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As the town says goodbye to summer with their Festa Major, all the villagers fill the dance floor. The last to leave are a group of young people who, in the early morning, will exchange their cocktails for coffees while they decide they won’t go to sleep. At the same time, a mailman arrives at Custodio’s house and delivers something he was no longer expecting: a coffin for his wife, who was buried three months ago. On their last day of summer, three dead tired friends, Rita, Clara and Pau, wander around the village expecting something, but without knowing what it is.
First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.
This film presents a series of flickering frames of primary colors to groaning tape manipulations. ‘Though I have worked extensively in various media, from music to poetry to film to performance to multimedia and installation art, there is a single thread that runs through most of my creative work: I am fascinated by the potential of light and sound to produce sheer magic.’ (V. Grauer)
This film is my response to the epic tradition, from Homer to the Mahabharata–V. G. “This film reflects everything (Grauer) has been involved with in his previous films and he uses this knowledge in a highly personal and non-mechanical way. No matter how well previous type of 'flicker' film is done, they essentially remain machine-like and impersonal. In BOOK, Grauer extends his vision to encompass much more.... The totality of the experience is a kind of wrap-around poem... None of the parts exist by themselves, everything is interwoven to produce a strong and hypnotic unity."– Bob Cowan, in Take One
