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 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 Max Goldberg Ben Russell’s field studies of transfiguration invoke the magic of cinema with fearsome lucidity. Hollis Frampton might well have been describing Russell’s work when he defined invention as “the vivid primary instantiation of a compositional strategy deriving from a direct insight into the creative process itself.” Structuralist in their conceptual clarity and…