Frank Zappa: The Present-Day Composer Refuses To Die

Electro-Pythagorus is an intimate and subjective portrait of the late Martin Bartlett, the Canadian electronic music pioneer who studied with Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage, and Pandit Pran Nath. His contribution as an interdisciplinary composer, educator, and founding member of Western Front, though undoubtedly extensive, is in danger of being erased from cultural memory since his death from AIDS in 1993. Navigating an array of archival materials including letters, correspondences, notebooks, personal photos, and a huge body of unreleased music and field recordings held at the archives of Simon Fraser University, Electro-Pythagoras is a journey through the evolution of Bartlett’s musical time and space, softly guided by Luke Fowler’s insightful camera and montage—creating an experimental portrait that defies one-dimensionality.

“Geometric animation made entirely by sculptural methods: cutting, punching, welding colored leader. HETERODYNE is related to some of my other work as RNA to a protein or polypeptide. It was made in abject (if blissful) ignorance of Paul Sharits’ early work.” –Hollis Frampton

"Like a Dream That Vanishes" continues Sternberg’s work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, as the stuff of life echoed on the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses (Your life is like a candle burning). Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles.

Everyday Portabella

A "thing" created by Frank Zappa from two concerts filmed live at the Palladium, New York City, on Halloween 1981. With Ray White, Steve Vai, Bobby Martin, Tommy Mars, Ed Mann, Scott Thunes & Chad Wackerman.

A feature-length documentary about one of the most successful British bands in rock music. The film recounts their extraordinary musical story, exploring the songwriting and the emotional highs and lows.

Two halves split by the perseverance of a scorpion. Come on, feet.

A small portrait of the volatility of intimacy and of breaking free from abusive cycles: made in response to a year of collapsing relationships and violent accidents that left me broken, dislocated and stuck in my apartment.

A Landscape documentary about the silent voids the living inhabit after everyone they love has gone.

An eight-hour contemplative epic, entirely starring sheep.

Romantic Warriors IV: Krautrock (Part 2) is the 2nd film of the Krautrock Trilogy, and explores eminent Krautrock bands from the South of Germany. Part 2 focuses on bands from Munich, Wiesbaden, Ulm, and Heidelberg, and highlights a more recent band from Aachen.

Maria Lang is my very close filmmaker friend who lives in the southern german countryside. We see her gardening and visiting an exhibition of female impressionist painters.

For us, a thought always presupposes a society, a culture and above all the consciousness of time. We are haunted by immortality, human notion par excellence. As if the world was here to fascinate us. And to disappoint us. The film travels around the bulb like the Earth around the Sun. Light makes the film visible. A fragile film, like our existence. In the orbit of the film tragedy and our reality, the image resists the cruelty of the experiment.

A depiction of a girl’s uneasy state of mind as it wavers between life and death.

Karel Svoboda: Šťastná léta

Video essay ‘Rock and Cliff' investigates the creation of Horn Town, a new model village and centre of large scale tourist development, and the experiences of rural residents moved there through government-led displacement. Horn Town is located in Wulong, a rural district near the Three Gorges Dam administered by the Chongqing municipality (a city of 30 million people). Narrated in the style of a science documentary but using local Chongqing dialect, the video brings a geological and topographical perspective to types of 'rocks' found in the area,from mythological stones from a mountain cliff, to ruins of the original settlement, to a stone sculpture from a dubious 'Land Art Biennial', in order to address issues of land acquisition, top-down development and spatial politic.

Hauntology of the Retrodromomania is an essayistic motion picture, a locomotory legwork, a deambulatory non-rural land survey, a casual journeying in a punctual dissertation around the phenomenon of the nostalgic feeling, discoursing on a late capitalistic landscape of social emotions, which are of yore, yet coloured of the postmodern tint of pixelated neo-noir, a socio-philosophical flâneur’s trip in critical theory escorted by the spirits of French post-structuralists. For a Sociology of Nostalgia revisited.

A thrillingly lo-fi salute to the old-school, hand-crafted special effects that were once a mainstay of pre-CGI science-fiction films.

For five grueling years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist while contending with the pressures of modern life in China. He is caught between two families: his wife, son and mother, whom he can barely support; and his enthusiastic but disorganized guerilla dance troupe. Li's chaotic life becomes inseparable from the act of taping it, as if his experiences can only make sense on screen. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI. Tape captures a decade's worth of artistic aspirations and failures, while breaking new ground in individual expression in China.

His filmmaker son probes the professional and private lives of his remote but fascinating father: bandleader, composer, inventor, and electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott.