Straub and Huillet invited friends to recite Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance,” with its radically modern use of free verse, in a park alongside the wall in Père Lachaise cemetery where the last 147 men and women of the Paris Commune were lined up and shot dead in 1871.

It is not hard to understand why these ambitious filmmakers were drawn to Mallarmé’s late 19th-century poem, which casts readers adrift in a sea of elusive meanings, a playfully and hermetically cubist constellation of words that can assume myriad visual, aural, and symbolic forms.—MoMA

There’s always a pool of blood somewhere that we’re walking in without knowing it. There are always cadavers under a hill.—Jean-Marie Straub

The camera swivels (pans) left to right, over and over again, then tilts, up and down, over and over again, establishing movement as such as the given condition of perception and existence … The bombarding impulses, through the “repeated” pans/tilts, permit (for each viewer, each time) different moments of reality to become relevant, exciting, etc. The speed at which the camera sees the given visually creates frustration at not being able to hold (the) experience, to pattern it in a conventional manner. … Snow’s film activates one’s internal mechanisms for grasping (idiosyncratically, in time) the substances one is faced with, it negates objective experience once and for all.—Peter Gidal

A domestic swirl filmed while the building was being sold. How much longer can we afford to stay? A kaleidoscopic portrait of destabilization during the struggle to stay in a rent-controlled apartment amidst an affordable housing crisis.

Shot frame by frame, moving the camera between every image. Single frames move forward in time, creating afterimage combinations without superimpositions. A phased drum machine soundtrack emphasizes the percussive quality of the image.

With gratitude to neighbours and the Los Angeles Tenants Union Northeast Local.

An exploration of recursive patterns, a series of repeated sequences, flickering images, and looping sounds. On the surface, Repetitions concentrates on inducing retinal excitement and states of anticipation, but telephone messages and speech provide a through line that speaks to physical labour, industrial work, and fragile bodies.

Ben Russell presents two conceptions of time: a space of rapid succession and a space of simultaneity. Against Time celebrates the moment as an entity in which an infinite number of realities come together synchronistically.—Claire Lasolle