By Michael Sicinski With its very title, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is a film that announces itself as being in league with forces not entirely of this world. Nevertheless, its makers are two of the leading lights of contemporary experimental cinema precisely because of their pellucid examination of the world around them.…

  By Michael Sicinski Untitled, 35 mm glass slides (Luther Price, USA) Phantoms of a Libertine (Ben Rivers, UK) A Minimal Difference (Jean-Paul Kelly, Canada) Shoot Don’t Shoot (William E. Jones, USA) Sorry Horns (Luther Price, USA) Orpheus (outtakes) (Mary Helena Clark, USA) Pipe Dreams (Ali Cherri, Lebanon/France) UFOs (Lillian Schwartz, USA) Although the first…

By Max Goldberg In founding the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 1955, Frances Flaherty paid tribute to her husband’s memory with an informal colloquium that would extend their guiding principles of immersion and “non-preconception” to the viewing of films. The week-long seminar has long since outgrown the Flaherty farm (the last several have taken place…

By Robert Koehler When we first found fire, we had our first movie. Once the flames began to curl around the wood, building up heat and its own thermal momentum, the fire took hold, and began to capture the imagination of those staring into the constantly flickering light, with stories and images emerging. For millennia,…