Plot:
A collection of abstract film art films from the early 00's, all taken from the 6th Different Cinema Festival.
Our thoughts:
I've had some interest in checking out the Lowave collections "Cinema Different: Different" for a while now. I always seek out the best short film collections I can find and except for "Resistance[s]", Lowave was completely new to me up until recently. Now I know that one of the things they eagerly deal with is the abstract digital and celluloid art (as seen also in their "BlackLight" collection). I really like these things, but they require something very specific for me to really get into it and let the images move me. "Cinema Different: Different Cinema Vol. 2" might not have climbed up on the top of my favorite collection, but its content is far from boring and this is something I could imagine recommending to people who are new to this type of art because it offers a nice variation. In my review I won't focus on giving all films a rundown, but I will do a few picks and let them represent my overall view of the DVD
"Da Qui, Sopra Il Mare" was a strange one because it managed to tell me a story without really doing it. It shows a location (a house, I imagine, with corridors, stairs, etc) and sometimes a person. It's all very blurry, and fades a lot. The weird thing was that even though it never gives you anything to go on, I found myself creating a story in my head. I started feeling like it was about a missing person and how it has changed since the event. It was a very interesting feeling to get that from an otherwise "empty" film. Visually, it's not nearly as strong as the feeling I got which again made it weird to me. Definitely a highlight of the collection.
"Artemis" was the closest one to fulfill my own interest in eroticism, and even if it was tedious at times I found it to really work. It starts out with what seems like the waves of an ocean as a layer on top of a naked woman, making it hard to see what it was. A couple of minutes in the water layer disappears and it gets a bit more psychotic, with it mixing the naked body and something that I could only make out as flesh. It's nowhere near as good as "Macula" from "BlackLight", but it was the closest I could get to my personal taste on here.
"Flamenc'co" is my favorite of all the shorts, but not without leaving me a bit let down towards the end. It's black and white and very gritty, and shows flashes of the inside of a factory (sometimes it looks more like a prison), sometimes with girls dancing in the background. It's completely silent which built a different atmosphere and having the scenes appear in flashes made it very effective. But what I didn't like about the ending was that it left me thinking that it was really just a dance practice.
The Solomon Nagler short "Perhaps/We" I had seen before in a Solomon collection I have. It's not his best work, but it was nice to see it in the collection. I consider Solomon Nagler to be one of the best in the field. Even if he does something that has been done so much before, his films come out as very eerie and beautiful. They seem to have a reason, a message and that's admirable when it comes to abstract art. "Perhaps/We" is a little taste of what he has made and if you dig it, I absolutely recommend tracking down more films of his.
"Cinema Different: Different Cinema Vol. 2" is a good collection because it offers a taste of a very unique style I have found myself mesmerized by, but if you have seen much before there are better DVDs to pick up. I really appreciate what Lowave is doing, they seem to be going strong with their interest and it's great to see such a big collection of DVDs. |
