Alvin Curran

Sometimes you feel like an inflated prophylactic glove, and you almost want to jump out the window.

A detailed look at a remarkable artist who died in 1999 at age 85. Aspects of Burckhardt's work in photography, film, and painting are examined in interviews with Rudy Burckhardt, painter Yvonne Jacquette, and curators Robert Storr (former Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Brian Wallis (Chief Curator, International Center of Photography, New York). In his studio in New York, Burckhardt discusses his photography and its significance within its historical framework. In the woods near his summer home in Maine, the viewer sees Burckhardt's easel and painting in front of the scene he is depicting. Whether in city or country, Burckhardt appreciated and transformed the chaos he discovered.

A biographical documentary on the life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

“Before the eyes of all, at least of those present, the naked and direct exhibitions of the body take place with all its extensions; but the naked eye of the spectators who circle is promptly doubled by the many mechanical or electronic eyes of the photographic equipment and of the 'cameras' which, with their clicks and their tenacious buzzing, form the background” Renato Barilli

First of all, the music. The music in Night and Day by Gianni Castaglioni is in the repetitive rhythm of the images, usually very rapid (with some suddenly slowed down, figements, yet with a fiery intensity). And as each shot, (brief like those of Mekas or Brakhage), moves,; as the camera moves to the nervous rhythm of a wrist, the music becomes a sort of Free Jazz — and not only visually, since the soundtrack is composed of piano frenzies à la Elton John. The extreme close-ups that sprinkle this sort of intimate journal and which are among the most admirable - as well as the most rapid - ever made in cinema, don’t float adrift like the film’s music through a hundred flowing veins.

In the distant future, a spaceship inhabited by a group of young descendants of a "subversive" minority who escaped the destruction of the Earth, recovers a capsule in which the hibernating body of a reactionary warmonger has been preserved, who after having caused war and death, it has abandoned the now unlivable Earth. The visual experimentation aimed at the liberation of the gaze is intertwined with psychedelic visions on the one hand and with the orgone theory of Reichian memory on the other.