Kritiken (1)
The subtitle "Chronicles of the Present Time" illuminates two aspects - 1) a countercultural perspective on the history of the present, viewed logically in an experimental but also popular culture (Clémenti met Warhol during the filming process) manner; and 2) the position from which this perspective was formed, i.e., the lived-in and intellectual world of the "chronicler," /// "The period from the making of Belle de Jour was wonderfully productive, but in 1971 Clémenti was imprisoned in Italy on drugs charges. He never seemed to fully recover from the ordeal, but the experience led to a book and a film, New-Old (1978), which he described as "my diary of my life before and after 1973." (The Guardian, B. Baxter, 21.1. 2000). New Old is less condensed than Clémenti's previous two films (which is understandable given its significantly longer length), yet it still successfully builds on their previous methods (especially the multiple psychedelic exposure in the passages of the impressions of the time), enriched here by capturing one's own thoughts or ideas of friends and fragments of the life of one's own circle of artists and friends. The film differs from the otherwise formally similar films of Clémenti's friend Etienne O'Leary, who also subjectively captured the surrounding world and his own privacy, but could not coordinate the viewer's perception, so his films appeared as a random mess, even though they captured the same things as Clémenti, who, however, is able to better distinguish both levels and make them more comprehensible and impressive.
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