| Abstrakt: |
Chalk it up to personal preference-or perhaps one can classify it as a knee-jerk reaction against the incessant festival-hype machine that seems to be constantly running for just about anything and everything seemingly new these days at most major festivals-but at the third edition of Prismatic Ground, when it came to counting up the winners and losers in its ever-eclectic line-up, the old-guard remained resoundingly at the top of the programming hill. Likewise, with Bill Brand's Coalfields (1984), which was shown on the same program as the Cantrills' film at Anthology Film Archives, the festival had another seasoned avant-gardist going about his usual practice, albeit with an additional political spin. Brand spoke afterwards about using experimental film techniques-one previously employed in a series of short structuralist works in the early 70s, most notably his Acts of Light trilogy-in order to help construct a new cinematic language for documentary-adjacent films; in a sense, this could, considering its mission statement, be seen as the platonic ideal for a festival like Prismatic Ground. [Extracted from the article] |
