Drux Flux

A burst of cheer and refreshment that it seems perfectly suited to a late July afternoon.

Rainer Kohlberger’s abstract film was created entirely without a camera. Through digital algorithms, he precisely arranged a rhythm of light and shadow that pulsates off the screen into our physical space with blinding intensity. The presence of light is almost felt as we are sucked into the image to become its ghostly accomplice. As we leave the theatre, the optical vibrations continue to haunt us.

A deep dive into a snowstorm of structural chaos and a blizzard of exploding gestural animation.

A vibrant animation by Patricia Marx. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2000.

Since the death of their father, the Riley siblings have kept their heads above water by illegally dealing in painkillers. Josie is managing the business with an iron fist, when her brother, War veteran Kip, is concerned that the risky business is increasingly turning them into outsiders in their small community. While Kip wants to keep his younger brother out of their illegal endeavors, his younger brother is already making plans of his own.

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

An unnamed man peacefully sips cocktails at a nightclub. Simultaneously, an identical, unnamed man paints a self-portrait in an abandoned cabin in the middle of a field.

Torn from their home by a hand in the sky, colorful entities seek freedom from a rigid binary in this short experimental animation.

An unsuspecting, disenchanted man finds himself working as a spy in the dangerous, high-stakes world of corporate espionage. Quickly getting way over-his-head, he teams up with a mysterious femme fatale.

A student finds out he is late for his train.

A person living in Liberty City goes to work, have some food & gets back home.

Odds & Ends is a sly comment on the collage film and Beat culture. To discarded travel and advertising footage found at a local film laboratory, Belson Shimane added a mélange of animation—assemblages, cutouts, color fields, and line drawings—and faux hipster narration by Jacobs (credited via the anagram Rheny Bojacs) punctuated by a bongo backing. Strung together with doublespeak and non sequiturs, the monologue skirts the edge of nonsense as Jacobs waxes on about poetry, jazz, “reaching the public,” “having a good time,” and—although “money doesn’t count”—the “possibility of subsidy” through grants. Footage of champagne, tropical beaches, and exotic peoples intermingle with rhythmic drawings and stop-motion flights of fancy. The visuals race on through dazzling transformations, both amplifying and undercutting the patter. —National Film Preservation Foundation. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Iota Center Collection in 2006.

A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.

Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create.

Three memories that become one. An attempt to merge heterogeneous materials: a film sequence shot in Rome, a photo from the 1930s, a noisy soundtrack. Fragmented lines, exploding bass frequencies and flickering.

Claire is composed of digital scans and blow-ups of a series of three ink-on-paper artworks created in 2012 by French-Spanish researcher, publisher and artist Claire Latxague. While collecting drawings, written documents and other printed materials for a (yet unreleased) project called Un film de papier, I’ve stumbled upon Latxague’s artwork, entitled À la renverse. The blow-ups were made in an attempt of unearthing cartographic imagery in abstract compositions.

Abstract animation by Boris Labbé

One day, Kandume's can boy, who happily lived with his friends in the kitchen, becomes an empty can and is discarded. Eventually, he has a dream about the history of iron and humanity. He sees how iron that melted and flowed out during a forest fire, was discovered by humans once it cooled and solidified. This iron then transformed into knives and machines, leading to the development of civilization. When the can boy awakens, he is taken to a steelworks and reborn as a new steel material.

La Costante di Archimede

Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.