Experimental film at Arts Fest
21 June 2005
This year's National Arts Festival offers a feast of experimental cinema, grouped under four different themes. The festival takes place in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape from 30 June to 9 July.
"Dionysian" is the word festival film director Trevor Steele Taylor uses to describe this part of the overall film listing, which also has a major section on recent South African productions as well as the pick of current international films, a tribute to Orson Welles and another to Cervantes's 400-year-old novel Don Quixote.
The first grouping includes recent work by South Africa's avant-gardist Aryan Kaganof (The Murder Mystery, Oedipus and Punishment, Self Portrait with Nanny and Prodigal Sons), two films by Greek Dionysos Andronis (Antinoos and The Lamp), and British-based Victor Sobchak's The Grey Zone or His Muse.
The second programme features James Broughton's celebration of the pleasure
principle, The Pleasure Garden and the erotic Daddy by Peter Whitehead and Niki de St Phalle.
The work of South Africans, some working in the diaspora, are included in the third programme. Local artist Bart Brummer's Visions of a City meditates on Port Elizabeth.
Cinderella by Aldo Lee and Peter J Morris tracks a foot fetishist on the Paris metro. She Seems So Easy is a silent movie by Elvira Hoffman, and Lasse Braun's Ceremony/Penalty/Restrained Response completes the programme.
Afri-Cola by Charles Wilp, The Argument by Donald Cammell, Les Astronautes by Walerian Borowczk, The Attack of the 50-foot Woman by Belgium's Steven Doedt, No More Workhouse by Harmony Korine and Sinai Desert by Florian Fricke make up the fourth programme.
The National Arts Festival is sponsored by the Eastern Cape government, Standard Bank, the National Arts Council, the National Lottery
Distribution Trust Fund and the SABC.
For more information, visit the National Arts Festival website.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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