Preceded by short: She Puppet

Gustav Deutsch continues to examine cinema's history through engagement with the film material itself. His latest compilation film is drawn from the early days of cinema. The technological innovations, such as stop-motion and time-lapse cinematography, seen in the scientific films in Film Ist 1-6 are employed in these primitive films to startle and amuse. Men are shaved magically, and apparitions haunt women's rooms. In lovingly edited sequences that intercut scenes from several films, the basic gestures of early cinema are revealed. Daggers, crumpled letters, and furtive glances signal melodrama, while a freewheeling franticness indicates comedy. Spectacles range from fires and chaotic chases to people and animals from far-off lands; even the view from a moving train is breathtaking. Film Ist tries "to track down some of the building blocks of perception and some of the effects of moving images. The product is neither an analysis nor a documentation but rather an artistic experiment" (Rotterdam Film Festival).

-Kathy Geritz

(90 mins, B&W/Toned, 35mm, From Sixpack Film)

She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh, U.S., 2001). At the other extreme of the history of image-making, Peggy Ahwesh's She Puppet manipulates footage gathered from the video game Tomb Raider, transforming it into a proto-feminist saga concerned with both the gesture and the aesthetic of the game. (15 mins, Color, Video, From EAI).