Like the 2008 Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, Elijah Drenner’s smart, affectionate but clear-eyed history of American exploitation films combines talking heads and well-chosen clips from movies that range from now-quaint 1913 white-slavery “exposé” Traffic in Souls to the still-scurrilous Nazi sexploitation classic Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS.
Do dreams, especially the portentous kind that you cannot easily shake off, predict the future? That question is investigated in “The Edge of Dreaming,” a deeply personal film by Amy Hardie, a Scottish science documentarian whose world was shaken after she experienced a series of related nightmares.
From The Wall Street Journal: "An experimental narrative... this curious film requires a contemplative mood to really take in. The premise is grim: A man decides to go into the woods, where he will stay until he starves himself to death. Swiss director Peter Liechti adapted the film a novel by Japanese writer Shimada Masahiko. The original work is based on a real-life incident, and the diary kept by a man who followed through with this unusual form of suicide. Observations mundane and profound are related in a low-key narration. For instance: The man lacks a huge appetite for his last unremarkable meal, so he spends his last coins on pinball. Yet, he knows his death will be drawn out, so he stocks his tent with grooming supplies. This ambient meditation certainly isn't for every viewer, but its philosophical tone and embrace of nature make it distinct."
Very insightful review from Slant Magazine of The Sound of Insects by Diego Costa:
Surprisingly not macabre, this fictionalized record of self-aggrandizement through self-destruction reminds one of Derek Jarman's Blue in its epistolary delivery and its displacement of meaning to that which is never really shown. One can also think of writer Yukio Mishima's seppuku, performance artist Fred Herko's jeté out the window (Andy Warhol was bummed for not having caught the moment of the plunge in a photograph), and the HIV-chasing politics of Guillaume Dustan, who also turned the courting of death into literature through barebacking. But the anonymous suicidal performer mummy in The Sound of Insects is less interested in the grand finale, more focused on his very shriveling. Still it is death as spectacle, even if a quietly murmured one, that links all of these performers.
Winner of the European Film Academy Documentary 2009 award "for its skillful exploration of minimalistic means to create an extraordinary visual story between life and death."
A profound inquiry into the art of representation, Peter Liechti's The Sound of Insects probes the ever-elusive and mystifying line between life and death. The film also blurs the line between documentary and fiction. A hunter in a remote corner of the Austrian wilderness, makes the horrifying discovery of a desiccated human corpse in a makeshift tent deep in the forest. Who was this person? Why did he die? The dead body releases its secrets in a day-by-day account fusing fiction and reality in an unsettling, highly sensory narrative.
Based on the Japanese novel by Shimada Masahiko, which in turn is based on fact.
Craig Blinderman, M.D., chief of the Adult Palliative Medicine Department of Anesthesiology at Columbia University joins poet Paul Muldoon after the screening.