130 – Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013)

Jodorowsky’s Dune is a 2013 American-French documentary film directed by Frank Pavich. The film explores cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s unsuccessful attempt to adapt and film Frank Herbert‘s 1965 science fiction novel Dune in the mid-1970s.

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gave Jodorowsky’s Dune a 98% “Certified Fresh” rating based on reviews from 108 critics. The site’s consensus states: “Part thoughtful tribute, part bittersweet reminder of a missed opportunity, Jodorowsky’s Dune offers a fascinating look at a lost sci-fi legend.”

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/

 

069 – Total Eclipse (1995)

spacetime coordinates: 19th century  France – Brussels – Abyssinia

“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.“

Total Eclipse is a 1995 film directed by Agnieszka Holland, based on a 1967 play by Christopher Hampton, who also wrote the screenplay. Based on letters and poems, it presents a historically accurate account of the passionate and violent relationship between the two 19th-century French poets Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio), at a time of soaring creativity for both of them.

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0026 – Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision 2004

The animated documentary Proteus explores the nineteenth century’s engagement with the undersea world through science, technology, painting, poetry and myth. The central figure of the film is biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel, who found in the depths of the sea an ecstatic and visionary fusion of science and art.

Selections from the the film Proteus:

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015 – oxenfree 2016 (video game)

Oxenfree is a 2016 supernatural mystery graphic adventure video game developed and published by Night School Studio. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, OS X and Xbox One in January 2016, with PlayStation 4 and Linux versions released later that year.

Recommended: OS: Windows 8.1 64-bit. / Processor: Intel i5 2.5 GHz. / Memory: 4 GB RAM. / Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 / Radeon HD 6750 (or higher) / DirectX: Version 11. / Network: Broadband Internet connection. / Storage: 3 GB available space. / Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 Compatible.

The game itself also has an alternate reality counterpart. Within the game are radio frequencies that hint to a real phone number. This phone number led players to the Twitter account @xray9169363733. The account posted various cryptic, coded messages, all of which seemed to point to a real world location. On May 7, 2016, Youtuber Jesse Cox posted a video similar to the PS4 Oxenfree trailer, but with several letters highlighted in red. This led players to http://www.edwardsisland.com. Several messages were found, but most important was “MILNER IS WARD”, confirming that a special object would be hidden at Fort Ward, WA. The object was revealed to be a box with letters by Alex from all the possible timelines from the game warning her not to go to Edwards island, and a manually operated tape player with two paper music tapes of songs from the game soundtrack. (wiki)

steam

ooo4 – Room and a Half (2009)

(Полторы комнаты или сентиментальное путешествие на родину)

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spacetime coordinate: 40’s > 90’s, Saint Petersburg > New York

When asked in an interview whether he ever intended to return to his Motherland, Joseph Brodsky replied: “Such a journey could only take place anonymously…”

The creators of this film imagined that the journey in question was undertaken after all, selecting the genre of an ironic fairytale. The poet sails to the country of his childhood, and with him we traverse not only geographical expanses, but travel through time as well; stringing together a number of facts from the Nobel Prize Laureate’s biography, we return to the USSR of the 50s and early 60s, soaking up the atmosphere of the “European” city of Petersburg, to this day Russia’s cultural center.  Along with live-action sequences, the film features animation, as well as documentary footage concerning Brodsky and his milieu.

Some of the animated sequences — of winged horses and flying sleds, of Brodsky as a farm animal on all fours drawing a cart — suggest Chagall. Other, more elegant pictures — of pianos and other musical instruments flying in formation while framed against the heroic architecture of St. Petersburg — are closer to Magritte’s surrealism. Visually, it is an ode to St. Petersburg (its museums, architecture and statuary are lovingly photographed), and to the Neva River, which runs by the city.

With its unabashedly nostalgic glow, the film belongs to what might be called the “rosebud” school (after “Citizen Kane”) of film biographies that locate the essence of a life in childhood memories. Recurrent images in the film are visual representations of the family’s house cat. The youthful Brodsky (Evgeniy Ogandzhanyan) is shown conversing with his father in meows and later subverting the solemnity of a school anthem sung by a chorus by substituting cat cries for words. He later confides to a friend that he wants to be reincarnated as a cat in Venice.

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