Fat Chance

In Phantom Ride, Stephen Broomer permutates the home films of Ellwood F. Hoffmann (1885 – 1966), a self-made hosiery mill owner from Philadelphia, into a road movie.

On Zerah Colburn, the early-nineteenth-century human calculator, made into a sideshow attraction by his father. This film is a record of the countryside that he grew up in and to which he later returned and died at age 35.

"In memoriam. Man in pieces. You have the lovers, remade by funhouse mirrors; you have the symmetries, undone, bent and curved; and you have the model, the bag on her head filling with carbon dioxide. Who owns your life? Testimonial and demonstration, a most ominous trade show. An experiment in therapeutic cinema. A speculative sequel and conclusion to John Hofsess's Palace of Pleasure (1967)." — S.B.

Trains travel to and from a fixed point in space beneath a variable colored horizon.

In early 2020, MUTA - International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation and Cine Íntimo rescued and digitised a Peruvian archive of orphaned 8mm and Super 8 home movies. With the aim of restoring these lost memories, we sent the images around the world. This omnibus film is the result of the intervention of this material, by 14 experimental filmmakers. Fourteen perspectives and ways of experiencing appropriation. Fourteen variations on the intimate.

Day and night in a hotel window in Ottawa. The window frame vibrates and multiplies. An embarrassment of lampshades.

In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world's most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness.

A miracle happened: summer came prematurely. Being in love with an image was worse than being in love with a ghost. (I feel like my eardrum is breaking). Almost everything, in fact, has an explanation. (The atmospheric pressure is increasing ...). The remaining chapters will have no surprises (... and I feel like my eardrum is breaking). Being on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most excruciating nightmare. (12.30 sharp, breathing is extraordinarily difficult.) I have given you a pleasant eternity! Only me for you and you only for me. (I am intoxicated with gasoline.) It will be an act of pity.

Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity (1966) is a reflection of the ceaseless possibilities of nature to produce distinctive forms acting in concert with one another. It is a myth, enacted through the avatar of a universal man, who samples this world from the cave to the beach to the parking lot to the supermarket, from birth to death, in navigation with other bodies, a figure of bounded perception whose actions are guided by impulse, invention, and perhaps, the stars. It is an embrace of life in its broadest definition, a catalogue of earthly phenomena. In this video, Relativity is discussed in relation to Emshwiller’s trajectory through the course of the 1950s and 60s, his interests in the body and abstraction, the correspondence between his work in science-fiction illustration and his work in experimental cinema, and the film’s mythopoeic constitution.

Apis the bull of Memphis, earthly representation of the god Ptah. At the temple, Apis the oracle, his movements interpreted as prophecies, his breath as medicine. He had a window in the temple through which he could be seen and out which he saw. On holidays Apis was led through the streets of Memphis, adorned in jewelry and flowers. His sacrifice signaled the rebirth of a king as a god.

Jacques Madvo’s street photography of Paris in 1961 is a launching point for a reflection on water forms and their distortion of optics.

Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe De Liguoro’s L’inferno (1911), a Doré-inspired visualisation of the eponymous first canticle in Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia (1320), is commonly considered to be Italy’s first feature-length film – and also the first local attempt at making something that, in the eyes of a bourgeois audience, would be accepted as having artistic value. Stephen Broomer, now takes the complete film and re-works it by all means, analogue and digital, available to the modern filmmaker. But who is Tondal? A knight errant who appears in the Divina Commedia, but also an older literary character (from the 1100s) whose story was re-told till deep into the 15th century. Expect a grand, exceptional audio-visual spectacle!

By Stephen Broomer

The howl of an infant, a tinsel pastoral. ""And the trains still go through the station at La Ciotat." For the 50th Anniversary of Anthology Film Archives, with debts to Jerome Hill.