Synopsis
Luminous Void: Docudrama is a documentary like no other. Starting with the bizarre practices and fantasies of a group of filmmakers working under the label Experimental Film Society, it spins off into a manifesto of light and sound. This dazzling journey through a view of cinema as cosmic ritual and erotic delirium is also an idiosyncratic celebration of the medium itself. Rouzbeh Rashidi’s ornate visual style unleashes a parade of visionary scenes that redefine movie magic as a fevered hallucination.
Film stills:
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Screenings
2021 – Kino ARMATA (RKS)
2020 – Hypnos Theatre (SE)
2019 – Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival (TUR)
Press & Reviews
“Some viewers will recognise members of the Experimental Film Society. They are a Fringe Society, on the margins of decency and good sense. We have slowly entered the realm of the mythic – but a broken, indecipherable myth… The spectator is a pinball pinging between The Wizard of Oz and Carmelo Bene, between Wild at Heart and pink erotica… The prodigious cinema of Rouzbeh Rashidi and his fine feathered friends.” – Adrian Martin, The Fringe Experience
“it initially subverts our expectations, only to exceed them by far, as the film evolves into a beautiful, genre-defying (and genre-redefining) chimera – a light-breathing monster with a documentary-turned-neo-noir head and anachronistic period drama body sporting expressionist wings, bizarre avant-horror scales and a stingy tail of an erotic, occult fantasy.” – Nikola Gocić
“In the run-up to 2020, the 20th anniversary of the founding of EFS, Rashidi completed Luminous Void: Docudrama (2019) which was conceived to encapsulate the very essence of EFS. This cosmic carnival of visionary delirium and erotic obsession conjures a gorgeously artificial, opulently hermetic zone comparable to Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). In Rashidi’s ‘luminous void’, as the film’s tagline puts it, “space is abolished, cinema is present”. This most eccentric and Decadent of film manifestos includes sequences suggested and performed by several EFS filmmakers as part of the overarching spectacle presented by ring master extraordinaire Rashidi. In terms of ornate pictorial technique, this film surpasses even TRAILERS although its rhythm is markedly tighter and more frantic than the earlier work.” – Maximilian Le Cain
“I think of myself as a medium. There is a portal between the universes, and I mediate or transmit energies as I create films. It is because of this that I see my practice as . . . alchemical. Or shamanic, even. Because when you are making film, things happen that are completely out of your control. And the job of the director,” he insists, “is to enter into this chaos. You can control this in editing.” – Hilary M. V. Leathem
Reviews:
- Read here by Adrian Martin
- Read here by Nikola Gocić
- Read here by Hilary M. V. Leathem
Lists:
Voted among the best films of 2019 “Top 20 Migliori Film del 2019” by Cinepensieri