Avant-Garde - vo.rs

Institute Benjamenta: The Quay Brothers' Only Live-Action Feature

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:00:00 +0000

The Quay Brothers spent the 1980s making some of the most influential animation in the world without most of the world noticing. Stephen and Timothy Quay, American twins who settled in London, built miniature universes out of doll parts, dust, screws, and dead-eyed puppets, and their 1986 short Street of Crocodiles rearranged the nervous systems of everyone who later made a music video or a horror film about a haunted room full of objects. Then in 1995 they did the thing nobody expected. They pointed a camera at actual human beings and made a feature.

The Colour of Pomegranates: Cinema as Illuminated Manuscript

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Most films ask you to follow. Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) asks you to look, the way you’d look at a page of an illuminated Gospel — a thing built to be dwelt on rather than turned. It runs about seventy-eight minutes, purports to tell the life of the eighteenth-century Armenian troubadour Sayat-Nova, and contains almost nothing a screenwriting manual would recognise as a scene. People rarely move toward a goal. The camera almost never pans. What you get instead is a sequence of frontal, jewel-coloured compositions, each held long enough for the objects inside it to start meaning something.

Daisies: Chytilová's Anarchic Feminist Provocation

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

There is a moment early in Věra Chytilová’s Daisies — Sedmikrásky, 1966 — when the two heroines, both named Marie, sit in a field and conclude that since the world is spoiled, they will be spoiled too. From that childish logic the film launches into seventy-four minutes of pure, gleeful destruction: gorging on stolen food, conning elderly men out of expensive lunches, snipping images and each other into paper collage, and finally demolishing a banquet in the most joyously anarchic food-fight ever committed to celluloid. It is one of the great provocations of the 1960s and one of the foundational works of feminist cinema, and it remains genuinely, dangerously funny.