| Fog Line | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Larry Gottheim |
| Distributed by | The Film-Makers' Cooperative |
Release date |
|
Running time | 11 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | Silent |
Fog Line is a 1970 short silent experimental film directed by Larry Gottheim. It shows a rural landscape with slowly dissipating fog.
Fog Line is a single, static 11-minute shot of a rural landscape. At the beginning of the film, heavy fog obscures the view. Two sets of telephone lines run across the frame, roughly trisecting the image (thus the title). Over the course of the film, the fog gradually clears, revealing various figures in the field. Several trees are scattered through the area. Two horses enter the frame and graze across the bottom of the image, and a bird flies across the field. [1] [2]
After completing his PhD at Yale University, Gottheim moved up to Binghamton University in New York. He shot Fog Line near his home there. He chose to film a section of the countryside through which horses passed in the morning. He studied the area for months and filmed it multiple times. Gottheim used a telephoto lens to shoot the film. [1]
Fog Line screened at the New York Film Festival in 2005. [3] A digital transfer was made for its inclusion in the 2008 DVD collection Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986 . [4]
Critic Dave Kehr called Fog Line "one of the most hauntingly beautiful of all avant-garde films". [5] In his column for Take One , Bob Cowan praised it as among the best minimalist films he had seen, commenting, "It has a sense of the mysterious; one never knows the precise point at which the transformations take place." [6] Director Paul Schrader remarked that it "demonstrates how magical waiting can be." [7]
Serene Velocity is a 1970 American experimental short film directed by Ernie Gehr. Gehr filmed it in the basement hallway of a Binghamton University academic building, using a static camera position and changing only the focal length of the camera. It is recognized as a key work of structural filmmaking and has been inducted into the U.S. National Film Registry.
Maya Deren was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important part of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.
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The Film-Makers' Cooperative is an artist-run, non-profit organization founded in 1961 in New York City by Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Lionel Rogosin, Gregory Markopoulos, Lloyd Michael Williams, and other filmmakers, for the distribution, education, and exhibition of avant-garde films and alternative media.
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Non-narrative film is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment.
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Larry Gottheim is an American avant-garde filmmaker.
