La extranjera

Surrendering the mind to the hypnotic dance of fire, a candle's glimmer reveals dreamlike memories, illustrated by flickering fragments of experimental films that overlap alongside a deconstructed soundscape. Entering a hallucinatory state in a haunted ambience, one's own subconscious is put on display.

Covert Action is a stunning melange of rapid-fire retro imagery accomplishing Child’s proclaimed goal to "disarm my movies." "I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social, and remake those gestures into a dance that would confront their conditioning and, as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the ‘facts’ forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing, explosive."

Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

A 6-year-old Tibetan boy leaves his family and flees to a refugee camp in northern India.

'It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan.'

The film contains the despair of an artist’s desire for creation on ruthless censorship, rebel, and anxiety in the mid-70s when it was politically and socially depressed.

Rapidly changing images of natural objects, scenery, animals, plants, and people flicker, flash, tumble, and cascade across the screen.

The Displaced View traces a personal search for identity and pride, within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in Canada. Through an examination of the emotional and cultural links between the women of one family, the processes of the construction of memory and the re-construction of history, are revealed. Utilizing an innovative combination of experimental, dramatic and documentary forms, the film emerges as a deeply moving and compassionate love letter. Just as the official history of the Japanese Canadians has been thrown into question, so does the film’s fictionalized narrative, question documentary as truth.

Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive

Christened for the Greek mythological personification of human memory, MNEMOSYNE, MOTHER OF MUSES is Larry Gottheim's facsimile edition of how one reflects on life and experiences (namely, in flashes and excerpts of sound and imagery). Typically known for his avant-garde, single-shot meditations on nature, Gottheim here provides a palindromic quotation of his own memories, including street corners, movie quotes, family members and Johnny Hartman tunes.