WILLFUL BLINDNESS is an art film experience that seamlessly weaves intense visuals with hard driving sound design and original music composition; there is no spoken dialogue. Winner of Best Editing Feature at 2012 VIFF!, nominee for Best Experimental Film at RIFE, and receiving an Award of Merit at LIFF, this experimental feature by American fine artist James Higginson is now available on VoD and DVD. WILLFUL BLINDNESS will also be included in the compilation DVD collection from the 2012 Lucerne International Film Festival.
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One murder has happened. Another man is chased and shot. As he crawls on the street no one notices or lends him help. Is he actually alive or might he be dead, a ghost? The audience joins the crawling man as he drifts though states of consciousness/unconsciousness and their understanding becomes suspended somewhere between a reality and a dream.
WILLFUL BLINDNESS rakes the boundaries of distant memory and familiar present. Three interwoven narrative threads are reconstituted in an unconventional, experimental, kaleidoscopic rollercoaster ride that becomes this visual experience. Surreal and shocking, yet oddly meditative, WILLFUL BLINDNESS is a stunning journey into personal choice and survival.
“Higginson takes the concept of film to its final limits---that it is not the camera that is the projector, it is
us, our minds, reaching out of the depths of the repressed impulses who streams our darkest fears onto a helpless blank
white screen. Powerful and moving, even frightening, Willful Blindness is an act of art.”
Jeanne Willette, imdb review, June 2012.
WILLFUL BLINDNESS, 2012, is an art film experience that contains no spoken dialogue, only intense visuals and hard driving sound design/music.
- 2012 Nomination-Best Experimental Film: REEL INTERNATIONAL FILM EXTRAVAGANZA, Washington DC
- 2012 WINNER-BEST EDITNG FEATURE VEGAS INDIE FILM FESTIVAL! Las Vegas, Nevada
- 2012 AWARD OF MERIT LUCERNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Lucerne, Switzerland
- 2012 Official Selection: BRIDGE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, Vancouver
JAMES HIGGINSON (1957- )
Director and fine artist James Higginson(Emmy Award, 1989) premieres his first feature length experimental art film, WILLFUL BLINDNESS(2012),a visual experience.
At the core of Higginson’s work is an analysis, investigation and experimentation with distinguishing boundaries and definitions of “Reality”, including dreamed and imagined realities. Higginson’s work confronts and provokes the viewer with arresting images that reveal the unspoken of today's world—the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the material.
The question Higginson consistently addresses is how to tell the stories of which we all are made. His choice of artistic means reflects flux and non-resolution. In the Twenty-First Century, Higginson believes it is the task of the artist to interrogate contemporary life.
In development are two experimental features, Niki + Alex, that will be shot in Germany, and The Road to Batumi, that will be shot in the country of Georgia. Also in prouction is a documentary short about the Orthodox Monks of Georgia entitled, From Behind the Flowers.
Perhaps it is a generational willingness to gaze squarely into the heart of domination and control that allows him to take performance and theatricality as a working metaphor and redeploy the co-opted language of mass media to subvert the conditioned numbness of modern life. Art becomes a Brechtian exercise in daring to call attention to itself, its own artificiality only to proclaim a harder truth. Higginson continually addresses issues that expose our human frailty.
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Lucerne International Film Festival will include WILLFUL BLINDNESS in it’s 2012 Festival Compilation DVD collection.
