Garbage

Documentary short film depicting the filmmaking activity at the Paramount Studios in Hollywood, featuring dozens of stars captured candidly and at work.

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."

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.

Peter Hutton's New York trilogy. An act of urban archaeology, a chronicle of indelible impressions of the city.

Andy Warhol directs The Factory regular Louisa "Jackie" Foster for a screen test.

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.

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)

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.

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.

Events that took place in the capital of the Tajik SSR, the city of Dushanbe in 1929.

This silent film from 1948 "The Creation of Life" briefly demonstrates how a fetus forms and graphically shows different types of births. It was made by Sherwood Picture Corp., and may have been sold both to schools and professional organizations for medical education, and to the public for shock value. (Several similar birth films were sold in this era through home catalogs and photography shops.) Summary: By means of diagrams, conceptions and pregnancy are explained. Views of various methods of delivery are shown. Created by: T. Marc Sherwood

"This is taking a Super 8mm camera around with me wherever I go and I'm very interested in windows at this time of travel, and I'm trying to make a variety of different statements about the concept of window." - S.B.

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.

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.

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L'intimité

THE SCREEN TESTS OF COSMOTROPIA DE XAM A collection of 12 screen tests from all over the world, based on a direction sheet of Cosmotropia de Xam. Starring: Elzabeth Hart of Psychic Ills, How I Quit Crack and Aura, Carmen Incarnadine, Shivabel, Black Madeleine, Jenni Hensler, Agnes Pándy, Suzy Poling, Omebi, Sarah Toon and Owleyes, Dania Myers, ∆AIMON

Sketch Film #5 (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2007, 3 min., super 8, silent, 18/24fps, b&w, USA) This is the last film in the series. I shot at the site of Marin Headlands County in California when I was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Art. The footage shows the nature in the area, as well as the historic buildings originally built for the US Army, including batteries and the Nike Missile Site. It was all edited in camera and hand-processed afterwards.

Documentary that details the daily habits of beavers and their interaction with the ecosystem at large. Filmed mostly in Digby County, Nova Scotia.

A symphonic film about neighborhoods and roads.