By Sean Sullivan In 1996, Frank Stapleton released his short film The Poorhouse for broadcast on television. The story is set during Ireland’s famine era, in the seven years following 1845. It portrays the relationship between an ageing gravedigger and a young girl who is marginalised by life in a rural workhouse. Stapleton based The…
By Rob Smart Rouzbeh Rashidi breaks “the rules.” The rules do not exist except for those who choose to follow them, who seek a career in mainstream commercial filmmaking with its formulaic, predestined plot constructions and easily decipherable characters. Unlike the typical character of Hollywood cinema, whose central and usually simplistic “problem” is revealed in…
By Bill Mousoulis “Experimental narrative” – it is a conjunction sometimes bandied about but seldom realised in films themselves. Maybe it is too much of a dream, too “in-between” our known, delineated forms. For filmmakers who have tried, they have always slipped to one side or the other. Warhol did Sleep, but it is experimental;…
By Richie Abraham Redolent of their improvised, ostensibly meandering yet finely structured collaboration ‘Closure of Catharsis ‘, actor-director pair James Devereaux and Rouzbeh Rashidi’s new feature ‘HE’ starts off with a man dressed like an astronaut sauntering through a corridor, perhaps looking for something. This exemplary oneiric sequence is characteristic of the dreamlike imagery that…
By Jorge Núñez Lately, I’ve had a recurring vision: to make a video as someone from another planet. I’ve also been thinking that there’s a lot in this cinema that’s ritual, that offers the conditions for a ritual to take place when it starts to occur. A film that is a ritual and which proposes…
By Maximilian Le Cain Access the PDF version of this content by clicking here.
By Dean Kavanagh Open Night Cinema took place on Friday June 12th, 2015. It was a very special and intimate evening at a derelict industrial site. The space itself was vast and overwhelming, punctuated with patches of light and a tepid scent of chiselled stone. Watching people enter the complex through the overgrown exterior seemed…
By Théo Deliyannis & Florian Maricourt Proposals for a Comprehensive Study of Snow in Cinema: The Immanent Deconstruction of “Us” (Rouzbeh Rashidi, 2011) Explore the original French review.Read the translated English version. By Théo Deliyannis & Florian Maricourt (May 2014)
By Maximilian Le Cain To tie in with the current retrospective on his work at Microscope Gallery, NY, I have decided to re-publish my review of his film Dignity, originally published in the pages of Experimental Conversations (Issue 12, Autumn, 2013). – Maximilian Le Cain, March 2015 There is a strong case to be made…
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