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Young at Heart: Films From the Avant-Garde
Youthfulness is too broad a theme to make much sense here, but this program of short films does have another: different uses of rhythm. In Robert Breer's animated Time Flies (1997), rotating watch hands cue many other kinds of movement and imagery in an ecstatic collage in time. In The Cat of the Worm's Green Realm (1997), Stan Brakhage creates a dense weave of nature imagery from the diverse rhythms of a worm, a cat shrouded in darkness, and his own shaking, handheld camera; by contrast, the nature imagery in Leighton Pierce's Glass seems syrupy sweet. Bruce Baillie's Here I Am (1962) and Brookfield Recreation Center (1964) are commissioned films about children: sensitive to the diverse movements of mentally disturbed children in one, balancing children with images of empty land and sky in the other, Baillie imbues both with a quiet, meditative poetry. For Later That Same Year . . . (What the Water Said, No. 2), David Gatten let the ocean directly scratch the celluloid and sound track; the film is fascinating in the way its randomness seems to yield up patterns. On the same program, Mark Street's Sweep. |
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