At the beginning of the twenty-first century, abstraction - that most quintessentially modernist innovation - maintains a peculiarly contradictory position. Used, on one hand, by post-modernist artists as just one more quotable style amongst many, it is on the other hand still considered an elitist or hermetic language by audiences intimidated by its lack of recognizable subject matter. Yet ultimately, abstraction continues to be a viable creative path for contemporary artists of all generations, many of whom embrace it as the most inclusive and fundamentally resonant of artistic languages. Filmed at the artists' studios, the Dia Center for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Museum during their exhibition, "Abstraction in the Twentieth Century."
Documentary short film depicting the filmmaking activity at the Paramount Studios in Hollywood, featuring dozens of stars captured candidly and at work.
L'intimité
Taken in 1896 on the Boulevard (upper Broadway) on the occasion of a bicycle parade in the heyday of the wheeling craze. Old-fashioned horse cars lend interest to the scene.
C+M, for YK. Subtractive colour blending is used in an attempt to conjure Yves Klein's 'L'accord bleu (RE 10)', 1960. The limitations imposed by media and technology ensure that my perfect pigment never is, and that what is produced is ephemeral, declarative, and reverent of the impure. Laser printed onto recycled 16mm film in 2014.
An exploration of Rodez Cathedral and its stained glass windows: praying figures and scientific imagery. A study on color, repetition and flickering consisting of 292 photographs.
Mudos testigos is a cinematographic collage made from all the surviving material of Colombian silent films, re-editing the images in such a way as to create a single imaginary film: the impossible love story of Efraín and Alicia that traces the convulsive first half of the twentieth century in Colombia. Compiled by the late Luis Ospina and finished posthumously by Jeronimo Atehortúa.
Documentary without audio produced by deaf people. Music is depicted visually with the complete absence of musical instruments or voices. Directed by Makihara Eri and choreographer Dakei. With a diverse lineup including ordinary deaf people with zero acting experience and a choreographer who performs in Japan and abroad, this film pulls out all the tops to give visual expression to music through the physical body. An aging man uses multiple sign language poems to convey the four seasons, and a girl expresses the wind amidst the rustling trees.
Documentary that details the daily habits of beavers and their interaction with the ecosystem at large. Filmed mostly in Digby County, Nova Scotia.
Andy Warhol directs The Factory regular Louisa "Jackie" Foster for a screen test.
Shows masked mental patients enacting various schizophrenic symptoms as they were understood at the time. A disturbing film that raises questions about the condition and treatment of its subjects. (archive.org) “Abstract: This film describes and demonstrates four types of schizophrenia. Filmed at various New York institutions, it shows patients singly and grouped in large, outside recreational areas. Some patients are blindfolded. Symptoms shown include: social apathy, delusions, hallucinations, hebephrenic reactions, cerea flexibilitas, rigidity, motor stereotypes, posturing, and echopraxia.” (Guide to Mental Health Motion Pictures)
Bernadette Corporation describes this work as "A fashion film about the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the color white." Produced for the 2000 Walker Art Center exhibition Let's Entertain, this short film employs a range of strategies to approach the idea of nothingness, emptiness, and vacuity, with an eye to how these notions relate to contemporary mass-cultural entertainment. Juxtaposing "documentary" takes on a fashion shoot with footage of semiologist Sylvère Lotringer giving an impromptu lecture on Mallarmé on a frozen lake, Hell Frozen Over maintains an ambiguous stance from which to both critique and celebrate the power of surface.
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Peter Hutton's New York trilogy. An act of urban archaeology, a chronicle of indelible impressions of the city.
Six years after the Berlin Wall fell and five years after German unification this documentary looks into the fast changes in architecture and street life of Berlin Mitte and stays in tune with a piano piece of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Watch as Aiden Aleman creates his newest art piece “TRUTH” in the middle of Zilker Park.
Amongst the contemplative static shots of decaying architecture weaves an abstract narrative unveiling the life-cycle of a higher perception, too large to perceive. Shot at various sites across south-east England, INFRASTRATA is a study on the concept of super-organisms, and the relationship between structure and nature.
On September 11, 1929, the first Termez-Dushanbe train arrived at the newly built station in the Tajik capital. However, not only the train was the first that day - the shots of the arrival of the locomotive, as well as people waiting for it with excitement, became the basis of the first Tajik film.
This short film from Arthur Lipsett is an abstract collage of snippets from discarded footage found by Lipsett in the editing room of the National Film Board (where he worked as an animator), combined with his own black and white 16mm footage shot on the streets of Montreal and New York City, among other locations. A commentary on a machine-dominated society, it is often cited as an influence on George Lucas's Star Wars and his conceptualization of "The Force."
An abstract and detailed observation of a young life told through a series of observational montages. Part of the 'Technicolour' series of films from Lot 108 Productions.