chimera

Starting in the late 1930s, illustrator and experimental animator Douglass Crockwell created a series of short abstract animated films at his home in Glen Falls, New York. The films offered Crockwell a chance to experiment with various unorthodox animation techniques such as adding and removing non-drying paint on glass frame-by-frame, squeezing paint between two sheets of glass, and finger painting. The individual films created over a nine-year period were then stitched together for presentation, forming a nonsensical relationship that only highlights the abstract qualities of the images. —Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance

An abstract computer-generated film. The image is of squares revolving in space around and through each other. Colors and forms multiply and divide against a beautiful symphonic score by George Kleinsinger.

Simon is an eight-year-old boy who seems to have everything from life. He’s a handsome child, he’s rich yet unhappy. He senses that there’s something wrong with his life and this leads him to wander off thanks to his fervid imagination. His greatest wish is to leave the materialistic world behind since he isn’t fond of it. That’s why the only present he wants for Christmas is for Santa Claus to take him away to live in his fairyland toy factory. At the same time, a secret that his family has been keeping for a long time suddenly comes to the surface and it is feared that the worst might happen soon. The expectation for the stroke of midnight on the night before Christmas is transformed into reality for everyone on the eve of something truly different. Something terrible that might happen.

Just out of jail, rumpled English archaeologist Arthur reconnects with his wayward crew of tombaroli accomplices – a happy-go-lucky collective of itinerant grave-robbers who survive by looting Etruscan tombs and fencing the ancient treasures they dig up.

Údolie večných karaván

A young man sits at a local restaurant with his friend: but he isn't paying attention to her as she speaks. This film visualizes his chaotic state of mind and how he uses mindfulness practice to tune back into the conversation. Mindfulness is being able to sit with and observe your thoughts. Being mindful improves focus and mental health. FLES is SELF spelt backwards.

A washed up actor performs night after night in a grimy theater to a nearly empty audience. However, everything changes when a clueless dog jumps on stage.

An underground fight is taking place in a painter's studio between the artist and the ten tyrants.

In 1958, graduates of the Film School in Łódź – director Mieczysław Waśkowski and camera operator Adam Nurzyński – produced in cooperation with Tadeusz Kantor the short film Somnambulists. The colourful, painting-like moving image was an attempt at transferring the informel onto film stock.

LAND is a fluid series of formal land animation experiments based upon the imprint of landscapes in various locations and intuitive interpretations of those movements. Shot in New York, Thimble Islands Bear Island, Connecticut, Armstrong Redwoods, Sonoma County, California, Hastings, England. note* (part of the EYE Filmmuseum Permanent Collection)

Regeneration is a film about transformation. Starting in a dark place the character reaches toward the divine and breaks into the world of the spirit. Through this act representing an outstretched hand we see that the Holy Spirit represented as a dove is pursuing us even more urgently. The meeting of the two represents the freedom in flight found in trusting fully in the Holy Spirit and is completed with the return to the heart now fully regenerated.

An individual finds that the world that intrudes upon his personal life cannot be escaped, and he turns to the next generation.

Through thread and textile, an Asian seamstress tries to escape from the factory.

On the cold outskirts of town, something is about to happen. In our own way we are all waiting for something to happen.

A short experimental film shot on Super 8, inspired by the music of Richard Wagner.

The model’s feet are uncomfortably squeezed into the heels, and her movements are slippery on slick silver liquid, before she slowly and ominously destroys the glass pane separating the subject from the viewer.

A corridor of an apartment is transformed into a claustrophobic and vertiginous vortex that swallows and imprisons you in an infinite fall through a mise en abyme: it’s a pure enclosure inside the image world, it’s the Descent into the Maelstrom.

Needles are used to repair the damage. Stay is a 5-minute animated film made using hand embroidery on tracing paper, depicting the relationship between a daughter and her absent father. Don’t forget to spend more time with the people you love even though you are busy.

arc of the natural world’s evolution from the primeval environment to the Anthropocene and back again premiered in program Death is Green at the Whitney Museum of American Art part of Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 1905-2016 organized by Chrissie Iles

Filmmaker and artist Jack Smith described his own film as a “comedy set in a haunted movie studio.” Flaming Creatures begins humorously enough with several men and women, mostly of indeterminate gender, vamping it up in front of the camera and participating in a mock advertisement for an indelible, heart-shaped brand of lipstick. However, things take a dark, nightmarish turn when a transvestite chases, catches and begins molesting a woman. Soon, all of the titular “creatures” participate in a (mostly clothed) orgy that causes a massive earthquake. After the creatures are killed in the resulting chaos, a vampire dressed like an old Hollywood starlet rises from her coffin to resurrect the dead. All ends happily enough when the now undead creatures dance with each other, even though another orgy and earthquake loom over the end title card.