sleepless nights stories; jonas mekas; 2011; 114min
“This film originated from my readings of the ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. But unlike the Arabian tales, my stories are all from real life, though at times they too wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality.
There are some twenty-five different stories in my movie. Their protagonists are all my good friends and I myself am an inseparable part of the stories. The storyteller of the Arabian Nights was also part of his or her tales.
Some of the people in the movie you’ll recognize, some not. The fact that some of them you’ll recognize has no bearing on the stories: after all, we all recognize John Wayne or Annette Bening, but in their stories they are no longer the people we know.
The subjects of the stories cover a wide range of emotions, geographies, personal anxieties, anecdotes. These are not very big stories, not for the Big Screen: these are all personal big stories… And yes, you’ll also find some provocations… But that’s me, one ‘me’ of many. The very question What is a story? is a provocative question.”
journeys from berlin/1971; yvonne rainer; 1980; 125min (part of the anarchism on film series)
“With Annette Michelson, Amy Taubin, Vito Acconci, Cynthia Beatt, Ilona Halberstadt, Vernon Gabor, and Yvonne Rainer.
To explore the ramifications of terrorism, Rainer employs an extended therapy session – in which an American woman speaks to a series of psychiatrists – to evoke the daily experiences of power and repression.
Rainer’s film questions duplicitous rehabilitation (psychiatric care/control), the efficacy of radicalism, and conflicted political and personal motivations. … The collage essay technique of JOURNEYS parallels the investigation of these conflicts on a formal level. She weaves the stories of 19th-century Russian anarchists; the staging of identity as it occurs in therapeutic analysis, writing a diary, or preparing a meal; and the fate of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof gang), which exposed the precarious and enforced nature of West German democratic freedoms in the 1970s.”
