Between 1982 and 2002, director Godfrey Reggio shot his well known Qatsi trilogy – Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi. Somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd installment, Reggio took a little detour and directed a short eight minute film called Evidence. The main characters? Kids watching cartoons (Dumbo, actually) and looking “drugged,” “like the patients of a mental hospital,” he writes on his web site.
The villain? “Television technology,” which “is eating the subjects who sit before its gaze.” The weapon? Television again. That “radiation gun aimed at the viewer” “holds its subjects in total control.” A little house of horrors, to be sure. We have added Koyaanisqatsi (featuring the music of Philip Glass) and Evidence to our collection of Free Movies Online.
In his newest film, French documentarian and cinema-essayist Chris Marker reflects on French and international politics, art and culture at the start of the new millennium. In November 2001, the filmmaker became intrigued, as did many other Parisians, by the sudden appearance of alluring portraits of grinning yellow cats on buildings, Metro walls and other public surfaces. Marker’s cinematic efforts to document the mysterious materializations of this charming feline throughout Paris are a recurring theme of THE CASE OF THE GRINNING CAT.
This engaging record of Marker’s cinematic peregrinations throughout the city, visually energized by his free-association montage style, chronicles strikes, demonstrations, memorials, election campaigns, celebrity scandals, international political incidents, and a seemingly endless variety of political protests (against the Iraq War, against China’s occupation of Tibet, against the government’s ban on the wearing of Muslim headscarves). The personalized commentary running throughout THE CASE OF THE GRINNING CAT offers the simultaneously learned and witty reflections of the filmmaker, now in his early eighties, on both the contemporary and historical implications of these varied events and personalities.
The mysterious grinning yellow cats soon begin to appear amidst the banners and signs in some of the political demonstrations. Eventually, the creator of the grinning cats is revealed to be an art collective known as Mr. Cat, whose members are shown painting a massive representation of their mascot on the plaza before the Pompidou Center. The filmmaker’s own famous cat caricature soon allies with Mr. Cat, as Marker speculates on the political possibilities of such a feline association.
Chris Marker concludes THE CASE OF THE GRINNING CAT with thoughts on the vital importance of such expressions of imagination in our public lives, echoing the May ’68 slogan that “La poésie est dans la rue” (“Poetry is in the street”).
METAMORPHOSIS – A video “trialogue” featuring Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake – is part shamanic journey and part New Physics 101. It’s mostly talk, with touches of simple computer graphics and music adorning the presentation. But what talk it is. We’ve got Abraham, a mathematician and the godfather of chaos theory; McKenna, a shamanologist, ethnopharmacologist, and psychedelic philosopher; and Sheldrake, a radical biologist and originator of the idea of “morphic resonance,” a memory embedded in all natural systems. Their free-form discussion ranges from drug experiments to the anima mundi (world soul), chaos and complexity, and the effects of language and imagination on the shape of the universe – all in search of a new field theory that encompasses art, science, and philosophy.
In this particular chaotic system, McKenna is the strange attractor around which Abraham and Sheldrake orbit. The three unite in a quest for knowledge and an exchange about the sciences they’ve studied. Sheldrake talks passionately about trying to redefine biology in terms of living organisms, not the abstract dead things found in textbooks and labs. Abraham, not surprisingly, explains how protests over the Vietnam War lead him to leave his sheltered academic life, pursue meditation in the Himalayas, and study chaos theory.
With McKenna as the ringleader (and biggest talker), imagination and chaos are the principal themes. Chaos, as McKenna describes it, is a science to study, an opportunity to reshape the world by looking through the lens of nonlinear processes, and a metaphor to help us think about our place in the universe. In McKenna’s words, chaos “is telling us that the intimation of mysticism, the intimation of a possibility of transcendence, is all firmly grounded in science.”
This is heady stuff. Though you half expect the psychedelic proselytizing to drift off into some kind of Birkenstock-and-bean-sprout dead end, the rigor, intelligence, and wit of these three minds keep the ideas sharp and fast. For anyone interested in the edge of science, this video is both entertaining and inspiring.
“The Magic Christian” (1969) is a British satire directed by Joseph McGrath and loosely adapted from the 1959 novel of the same name by Terry Southern, who co-wrote the screenplay with McGrath. Peter Sellers stars as billionaire Sir Guy Grand, who adopts a homeless man (Ringo Starr) and demonstrates to his new heir how virtually everyone in the world can be bought through an escalating series of pranks. Cameo appearances are made by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Raquel Welch, Spike Milligan, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Yul Brynner among others.
“The Jericho Mile” (1979) is the first feature-length film directed by Michael Mann and is an adaptation of a story by Patrick Nolan. It was filmed in Folsom State Penitentiary and features Peter Strauss as Larry “Rain” Murphy, an inmate serving a life sentence for first-degree murder who is discovered by jail officials to have potential as an Olympic runner. Though very different in many ways, the film has thematic similarities to the short story “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” by Allan Sillitoe. Most obviously, both use the figure of an imprisoned runner to highlight individual methods of defiance against authoritarian systems.
Renowned cyber-punk director ISHII Sogo strays from his roots, entering the realm of the subconscious with Mirrored Mind, a composed, contemplative and also a very personal film. Guiding us along with an actress who suffers an identity crisis when all at once she finds herself spirited away from the bustle of Tokyo to a tropical paradise, director ISHII poses philosophical questions about the origins of our soul. A visually stunning ode to the need for a spiritual and tranquil life. Mirrored Mind is the feature length version of the short by the same name, which was made as part of the Jeonju International Film Festival initiated Digital Short Films by Three Filmmakers 2004.
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IZO is a 2004 Japanese film, directed by Takashi Miike. The main character of the film is Izo Okada (1832–1865), the historical samurai and assassin in 19th century Japan who was tortured and executed by beheading in Tosa.
Izo appeared previously in Hideo Gosha‘s Hitokiri (1969), then played by Shintaro Katsu. However, Miike’s portrayal of the character (or rather his spirit) transcends reality (and time and space) and is more of a surrealist exposé of Izo’s exceedingly bloody yet philosophical encounters in an afterlife heavy on symbolism, occasionally interrupted by stock footage of World War II accompanied by acid-folk singer Kazuki Tomokawa on guitar. Kazuya Nakayama plays Izo and the many characters he encounters on his journey include figures played by Takeshi Kitano and Bob Sapp.
“Beyond the Black Rainbow” (2010) is a Canadian experimental sci-fi film written and directed by Panos Cosmatos. The Cronenberg-esque plot focuses on Elena, a test subject with ESP abilities, who struggles to escape a New Age lab facility called the Arboria Institute headed by the psychopathic Dr. Nyle. Set in 1983, the film is infused with a retro aesthetic heavily influenced by the director’s childhood experiences and recent tragedies as described in the following passage from Wikipedia about the film’s development:
As a child, Cosmatos frequented a video store named Video Addict. During these trips he would browse the horror film section looking at the boxes although he was not allowed to watch such films. During such times he would instead imagine what the film was. He would later reflect upon this experience when making Black Rainbow where one of his goals was “to create a film that is a sort of imagining of an old film that doesn’t exist.” The year 1983 was chosen for the story as it’s the first year he went to Video Addict. Additionally he thought the idea of setting such a film one year before 1984 was funny. The film’s genesis was an overlap between two projects Cosmatos wanted to do. One of these was a film about a girl trapped in an asylum while the other was an installation promoting a research facility that didn’t exist. Eventually Cosmatos realized that he could use both ideas in the same project.
The presence of his parents haunts “every frame of this film”, said the Rome-born filmmaker. His father was film director George P. Cosmatos (whose credits include Rambo: First Blood Part II and Cobra), deceased in April 2005, and his mother Swedish sculptor Birgitta Ljungberg-Cosmatos, who died in July 1997 after a lengthy battle with cancer. Unable to deal with his mother’s death, Panos “drifted into a slow motion mode of self-destruction and binge drinking”. When elder Cosmatos died, the grief he felt compounded. After that the aspiring writer/director started therapy and decided he wanted to make a film as part of the healing process. Cosmatos felt that his “filmmaking sensibility is a weird hybrid of both of them” – his father’s “popcorn movies” and his mother’s haunting, experimental art.
Beyond the Black Rainbow was financed by DVD residuals from Tombstone (1993), directed by Panos’ father. The film was shot in three weeks using a modified Panavision35 mm camera. This was suggested by cinematographer Norm Li, for he noted that Panos’ references – mostly films from the ’70s and ’80s – “were all grainy, colorful, and full of texture”, and he felt the 35 mm format was “the only way to shoot.”
After the Crash 