Maniac Summer

During WWII, the Japanese army developed experimental balloons able to cross the Pacific Ocean and reach the West Coast of North America in 3-6 days. Armed with explosives, they were given the code name fu-go, or fusen bakudan (“fire balloons,” or balloon bombs) in an attempt to instill a culture of fear like that caused by the far more deadly American firebombing of Japanese cities. The U.S. responded by enacting a censorship campaign, requesting newspapers avoid reports of fu-go landings or sightings. Living near the remains of a fu-go launch site in Fukushima Prefecture, Takeuchi mimics their flight take-off using a drone camera, and, traveling to North America, follows their arrival across the shoreline and rural landscapes, using a bat’s echolocation as narrative device to place fu-go and Fukushima as echos across history.

Montage of water related subjects.

Experimental short film about car wreckage and automobile safety.

The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience's sense of gravity. The camera's movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice

In the fictional city of Santa Teresa, located on the border between Mexico and USA, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line between journalism and detective work. Based on an unfinished book by Roberto Bolaño, his character investigates a handful of crimes and abuses perpetrated on women and workers of the zone.

Sepia toning lends a romantic (even wistful) quality to Larry Jordan's film Visions of a City, which he shot in San Francisco in 1957 and edited in 1978. The pace is un-irritating, in contrast to the San Francisco of today; but unlike the equal weight Helen Levill gives to all her subjects, there is an internal evolutionary development in the Jordan film that ultimately delivers a story. Until the introduction of the human protagonist, poet Michael McClure, we are treated to an extravagant display of visual delights.

Essay on the influence of arts at the end of the 20th century produced by the Museum of Modern Art.

An unedited film documenting a rooftop sculpture garden cultivated over a summer in Vancouver. The sculptures come alive but the vegetables are apathetic.

A miniature wrecking ball and accompanying mini brick wall to be destroyed; an incomplete puzzle of the Parthenon; homemade fake latex vomit containing plastic novelties, pieces of candy, knick knacks, and detritus from the artist’s studio; pennants made from packets and designer ziplock bags; and a mesh veil adorned with chewing gums. —Western Front

“Background actors” silently inhabit the roles of pedestrians or passersby. Like an exercise in walking meditation, the pedestrians trace a path that is unstable, full of distractions, thoughts, and emotions, crises of identity, anxiety, and restlessness. —Julia Feyrer

Supported by the works of poet/musician Claude Miller, the film portraits a snippet of brazilian reality.