trinidad+tobago film festival

In 1977, the late Texas-born director, Robert Altman (1925-2006) had a dream. It involved three women living in a desert resort community, somewhere in California. The next morning, with the help of the screenwriter, Pat Resnick, Altman began sketching his film, which remains his most personal and among the more disturbing produced during Hollywood... 's late to mid-seventies golden age. Starring three performers from Texas--Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule-- 3 Women is as much about the double-self as Ingmar Bergman's brilliant Persona but with the cock-eyed charm of a M-G-M comedy starring Zasu Pitts. While Janice Rule paints enigmatic murals in a rundown apartment house for singles, Duvall-as-Millie-Lamorroreaux's new roommate, Pinky Rose (Spacek) starts to assume aspects of Millie's personality, including her awkwardness, and penchant for sleeping with Rule's husband. For her astonishing work -she improvised a great many of her monologues -Shelley Duvall won the Best Actress award at Cannes, while Spacek collected a Best Supporting Actress honor from the New York Film Critics. This a process-oriented work that combines archival footage and images Thornton shot and arranged herself, on both film and video, from 1984 to 2009. In the early 1980s, the artist began filming two children she met in Providence, Rhode Island. They became the focus of her project - to show the last two beings, a pre-adolescent brother and sister, on Earth. Inundated by media and natural devastation, Peggy and Fred traverse a post-apocalyptic universe where they can only reflect one another, and the ruin of the world. (Part of the story Thornton means to tell here through metaphor is her own history of duality: How to resolve the image of her father, a gentle man, with the fact that he was a scientist who worked on developing the Atom bomb). Combining bright lights, pictures and sound from television, as well as pre-sound images from documentary nature films, this extraordinary document is a near hallucinatory blend of ...Read More