Precarity (2017)
Overview
A three-channel video installation, working with the themes of risk, hybridity and the unfathomable to explore the city of New Orleans through the remarkable life and times of Charles “Buddy” Bolden, the first person known to have explored the sonic tonalities of the music we now call jazz.
Production Companies
Additional Info
Budget | $0.00 |
---|---|
Revenue | $0.00 |
Original Language | en |
Popularity | 0.568 |
Directed By
John Akomfrah
Crew
John Akomfrah
David Lawson
Lina Gopaul
Ashitey Akomfrah
TOP CAST
Similar Movies
Sweet and Lowdown
In the 1930s, jazz guitarist Emmet Ray idolizes Django Reinhardt, faces gangsters and falls in love with a mute woman.
Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung
Experimental short made by Olivier Assayas for Fondation of Contemporary Art and starring Maggie Cheung.
Slaughterhouse
Documentary about a slaughterhouse in Quito, where hundreds of people and entire families work everyday. The smell of the place is warm and penetrating, the noise is intense, everything is red. Would that much effort and death have an ulterior purpose?
Tale Enclosure
Returning to the primal source of language, Hill explores the physical and subconscious origins of speech. In a continuous shot of a rhythmic, linguistically inspired chant-performance by George Quasha and George Stein, the camera wanders from mouth to face to hands to figure in an open-ended visual search. The performers use the body as an acoustic instrument of sound and abstract utterances.
Videograms
1980-81, 13:27 min, b&w, sound Videograms is an ongoing series of text/image constructs or syntaxes using the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, a device that enables Hill to sculpt electronic forms on the screen. Each "videogram" relates literally or conceptually to Hill's accompanying spoken text, which is visually translated into abstract shapes. Hill writes, "The vocabulary and precision of this tool allowed me to expand the notion of an 'electronic linguistic' through textual narrative blocks created specifically for the electronic vocabulary inherent in the Rutt/Etra device."
Crazy Love
Bressane's second London film, shot in six days in his apartment. "I had seen the French avant-garde films of the 1920's and naturally the title cites Breton. But underneath it can also be read in many ways. It is a cinema that is invented on the spur of the moment, like you invent an instrument to play music and then abandon it. This film came out like an improvisation, a total risk. It is a deconstruction of meaning but not in the analytical, intellectual sense. I have always tried to lose myself with my films. There is no trace of American or French underground cinema. If anything, it is the idea of home movies, there were many ideas for digital films long before digital film existed. This film made itself, it was like a jazz improvisation. Amor Louco is a lost object, it doesn't speak any language, it has no signs, no letters, no captions. And in the scene where the cataract is cut with the razor blade, it was the adventure of the film itself that was put to the test".
Persian Series #4
Elaborate petal-like and multicolored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly-swift mixtures of every conceivable previous shape from the Persian Series. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.
Clay or The Origin of Species
Traces the rise of life on earth from primordial ooze to the present.
Big Men, Little Men
Three young men have an interest they all burn for - jazz. But in the 1930's northern Sweden not many people like the new form of music. So when the three guys get a chance to make a journey to New York they take it.
Marital Rape Is Real
Marital Rape Is Real is a short film adapted from several published essays on marital rape by Shanon Lee.
Witchcraft Through the Ages
A seventy-six-minute version of Häxan, re-edited and re-released in the United States by Metro Pictures Corporation in 1968. It is narrated by author William S. Burroughs, with a jazz score and soundtrack featuring violinist Jean-Luc Ponty.
Trypps #6 (Malobi)
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It’s Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set.
Let Us Persevere in What We Have Resolved Before We Forget
On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.
The Red Bank. James Joyce: His Greek Notebooks
This documentary aims to register this unknown side of James Joyce: His Greek Notebooks. Trieste. Bloomsday, 2013. Dance in slow motion, accompanied by text. By deconstructing the body, we turn it into a memory: of the body, of life, of texts. The biographical references to Joyce and Mando Aravantinou, combined with the diagonal slicing of the image, cancel the realism of the landscape, including that of the Narrator’s space/study. As a culmination, Joyce’s letter “A request for a loan in Greek” functions as a timely denunciation. Various routes through cities, such as Trieste, London, New York, and Athens; languages such as Greek and English. In addition to the primal myth of Ulysses, there is another issue: Greek is “the language of the subject of Ulysses”
Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical
This film tells the tale of the Harper Affair, in which young Jimmy Harper finds his life of promise turn into a life of debauchery and murder thanks to the new drug menace marijuana. Along the way he receives help from his girlfriend Mary and Jesus himself, but always finds himself in the arms of the Reefer Man and the rest of the denizens of the Reefer Den.
Sita Sings the Blues
Utilizing the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, the epic Indian tale of exiled prince Ramayana and his bride Sita is mirrored by a spurned woman's contemporary personal life, and light-hearted but knowledgeable discussion of historical background by a trio of Indian shadow puppets.