With horseback riding comes pleasure, pain, and the kind of purpose that could only be derived from the bond between a woman and a horse. It’s with this in mind that Berlin-based visual artist Ann Oren co-wrote and directed her feature debut “Piaffe,” which is also inspired by the concept of a female centaur, or a woman whose sexual organs are, well, horse-like.
“Piaffe” premiered at the 2022 Locarno International Festival, where it became a critical hit. Co-written by Thais Guisasola, Oren’s “Piaffe” may sound like a surreal drug-induced fantasy: An introverted woman named Eva (Simone Bucio) grows a horse’s tail while foleying sound for a commercial about an equine-inspired drug. Eva becomes part of a Bdsm relationship with a botanist (Sebastian Rudolph) that involves auto-erotic asphyxiation, whipping, and more kinks.
But while Eva is the submissive subject in the relationship, Oren explained to IndieWire that “Piaffe” is...
“Piaffe” premiered at the 2022 Locarno International Festival, where it became a critical hit. Co-written by Thais Guisasola, Oren’s “Piaffe” may sound like a surreal drug-induced fantasy: An introverted woman named Eva (Simone Bucio) grows a horse’s tail while foleying sound for a commercial about an equine-inspired drug. Eva becomes part of a Bdsm relationship with a botanist (Sebastian Rudolph) that involves auto-erotic asphyxiation, whipping, and more kinks.
But while Eva is the submissive subject in the relationship, Oren explained to IndieWire that “Piaffe” is...
- 8/24/2023
- by Samantha Bergeson
- Indiewire
The wondrous, sometimes bizarre work of the celebrated Czech animator and surrealist Jan Svankmajer has inspired admirers far and wide for two generations, from Terry Gilliam to the Brothers Quay. A new doc, “Alchemical Furnace,” about the maestro’s processes and inspirations played at the Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival, made by two close colleagues of the 86-year-old artist.
Svankmajer, whose roots lie in the revolutionary Laterna Magika theater of the 60s, is studied around the world for his use of handheld 16mm cameras, a wood shop and freezers full of meat to create films such as 1988’s loose interpretation of the Lewis Carroll fairy-tale “Alice,” the 1996 tribute to carnal obsession “Conspirators of Pleasure” and the 2000 fairy-tale of an insatiable demon baby “Otesanek.” His last film, 2018’s “Insect,” casts a host of Czech stars in a theater production that becomes terminally infested.
Cinematographer and director Adam Olha and editor...
Svankmajer, whose roots lie in the revolutionary Laterna Magika theater of the 60s, is studied around the world for his use of handheld 16mm cameras, a wood shop and freezers full of meat to create films such as 1988’s loose interpretation of the Lewis Carroll fairy-tale “Alice,” the 1996 tribute to carnal obsession “Conspirators of Pleasure” and the 2000 fairy-tale of an insatiable demon baby “Otesanek.” His last film, 2018’s “Insect,” casts a host of Czech stars in a theater production that becomes terminally infested.
Cinematographer and director Adam Olha and editor...
- 11/1/2020
- by Will Tizard
- Variety Film + TV
Caleb Landry Jones would like you to know he’s not a tortured artist. The confusion is understandable: A decade into his career, the Texas native has been the guy selling viruses for fun and profit (“Antiviral”), the homeless heroin addict (“Heaven Knows What”), a ruined soldier (“Queen and Country”), the even-creepier son in a racist family (“Get Out”), and the dude who gets thrown out a window by Sam Rockwell in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” To be fair, he also made a 2010 appearance on the Nickelodeon show “Victorious,” in which he played “Adorable Guy.”
Those characters, however, are not Jones.
“I think people want to put that on [me], because it’s easier. I don’t know, but maybe there is a bit of it,” Jones told IndieWire when asked about the perception that he’s that kind of dude in real life. “I think it’s easy for people to do that,...
Those characters, however, are not Jones.
“I think people want to put that on [me], because it’s easier. I don’t know, but maybe there is a bit of it,” Jones told IndieWire when asked about the perception that he’s that kind of dude in real life. “I think it’s easy for people to do that,...
- 7/10/2018
- by Kate Erbland
- Indiewire
Out of all of Poe’s works, few have had as big of an impact on me as “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Like many youngsters with an interest in the macabre, it was the first to immediately grab my attention, its title conjuring images of a massive, swinging blade cutting a poor sap wide open. Of course, there’s more to the poem than that—it’s focused less on the titular blade and more on the paranoia it creates, as well as painting a portrait of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. It also has, quite infamously, one of the most frustrating deus ex machinas of all time, where the French army stops the swinging pendulum mere seconds before it can bisect our bound protagonist, much to the disappointment of English students the world over. While it’s hardly Poe’s best work, it’s certainly among his most iconic,...
- 8/4/2017
- by Perry Ruhland
- DailyDead
Even if our man on the ground didn’t much respond to Asghar Farhadi’s recent Cannes premiere, The Salesman, our anticipation and admiration remain high — but so it is for one of our age’s greatest filmmakers. (Really appreciating The Past makes some lukewarm reactions much easier to take.) Consider us pleased, then, that his Penélope Cruz-led, Almodóvar-produced, Spain-set project is steadily advancing: per Variety, it’s looking to add none other than Cruz’s husband, Javier Bardem — fun fact: also an actor — is nearly complete, script-wise, and will roll cameras “next summer or early fall.”
It’s hardly surprising that Farhadi’s written another film marked by moral intrigue and sundry complications, yet there’s already some sense of new territory: it follows “a family of wine growers living in rural Spain,” has been called, by producer Alexandre Mallet-Guy, “a psychological thriller with a dash of Agatha Christie in it,...
It’s hardly surprising that Farhadi’s written another film marked by moral intrigue and sundry complications, yet there’s already some sense of new territory: it follows “a family of wine growers living in rural Spain,” has been called, by producer Alexandre Mallet-Guy, “a psychological thriller with a dash of Agatha Christie in it,...
- 5/25/2016
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
The Insects
Director: Jan Svankmajer // Writer: Jan Svankmajer
Earlier this year it was announced that legendary Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, at the age of 79, was working on a new project, his first since 2010’s Surviving Life (Theory and Practice). Known for his combination of live action and animation, famously in his 1988 version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and more recently in masterworks like Little Otik (2000) and Lunacy (2005), Svankmajer returns to classic literature for the inspiration of his latest, The Insects. Previously taking pages from Goethe (Lesson Faust, 1994) and Poe (Lunacy), Svankmajer is loosely basing his latest on a 1922 play from the Capek Brothers, From the Life of Insects, combined with Kafka’s The Metamorphoses. Six amateur thespians meet in a pub to rehearse the Čapeks’ play, while their personal stories interweave with those of the characters they are about to play. The play is intended as a backdrop in which...
Director: Jan Svankmajer // Writer: Jan Svankmajer
Earlier this year it was announced that legendary Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, at the age of 79, was working on a new project, his first since 2010’s Surviving Life (Theory and Practice). Known for his combination of live action and animation, famously in his 1988 version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and more recently in masterworks like Little Otik (2000) and Lunacy (2005), Svankmajer returns to classic literature for the inspiration of his latest, The Insects. Previously taking pages from Goethe (Lesson Faust, 1994) and Poe (Lunacy), Svankmajer is loosely basing his latest on a 1922 play from the Capek Brothers, From the Life of Insects, combined with Kafka’s The Metamorphoses. Six amateur thespians meet in a pub to rehearse the Čapeks’ play, while their personal stories interweave with those of the characters they are about to play. The play is intended as a backdrop in which...
- 1/8/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
30. Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)
Directed by: Jan Švankmajer
We’ve already seen two films from Jan Švankmajeron the list, but this elaborate movie about a number of separate, but connected people takes the cake. Conspirators of Pleasure follows six people, each with their own incredibly unsettling fetish. A letter carrier ingests dough balls every night before bed. A clerk is obsessed with a new anchor and creates a machine that pleasure him while he watches her. That anchorwoman has an odd obsession with live carp. One customer of the clerk’s practice paper mâché voodoo with a chicken costume and a doll resembling his neighbor. The neighbor has a doll of him that she brutalizes. Finally, the anchormwoman’s husband rubs homemade contraptions to rub all over his body. Conspirators could simply be a character study that, while still strange, would not be nearly as creepy. Švankmajer’s known for his animation and puppetry,...
Directed by: Jan Švankmajer
We’ve already seen two films from Jan Švankmajeron the list, but this elaborate movie about a number of separate, but connected people takes the cake. Conspirators of Pleasure follows six people, each with their own incredibly unsettling fetish. A letter carrier ingests dough balls every night before bed. A clerk is obsessed with a new anchor and creates a machine that pleasure him while he watches her. That anchorwoman has an odd obsession with live carp. One customer of the clerk’s practice paper mâché voodoo with a chicken costume and a doll resembling his neighbor. The neighbor has a doll of him that she brutalizes. Finally, the anchormwoman’s husband rubs homemade contraptions to rub all over his body. Conspirators could simply be a character study that, while still strange, would not be nearly as creepy. Švankmajer’s known for his animation and puppetry,...
- 9/2/2014
- by Joshua Gaul
- SoundOnSight
Above: Eva Švankmajerová’s poster for Alice (Jan Švankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1988).
The adage that behind every great man stands a great woman was rarely truer than in the case of the incomparable Czech animator/filmmaker Jan Švankmajer and his wife, the painter, ceramicist and writer Eva Švankmajerová (1940-2005). Eva Dvoráková met Švankmajer when she was 20 (he was 26 and working in experimental theater) and just out of college (she had studied drama at the music academy of Prague), married him the following year and for the next 45 years they were inseparable artistic collaborators. The director of a 2001 documentary about the Švankmajers, entitled Les chimères des Svankmajer, has said “The more I worked with Jan, the more I realised that the influence of Eva was essential. Their whole life is dedicated to their work, which takes on gigantic proportions, without separation.” (You can see Eva at work in this trailer for the film.
The adage that behind every great man stands a great woman was rarely truer than in the case of the incomparable Czech animator/filmmaker Jan Švankmajer and his wife, the painter, ceramicist and writer Eva Švankmajerová (1940-2005). Eva Dvoráková met Švankmajer when she was 20 (he was 26 and working in experimental theater) and just out of college (she had studied drama at the music academy of Prague), married him the following year and for the next 45 years they were inseparable artistic collaborators. The director of a 2001 documentary about the Švankmajers, entitled Les chimères des Svankmajer, has said “The more I worked with Jan, the more I realised that the influence of Eva was essential. Their whole life is dedicated to their work, which takes on gigantic proportions, without separation.” (You can see Eva at work in this trailer for the film.
- 11/9/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Jan Švankmajer seems to have entered that slightly awkward phase of the arthouse auteur's career where he's apt to be underappreciated. The critics have already said all the obvious things about him, he's had a few films place in pantheonic positions of a kind (Dimensions of Dialogue, Alice), and so we're ready to allow the dust to gather on his legacy. Yet the Great Man remains obstinately and inconveniently alive, and still making films.
His latest, Surviving Life (Theory and Practice), is doing the festival rounds, while its immediate predecessor, Lunacy (2005), has faded into the obscurity of the recent-but-not-current. I'm as guilty as anyone of this neglect: I didn't see Lunacy when it came out. preferring to wait for DVD release. I admit to being less than enamored with Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), although I quite liked Little Otik (2000), and even participated in a TV play somewhat influenced by it. Needless to say,...
His latest, Surviving Life (Theory and Practice), is doing the festival rounds, while its immediate predecessor, Lunacy (2005), has faded into the obscurity of the recent-but-not-current. I'm as guilty as anyone of this neglect: I didn't see Lunacy when it came out. preferring to wait for DVD release. I admit to being less than enamored with Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), although I quite liked Little Otik (2000), and even participated in a TV play somewhat influenced by it. Needless to say,...
- 10/28/2010
- MUBI
The 9th annual Lausanne Underground Film Festival may just run for a mere five days in Switzerland on Oct. 20-24, but it hits with the force of a 10p-ton megaton bomb over that time period, packing in so much mind-boggling underground madness it’ll make your head explode.
Every year, the fest feels like 5 or 6 festivals crammed into one. There’s the fest that pays homage to the history of experimental filmmaking, there are the retrospectives of several cult festivals, a feature film competition section, a short film competition section and more.
Three filmmakers are especially getting major retrospective love this year. First, there’s legendary Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow who will be in attendance at screenings of his classic films Wavelength, <–> and La région centrale, plus several of his other short films.
Also being feted are German extreme horror filmmaker Jörg Buttgereit, who will attend screenings of his classic Nekromantik,...
Every year, the fest feels like 5 or 6 festivals crammed into one. There’s the fest that pays homage to the history of experimental filmmaking, there are the retrospectives of several cult festivals, a feature film competition section, a short film competition section and more.
Three filmmakers are especially getting major retrospective love this year. First, there’s legendary Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow who will be in attendance at screenings of his classic films Wavelength, <–> and La région centrale, plus several of his other short films.
Also being feted are German extreme horror filmmaker Jörg Buttgereit, who will attend screenings of his classic Nekromantik,...
- 10/18/2010
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
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