By Nikola Gocić There are directors who push the boundaries of what is considered the mainstream cinema. Then, there are experimenters who dare to go beyond that. And finally, there is Rouzbeh Rashidi – the Iranian-born, Dublin-based filmmaker whose modus operandi is based on the polemic Remodernist Film Manifesto (which is by no means set…
By Gianluca Pulsoni Film, photography and national identity Berwick Street Film Collective’s Ireland: Behind the Wire (1974) and Seamus Murphy’s The Republic (2016) ‘Knowing that if images were to survive economically, they now had to be sold as ambassadors of a nation, he nevertheless longed for that moment of silence, that illumination, that would not…
By Maximilian Le Cain To begin this talk about a possible approach to creating and experiencing experimental cinema in the 21st century, I’m going to set everyone a little challenge: to try to imagine that you have never seen a moving image before. And, more difficult still, to imagine that moving images haven’t even been…
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