Letterboxd — Your life in film

Pat O’Neill’s rarely-screened masterpiece of West Coast cinema is a dazzling synthesis of fast motion and superimposition, appropriated footage and time lapse photography, chroma keying and long exposures. Water and Power layers images drawn from urban Los Angeles, its water source in the Owens Valley, and an otherworldly interior space in increasingly complex permutations. What results is a fractured history, not just of California and its environment but of the cinematic imagination. Through subtitles O’Neill also weaves a story of…

By the time Babette Mangolte began work on The Cold Eye (My Darling Be Careful), her first overtly fictional narrative film, she was already deeply enmeshed in the artistic vanguard of two continents. She had served as the cinematographer for the early groundbreaking films by Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer, photographed and filmed the development of postmodern theater and dance, and directed her own experimental works. With The Cold Eye seeing Mangolte operate in a semi-autobiographical mode, how then would…

Although founded in early 1960s New York, the pioneering interdisciplinary art community Fluxus included participants from around the world, notably several from Japan. Born out of the influence of John Cage and the Dada movement, the loose group included composers, conceptual artists, filmmakers, video artists, sculptors, and performance artists and resulted in new forms of visual and sound art. The names of the western members are in greater currency, but the Japanese contingent, most famously Japanese émigré Yoko Ono, freely…

Although founded in early 1960s New York, the pioneering interdisciplinary art community Fluxus included participants from around the world, notably several from Japan. Born out of the influence of John Cage and the Dada movement, the loose group included composers, conceptual artists, filmmakers, video artists, sculptors, and performance artists and resulted in new forms of visual and sound art. The names of the western members are in greater currency, but the Japanese contingent, most famously Japanese émigré Yoko Ono, freely…

Although founded in early 1960s New York, the pioneering interdisciplinary art community Fluxus included participants from around the world, notably several from Japan. Born out of the influence of John Cage and the Dada movement, the loose group included composers, conceptual artists, filmmakers, video artists, sculptors, and performance artists and resulted in new forms of visual and sound art. The names of the western members are in greater currency, but the Japanese contingent, most famously Japanese émigré Yoko Ono, freely…

Although founded in early 1960s New York, the pioneering interdisciplinary art community Fluxus included participants from around the world, notably several from Japan. Born out of the influence of John Cage and the Dada movement, the loose group included composers, conceptual artists, filmmakers, video artists, sculptors, and performance artists and resulted in new forms of visual and sound art. The names of the western members are in greater currency, but the Japanese contingent, most famously Japanese émigré Yoko Ono, freely…

Although founded in early 1960s New York, the pioneering interdisciplinary art community Fluxus included participants from around the world, notably several from Japan. Born out of the influence of John Cage and the Dada movement, the loose group included composers, conceptual artists, filmmakers, video artists, sculptors, and performance artists and resulted in new forms of visual and sound art. The names of the western members are in greater currency, but the Japanese contingent, most famously Japanese émigré Yoko Ono, freely…

Although founded in early 1960s New York, the pioneering interdisciplinary art community Fluxus included participants from around the world, notably several from Japan. Born out of the influence of John Cage and the Dada movement, the loose group included composers, conceptual artists, filmmakers, video artists, sculptors, and performance artists and resulted in new forms of visual and sound art. The names of the western members are in greater currency, but the Japanese contingent, most famously Japanese émigré Yoko Ono, freely…

Although founded in early 1960s New York, the pioneering interdisciplinary art community Fluxus included participants from around the world, notably several from Japan. Born out of the influence of John Cage and the Dada movement, the loose group included composers, conceptual artists, filmmakers, video artists, sculptors, and performance artists and resulted in new forms of visual and sound art. The names of the western members are in greater currency, but the Japanese contingent, most famously Japanese émigré Yoko Ono, freely…

When Jack Smith transitioned from his relatively brief career as a director headlong into experimental theater in the late 1960s, he already had multiple scandals and groundbreaking films under his belt and had appeared in many more as a muse to Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, and Ron Rice. These films capture Smith in amber as he pioneered an intellectually serious approach to camp performance and a low-budget trash aesthetic. But within a few years of his exit, trends in experimental…

When Jack Smith transitioned from his relatively brief career as a director headlong into experimental theater in the late 1960s, he already had multiple scandals and groundbreaking films under his belt and had appeared in many more as a muse to Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, and Ron Rice. These films capture Smith in amber as he pioneered an intellectually serious approach to camp performance and a low-budget trash aesthetic. But within a few years of his exit, trends in experimental…

When Jack Smith transitioned from his relatively brief career as a director headlong into experimental theater in the late 1960s, he already had multiple scandals and groundbreaking films under his belt and had appeared in many more as a muse to Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, and Ron Rice. These films capture Smith in amber as he pioneered an intellectually serious approach to camp performance and a low-budget trash aesthetic. But within a few years of his exit, trends in experimental…