Film Categories: Mental Health

  • I.D.

    Part I, Prologue: 10 min Part II (Joanne): 10 min Part III (Milton): 17 min Part IV (Steve and Nadra): 19 min “I.D.” was filmed in Binghamton, N.Y. The main participants are, in order of appearance: Gayle Gorman, Joanne Thorne, Milton Kessler, Steve Grietzer, David Gresalfi, and Larry Klien. Dedicated to Lorie Blandin. Part 1 was produced in part by SUNY at Binghampton Cinema Department. Part II, III and IV wih the help of the Canada Council, over a number of years. A driving interest in this film has been the raw material of conflicts between the persona and the…

  • Inside/Out

    Joanna, a woman who decides to separate herself physically from the stress of the outside world, confines herself within her apartment. Her life inside is increasingly attractive in its calmness, balance, and stability. She maintains a mediated interaction with the external world through technology (a computer, answering machine and video camera). When a relationship that she has developed through her video camera demands an important moral decision, she finds she has to broaden her new way of being to encompass an engagement with the social, the real.

  • Intelligent Woman, An

    In her film “An Intelligent Woman”, Derko continues the concerns of her impressive debut film “The Scientific Girl.” Her new film is a complex, layered narrative set within the labyrinths of psychoanalysis. “This is a deeply intelligent, beautiful film, governed by the allusive structure of dreams.” – Toronto Festival of Festivals 1991

  • Journeys from Berlin/1971

    In “Journeys from Berlin/1971” there are five characters: a man, woman, and adolescent girl who “appear” only on the sound track; a female psychoanalytic patient in her early 50s; and a therapist, or analyst, played alternately by a man, woman, and nine-year-old boy. The speech of the analytic session is synchronous with the image. The voice-over of the other three people bears a constantly shifting relationship to a recurrent gamut of images: views from a moving train window and from various apartment windows in Berlin, London, and New York; tracking shots scanning a mantlepiece cluttered with objects; aerial views of…

  • Landscape Suicide

    “In ‘Landscape Suicide’ Benning continues his examination of Americana through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisconsin farmer and multiple murderer who taxidermied his victims in the 1950s. Bernadette Prott was a California teenager who stabbed a friend to death over an insult in 1984. Benning’s distanced approach to such grisly material is as far removed as possible from sensationalism, however. Although the acts of murder are both bizarre and violent, Benning dwells on them only minimally, emphasizing instead the details of psychological motivation, which in both cases seem frighteningly mundane. “Benning has created a script which…

  • Let Me Wrap My Arms Around You

    Leila is haunted by dreams. Dreams of drowning, of a love long since gone cold, and the frozen place in the far north where it all happened – Rankin Inlet, NWT. Intoxicated by love, she travelled there long ago to live with her chosen one, only to fall victim to a crippling internal disease and a debilitating, hallucinatory winter that claimed her passion and, for a time, her sanity.

  • Letters from Home

    Begun with a speech by Vito Russo, “Letters” enjoins a chorus of speakers to sound off on AIDS, love and death. Impelled with a variety of formal procedures, this series of mini-portraits are generously furbished with found footage extracts, hand-processed dilemmas, home movies, super-8 psychodramas, pixilated phantasms, intergalactic warfare and a hot kiss in a cool shower. “Mike Hoolboom has produced an absolutely sensational work, not only by the extreme density and intelligence of the witnesses who appear in the film, but also by the visual quality and inventiveness of his cinematographic language. Each shot, each edit has a message…

  • Lockjaw

    A babbling talking cure; an explanation; a walking tongue; a description of the juncture between I and you; the difference between what I feel and what I know; the body, the mind and what stands between – LOCKJAW.

  • Lost Hope, Lost Dreams

    A lyrical montage paralleling the romantic purity of nature with the emotional purity of love. A visual abstraction of reflections on love, hopes, dreams, and the reality of an HIV test.

  • Man Who Envied Women, The

    Jack Deller, a professor of Foucauldian and Lacanian theory, is left by his artist-wife after four years of marriage. Deller is played by two actors; the wife is never seen. Her voice is heard throughout – it governs the film. The camera pursues him on the image track, while her voice pursues her train of thought. The structure of the film is elaborated in a constant interweaving of fiction and documentary, narrative and theory, amidst issues of sexuality, aging, power relations, and political activism.