Ann Arbor Film Festival 2009

Original music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley.

A moving portrait of the bustle and permanence of a city, "Dahlia" juxtaposes the stable forms and patterns of life with the frenetic behavior of humanity, set to a driving score of vocal percussion.

For a period of time, while we believe it to be perfectly still, lifeless flesh responds, stirs and contorts in a final macabre ballet. Are these spasms merely erratic motions or do they echo the chaotic twists and turns of a past life

a Darkness Swallowed opens on a pair of faded photographs showing an old dented car, one with a child standing beside it and the other without. Speaking in voice-over, Bromberg references a past event, one that will forever haunt her although it occurred before her birth. The film then sinks downward, dipping below the surface of the rational world to mine the seemingly infinite layers of the past stored within the fleshy entrails, chalky bones, sinewy spider webs and gnarled ligaments of both the body and the Earth. Noises - of clanging metal, bells, heartbeats and jazz music, to name only a few - combine to create a dense sound environment, a seemingly immense, three-dimensional space for contemplation. As with all of Bromberg's films, there are images that, once seen, will stay with you forever, and then there are the colors - rich, luscious hues to be savored slowly. Dedicated to the filmmaker's mother, the film is also a gift to us, a reminder of cinema's organic basis in chemistry and light, and of its ability to take us deep inside.

A monochrome flat image changes slowly into a theatrical spectacle in which color subtly melts and solidifies lines and conical forms. At the end, the colors lose their power and all that is left is the basic structure of the image, 'the skeleton'. The second film by Vegter created with the Fourier transform.

"A constricted Frame in agitation, the sweet music of jackhammers raging throughout - with Intermission." -RT

Departing from an inimitable film repertoire of tour-de-force editing technique, visual comedy, and apocalyptic themes, avant-garde master Bruce Conner envisioned EASTER MORNING (2008) - metaphysical quest for renewal beyond the natural and ephemeral worlds - to be his last finished masterpiece. Keeping with his ritualistic reworking and re-imagining of his films, the image source originates from the 8mm Kodachrome footage of EASTER MORNING RAGA (1966), expanded in duration, gauge, and frame rate to devise an effect of visual transcendence. EASTER MORNING celebrates Conner's reverence for experiential cinema, aleatoric sound, and discoveries within the realm of the spirit.

When the trees were enchanted, In the expectation of not being trees, The trees uttered their voices From strings of harmony, The disputes ceased. Let us cut short heavy days, A female restrained the din. She came forth altogether lovely. The head of the line, the head was a female. - from "Cad Goddeu" (The Battle of the Trees) from the 6th-Century Welsh Book of Taliesin.

From film to film I often use the same images, to refer back to the universe I have created, to show that my work constitutes one oeuvre. I also often push farther a technique that I used earlier. In UN FILM BRÛLÉ (1984) I had ripped a film down the middle and shifted the two sides, creating a big gap and rendering the film unprintable; all that was left of the film was a soundtrack. Here I have made holes and ellipses in every way possible, then sewed the film back together following an aesthetic mode, in a celebratory end-of-century apocalypse of positive, negative, super-8, regular-8, black and white, color, saturated and faded found footage. Pictures sewed onto other pictures so as not to fall through the gaps between them, this is only a pretext to rejoice that cinema is not dead, that many things are still possible. One only has to join together these images that could have easily otherwise disappeared. Gluing color to color, frames or even fragments of frames become cuts of their own, in every sense of the term.