STRANGE MEETING

 

The early nineteen sixties were a boom period for avant garde film makers. Not only was equipment becoming more affordable and portable, the conventions (and cliches) of the avant garde were not yet fully established, making it a fertile and open period for experimentation. 

In 1963's Sretanje (Encounter) (1963), young Croatian amateur Vladimir Petek gives us a series of shots of a young woman, with the film variously scratched, punctured, drawn on, pixelated, polarised, solarised, cut in half and glued back together in post production to provide a discombobulating and visually rich breaking down of what film can - and is supposed to - do.

Thanks to Jörg for the tip off - and all the other pointers.

EGYPTOLOGY

 

Riddles Of The Sphynx, d. Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen (1977)

I have a fascination with making screenshots from this extraordinary experimental film treatise, the results of which transport me immediately back to my own early life. Here we see the enclosed back garden, the subsidised canteen, the smoking room, the outer office, the Arndale, British Home Stores, and a corner of the kitchen with exotic fruit. Perfectly observed and recorded details that sum up the artificiality and banality (and relative 'primitiveness') of life in the 1970s, particularly for the women expected to inhabit these places.