Agatha

Agatha

2012 · 15 min

A psychosexual sci-fi about a planet without speech. Its narrator, ambiguous in gender and function, weaves us slowly through a mental and physical landscape, observing and chronicling a space beyond words. Based on a dream had by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew.

Directed by Beatrice Gibson

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Six women in Paris traverse the anxiety of the city after dark. A filmmaker struggles to understand the film she is making. A Black single mother refuses the categories imposed on her. A former sex worker reflects on her past. A poet gives up trying for a child. Taking place over a single night, the film intertwines dream, fiction, and reality, liquefying one into the other.
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The first episode in a series of “adaptations” of poet Bernadette Mayer’s book Utopia that artist Beatrice Gibson envisions to undertake over the next decade, producing a series of small, quotidian films that together, and over time, will constitute an epic. This first film is drawn from Chapter 4, entitled “The Arrangement: of Houses & Buildings, Birth, Death, Money, Schools, Dentists, Birth Control, Work, Air, Remedies, and So on” and was shot at home during the pandemic.
Two Sisters Who Are Not SistersTwo Sisters Who Are Not Sisters · 2019
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Based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Beatrice Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.
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Reframing our current political moment in intimate terms, Gibson’s urgent snapshot of worldwide social calamities doubles as a document of practical resistance. In Gibson’s hands, the music of Pauline Oliveros and the words of poets CA Conrad and Eileen Myles imbue images of street riots, the Grenfell Fire, and the mass refugee migration with complexity and grace.
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‘Some Place in Your Mouth’ is shot in the Forum car park on the edge of Palermo. Young men sit on bouncing mopeds; cars overloaded with sub-woofers pound with base. The camera registers male posture. But it also captures moments of being together, of unspoken courtship, of physical, sonic encounters. A voiceover reads a poem by American writer Magdalena Zurawski, from which the film takes its title. The tight 5 stanzas, here translated into Italian, pull the listener in. Their fleshy tones and disarming syntax feeling their way through the sublime, the bodily and the ecstatic. The meeting of Zurawski’s poem, images of Sicilian sub-culture and found footage of wheelies and races is both unlikely and tender; their different worlds, and forms, becoming strange and close. (Nick Aikens)
Beatrice Gibson to Barbara Loden, Nina Menkes and Bette GordonBeatrice Gibson to Barbara Loden, Nina Menkes and Bette Gordon
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Garbiñe Ortega, Artistic Director of Punto de Vista, came up with the idea of creating a collective audiovisual project in which several filmmakers would make a filmed letter addressed to another filmmaker they did not know personally and who was as far as possible from their own cinema. This is how THE LETTERS THAT WEREN'T AND ALSO ARE was born. The result is an exciting journey through their affinities, their admiration and their creative processes.
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Idea by Garbiñe Ortega, celebrating four years of work, cinema and love.
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An abstract crime thriller set against the backdrop of a brutalist villa. Six characters, the set, the music, the foley, the special effects, the narrator and the author battle one another for control of the film as it unfolds on screen. The film explores the relationships between these characters as they emerge and unfold: grappling, wrestling, and dreaming with one another. The film's production elements were produced - employing the character-driven improvisational score The Tiger's Mind, by Cornelius Cardew - by Alex Waterman as Tree (foley), Jesse Ash as Wind (special effects), John Tilbury as Mind (soundtrack), Celine Condorelli as Tiger (props), Will Holder as Amy (narrator) and Beatrice Gibson as the Circle (author).
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