Time-lapse photography of books, paintings, reflections, and light falling on textures, shot entirely through a glass ashtray. "'All that is is light.' – Dun Scotus Erigena. 'To see the world in a grain of sand.' – William Blake. These are the primary impulses while working on this film. It is dedicated to Jim Davis who showed me the first spark of refracted film light." - S.B.
Pelle vegetale. Un'intervista
"Le Défilé" is a short film of Regine Chopinot & Jean-Paul Gaultier's collaborations, from a retrospective exhibit by the same name.
An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.
At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned. "S. Brakhage, entering, WITH HIS CAMERA, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without our knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that, for ourselves, with our own eyes. It is a room full of appalling particular intimacies, the last ditch of individuation. Here our vague nightmare of mortality acquires the names and faces of OTHERS. This last is a process that requires a WITNESS; and what 'idea' may finally have inserted itself into the sensible world we can still scarcely guess, for the CAMERA would seem the perfect Eidetic Witness, staring with perfect compassion where we can scarcely bear to glance." – Hollis Frampton
A collage of Derek Jarman's super 8 footage spanning over 20 years.
The Futurist is a condensed experience of film viewing, a single 360 degree animated shot in an empty 1920’s cinema where the sound becomes a cacophony of past projections and the aural experience is closer to that of the projectionist than the audience.
In Swole I continue to document my commitment to an intensive and transformative gym and diet regimen, as well as the communities that form around such activities, sustaining themselves through texting and sharing videos and photos on social media. I learn the vocabulary of my new community.
André's Eyes is an experimental docudrama in which the actual family members themselves participate in the recreation of their own story. Set in a small village in the Portuguese countryside, the film follows the struggle of a divorced father to keep his family together after his youngest son is taken away from them and placed in a foster family.
A woman walks, loves, eats and washes herself, dances. It all takes place in a bedroom. At times flashbacks, or visualizations of previous or following scenes. Unless her life in the bedroom becomes an obsession, she lives through the other scenes.
Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.
One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club
Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens, the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Beginning as a city state commission under the name and attitude of “Unschool”, the film became a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions and wonders of a couple of high school students after a year of experiences with filmmaker Ana Vaz questioning what cinema can be. Here, the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song.
In 2024, during an artistic residency at Periférne Centrá (Dúbravica, Slovakia), Cristian Estrella filmed the folkumentary „Medzi dolinami, medzi vŕški, po stopách budúceho zvuku Slovenska“ while producing the album "The Future Sound of Slovakia Vol.1" by Mira Tus Manos. But every film leaves scenes out. What doesn't fit due to time, rhythm, or because the main story needs to go elsewhere. "Medzi scénami, medzi hlasmi" is exactly those outtakes: already edited material that no one had seen, divided into two parts —SIDE A and SIDE B— where artists from Argentina, England, France, Catalonia, Amsterdam, New Zealand, and Slovakia speak not only about the project but also about their own artistic practices, personal stories, and internal maps.
The Vietnam War during the JFK years and beyond. Made in 1972 in the filmmaker's apartment, without documentary footage of the war, metaphors are created through the animation of images and objects, and through guerrilla skits. By rejecting the authority of traditional documentary footage, the anarchist spirit of individual responsibility is established. This is history from one person's point of view, rather than a definitive proclamation.
Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.
An experimental docu-fiction short from hours of collected material shot by the director. Different scenes, from drunk parties with friends to shots of the Dutch landscape during a train ride, are cut together to see if a narrative story can be constructed from nothing but randomly shot footage.
A first feature based on sexual events. An actress undertakes her desire of directing her first movie, without a budget or any production company funding her project. She gathers a group of professional actors and actresses, and proposes a project based on a very particular experience: stepping on their fears through a metaphorical 'leap of faith'. As the project advances, individual conflicts will arise affecting the shoot, making the movie crew wonder whether or not they should go on. Will they take the leap of faith with all its consequences?
Industrialization brings progress, but also harmful influences on the environment. Warning of the dangers of waste materials dumped into the air and the waters.
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.