Keith Griffiths — Producer (8)
The Eternal Day of Michel de Ghelderode (1981) [Movie] IMDb TMDB
The Eternal Day of Michel de Ghelderode
director: Timothy Quay / Keith Griffiths
Using the tricks of the Flemish playwright's own trade--puppetry, masks, and a Breughelesque sense of bizarre carnival, the collaborators succeeded in bringing about a rich and sardonic humor lurking at the edge of the playwright's macabre, death-obsessed imagination in an allusive homage.
Robinson in Ruins (2010) [Movie] WikiData IMDb TMDB Douban
Robinson in Ruins
other title: 废墟中的罗宾森
The eagerly awaited sequel to Patrick Keiller's London and Robinson in Space is a beautifully photographed cinematic essay on our current environmental and economic predicament, narrated by Vanessa Redgrave. Timely, provocative and studded with surreal humour, Robinson in Ruins reveals hidden histories and surprising visions (from the opium poppy fields of Oxfordshire to what seems to be a talking post box), making us consider the world around us afresh.
The Phantom Museum (2003) [Movie] WikiData IMDb TMDB Douban
The Phantom Museum
director: 史蒂芬·奎 / 狄莫瑞·奎 actor: 史蒂芬·奎
other title: 幻影博物馆 / Random Forays Into the Vaults of Sir Henry Wellcome's Medical Collection
The Phantom Museum was originally commissioned by the Wellcome Trust as a video installation for the British Museum exhibition Medicine Man: The Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome, which ran from June to November 2003. This provided an opportunity for the public to examine some of the rarer items in the extraordinary collection of American-born pharmaceutical pioneer Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), who assembled over 125,000 medical artifacts, many of which are currently stored in London's Science Museum and normally viewable by appointment only.
Typically, the Quay Brothers' film consists more of a series of impressions of the Wellcome collection than a guided tour, their approach summed up by its subtitle 'Random Forays into Sir Henry Wellcome's Medical Collection'. A linking device (shot on grainy black-and-white Super 8 stock) involves a man clad in a black suit and white gloves ascending staircases, warlking along corridors, switching on lights and investigating rooms full of cabinets bearing tantalising labels ('Shrunken Heads - Scalp').
Interspersed with these are much sharper colour sequences, depicting various objects in Wellcome's collection. Sometimes they're displayed as static museum pieces, sometimes rotated, and occasionally animated. Many of the exhibits are explicitly sexualised, from the diagram demonstrating the use of a chastity belt (next to an example of the real thing) to tender Oriental sculptures of human lovemaking. Many of the collection's many dolls come apart to reveal their anatomically-correct innards - one female body has a baby in her walnut-sized womb, connected via an umbilical piece of string.
Prosthetic arms and legs abound, in one case attached to a live human body, while there are plenty of dead ones glimpsed in the collection's storerooms, their lipless mouths fixed in a permanent grin. If the film is often unsettling, this is less because of the Quays' proven feel for the uncanny than for the way the Wellcome collection itself inescapably exploits our most fundamental fears: of birth, sex, mutilation and death.
The Quays originally edited the film to pre-existing recordings of the music of Czech composer Zdenek Liska (previously featured in The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer in 1984), but were unable to clear the necessary rights. In the final version, filmmaker-musician Gary Tarn provided a plangent semi-electronic accompaniment, occasionally interspersed with sound effects, notably in the shot of an old birthing chair and forceps being pressed into service on an invisible mother-to-be, whose baby can be heard crying as it emerges.
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1991) [Movie] WikiData IMDb TMDB Douban
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies
director: 史蒂芬·奎 / 狄莫瑞·奎
other title: 过时的解剖彩排 / 演练失传的解剖
Stop-motion animated short film in which, among other things, a man made of wire looks malevolent.
Innocence of Memories (2015) [Movie] WikiData IMDb TMDB Douban
Innocence of Memories
7.0 (5 ratings) director: 格兰特·吉 actor: 潘多拉·科林 / Mehmet Ergen
other title: 纯真的记忆 / 纯真博物馆
Orhan Pamuk – Turkey's Nobel laureate for Literature – opens a museum in Istanbul. A museum that's a fiction: its objects trace a tale of doomed love in 1970's Istanbul. The film takes a tour of the objects as the starting point for a trip through love stories, landscapes and the chemistry of the city.
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009) [Movie] WikiData IMDb TMDB Douban
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee
other title: 给布米叔叔的信 / 엉클 분미께 보내는 편지
A few years ago I visited a temple near my home and a monk there gave me a little book called “A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” In it, the monk wrote about Boonmee, who could recall his multiple lives in the cities of the northeast. In 2008, I wrote a screenplay inspired by the reincarnation of Boonmee, and started to travel in the region in search of his surviving offspring and relatives. I met his two sons who provided accounts of their father.
In Nabua in December 2008, I located several houses that I thought would be suitable as Uncle Boonmee’s house in the proposed feature film. This short film is a personal letter describing my Nabua to Uncle Boonmee.
The film is comprised of shots of the houses’ interiors in the evening. They are all deserted except one house with a group of young soldiers, played by some teens of Nabua. Two of them impersonate me by narrating the film.
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995) [Movie] WikiData IMDb TMDB Douban
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life
director: 史蒂芬·奎 / 狄莫瑞·奎 actor: 马克·里朗斯 / 艾丽丝·克里奇
other title: 本杰明学院 / Institut Benjamenta oder Dieser Traum, den man menschliches Leben nennt
Jakob arrives at the Institute Benjamenta (run by brother and sister Johannes and Lisa Benjamenta) to learn to become a servant. With seven other men, he studies under Lisa: absurd lessons of movement, drawing circles, and servility. He asks for a better room. No other students arrive and none leave for employment. Johannes is unhappy, imperious, and detached from the school's operation. Lisa is beautiful, at first tightly controlled, then on the verge of breakdown. There's a whiff of incest. Jakob is drawn to Lisa, and perhaps she to him. As winter sets in, she becomes catatonic. Things get worse; Johannes notes that all this has happened since Jakob came. Is there any cause and effect?