In the silent avant-garde film Garden of Luxor, Derek Jarman creates an imaginary Arabian garden by superimposing various images like old postcards from Egypt, and discarded images from ancient sword-and-sandal epics. This strange garden gets destroyed occasionally by a man with a whip, or by people smoking and eating insects. This is Jarman’s take on the Garden of Luxor and its mysteries.
Panning shots describe a room as a succession of still lives: a chair, some fruit on a table, a collection of solitary, waiting objects. Sitting on the bed, there is the presence of a young woman: Chantal Akerman, filmmaker herself, eating an apple.
My Childhood was the first of three films based on director Bill Douglas’ memories of his own impoverished childhood in the Scottish mining village of Newcraighall. In this cruel environment, the boy learns to take care of himself. We see him grow up from child to adolescent—angry and bewildered but playful and affectionate.
Recess is one of Abbas Kiarostami’s very first short films. We see a boy being punished at school for breaking a window. When he joins a group of schoolmates playing football, he disrupts the fun by stealing the ball and running away. Eventually, he drifts aimlessly along a busy highway.
Parviz Kimiavi is one of the most prominent figures of 20th-century Persian cinema.In his documentaries, he highlights various subjects in an often poetic and impressionistic way.In P Like Pelican, an old hermit in a slum wants to teach the alphabet to the street children who often come to play in his neighbourhood.
American filmmaker Robert Breer first experimented with rotoscoping in Gulls and Buoys, although by 1972, the technique was already considered outdated.The film is reminiscent of an abstract holiday video on the beach.
