Cinema Year Zero

Detective John Anderton spends his days in the future, solving murders that haven’t happened yet.

During each presentation at the fourth and latest edition of New York’s Prismatic Ground film festival,  which focuses on experimental and documentary cinema, the founder and organiser, Inney Prakash, made it a point to note that the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli, British, and American governments was ongoing.

Think of Arnold van Gennep.

“I shot the movie in 1993,” rasps the unseen director George Sluizer with a Herzog-like Germanic twang, his haggard voice emanating from the screen as it zooms slowly in on a still photograph: Sluizer’s arm is linked casually, almost absent-mindedly, with that of his star River Phoenix, who looks off into the distance (it is unclear whether he knows the camera is there). They are shooting Dark Blood (2012), a morose neo-Western whose production would be forever halted by Phoenix’s sudden and tragic overdose outside a nightclub in West Hollywood.

The film was dead: to begin with.

The method of cinema invokes the ghost of reality rather than reanimating it, the technology itself the vessel through which the ghost is projected to the seeing eye.

Digby Houghton reckons with the varying fortunes of the Australian film industry, where, for a time in the ‘70s, titillation was successful in getting arses in local cinema seats.

Ellisha Izumi finds the body and mind separated in the works of Scarlett Johansson, parallelling similar tensions between her MCU-superstar status and her personal sense of self.

Kirsty Asher pays tribute to the inimitable vaginal illusionist Sticky Vicky, using Bigas Luna’s Iberian passion trilogy to examine the interplay of food and the erotic in the post-Francoist era. 

Ben Flanagan attempts to make sense of a world mobilised by reaction for reaction’s sake, armed with the Kuleshov effect and Elizabeth Taylor’s curious performance in Identikit.