Birth

PHANTASMAGORIA OF THE INTERIOR is an audiovisual essay devoted to Walerian Borowczyk's film THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE. Utilising the materials of the complete, restored version of the film, and its French language soundtrack, the film offers a new way of looking at, understanding and appreciating Borowczyk's intensely cinematic art. Particular attention is paid to a painting by Vermeer of a pregnant woman, introduced early into Borowczyk's film, and reappearing at key moments. Beginning from this painting - its content, style, and historical background - particular aspects of the film are explored: its unusual pictorial compositions; the mingling of sexuality with violence; and the association of men and women with (respectively) open and closed spaces. The film argues that Borowczyk brings a surrealist sensibility to his free adaptation of the Jekyll and Hyde story, especially emphasizing the transgressive, revolutionary role of the free-spirited Lucy Osbourne.

"Our analysis of such a rich film should not be a rigid, either/or proposition. It remains for us, almost 55 years on from Contempt’s initial release, to fully grasp Godard’s modernist gestures, poised between a fullness of mythic and classical meaning, and the possibilities of a newly fragmented universe of signs."

Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López explore the joy and regret of nostalgia with one of the cinema’s great, spare poets of sense-memory.

a montage of a motif in Philippe Garrel's Cinema: walking.

A BFI video essay on Chantal Akerman's "La Captive" by writer and critic Cristina Álvarez López.

An essay on how could Welles' Touch of Evil and his story about the border between USA and Mexico influence Trump's imagination.

An audiovisual essay on Douglas Sirk's film The Tarnished Angels (1957). Analyzes a central scene 40 minutes into the narrative, and also refers both backward and forward in order to show the film’s richly elaborated logic of part and whole, repetition and stasis, drama and entropy.

In their lyrical and philosophical video essay, “Telescopic Intimacy”, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin explore the works of avant-garde filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin. Aesthetically captivating and conceptually interesting, Dwoskin’s films focus on the nuances of the human face and the complexities of the visual gaze. Through unusual shots and enigmatic close-ups, Dwoskin creates a special form of “telescopic intimacy”, revolving around themes such as longing and desire, closeness and alienation, the subject and the ‘other’.

In 1979, film scholar Noël Burch strongly criticized the films from the 1950s by Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse. He would be stuck in a "western mode of representation", and his work would be "academic" and "over-edited". Maybe even almost like the soap operas on TV! What Burch failed to see is how Naruse transforms a seemingly simple decoupage into his secret form of mise-en-scene, with endless variations and modulations. Let's look at eighteen consecutive shots from Sound of the Mountain (1954)…

An audiovisual essay on Nosferatu (1922) illustrating how F.W. Murnau used poetic montage to evoke an imaginary, secretive, ‘wishful space’ driven by desire and dread in equal measure.

an audio-visual essay on the unconscious relationships between Fuller's Naked Kiss and David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return.