Zamboanga

In the beginning the idea was to make something from nothing, in a neutral and unknown place. Collect images and sounds instead of producing them. The camera, the microphone and the mini-amplifier: tools that take away and then give back. We defined a rule: the sound shouldn't illustrate the image and the image shouldn't absorb the sound. Less than a hundred kilometres from Reykjavik we found Strokkur. For three days we saw and heard the internal dynamics of the crevice: the boiling water that spat out every seven minutes and the thermal shock, given the eighteen degrees below zero of the atmosphere.

This documentary is a journey into our own fascination, a collection of portraits of folk musicians living in New England, and a study of the ground on which their music is founded. We listen to them as they tell their stories and play their music. First and foremost, Behind a Hill is a tribute to these musicians and a rare peep into the house parties and basement jams of New England, in the northwestern corner of the USA, with the vain hope attached that maybe you, the viewer, will grow as fond of the music as we have. When we first encountered these musicians, we were overwhelmed by the quality of their musical output. We were entranced by the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and tempos and every other element that constitutes a song (or, as is often the case, a piece of abstract drone music, heavy feedback, or someone banging a steel pipe against a bag of dirt while chanting in a yet undiscovered language, or...).

Gérard Courant applies the Lettrist editing techniques of Isidore Isou to footage of late 70's pop culture. Courant posits that his cinema offers an aggressive détournement to the French mainstream, reifying a Duchampian view of film: "I believe in impossible movies and works without meaning... I believe in the anti-movie. I believe in the non-movie. I believe in Urgent... My first full length movie that is so anti-everything that I sometimes wonder if it really does exist!"

Trance dances and out of body projection. In front of the camera, Parvaneh Navaï becomes a mediator who enters in contact with and immerses into the energies of Nature, while her own energy radiates and echos in the forest ("selva"). The camera amplifies and expands her presence, transforming the forest into an imaginary space. The camera becomes a painter's brush.

Szirtes's masterful experimental work is a dazzling composition of several years of filming within an industrial macro/microcosm, an abstract model of revolution and the beauty of daybreak.

"In his description for A CHILD'S GARDEN, Brakhage quotes from poets Ronald Johnson and Charles Olson (and cites Johnson's poem "Beam 29" as inspiration). But the film also vaguely calls to mind William Blake—more perhaps for his art than his poetry: there is both a sense of darkness and of mystical transport in Brakhage's images. The first film in the loose "Vancouver Island" quartet, Brakhage films locations around the British Columbia locale where his second wife, Marilyn, grew up. He films land, sea, and sky and intercuts frequently between them. Shots are often out-of-focus, to accentuate color and light; they are hand-held, upside down, and fleeting. All of this is no surprise for those who know Brakhage's work: anything and everything is valid, as long as it works." - Cine-File.info

"I was visiting Jerome Hill. Jerome loved France, especially Provence. He spent all his summers in Cassis. My window overlooked the sea. I sat in my little room, reading or writing, and looked at the sea. I decided to place my Bolex exactly at the angle of light as what Signac saw from his studio which was just behind where I was staying, and film the view from morning till after sunset, frame by frame. One day of the Cassis port filmed in one shot." -JM

The Quays' interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed from different angles, mischievously revealed hidden symbols.

Canadian Pacific I is made up of a series of slowly dissolved shots done from the same framing over several months. The camera frames a window with a railway yard in the foreground, a bay in the space behind it, and misty mountains in the extreme distance. Trains occasionally pass by in the foreground. Huge ships move across the bay. Blue mists hover over the mountain heads.

This short film documents the daily life of the goings-on on Orchard Street, a commercial street in the Lower East Side New York City.

Montreal of another time is reborn into screen through images from a hundred of movies and shorts produced by the National Film Board of Canada while at its first four decades of existence. Port activities, musical shows, presence of Church, labors life, hockey fever and the best years of "Red Light" are few of the chapters of this collective family album.

Black Hole Radio is an installation that consists of taped confessions of callers of the New York City Phone Confession Line and video images. The Phone Confession Line is based on anonymous callers ringing to confess on things they had done or thought like adultery, theft, murder or regrets. Thereafter anybody could call and listen to the confessions. Although making a confession was free, listening to a confession costs money. After Cohen got his hands on the confessions, he used them as an audio heartbeat to accompany video-images of every day life in New York City he had taken over the years. This installation is a portrait of the city with its dark secrets, hushed voices and nocturnal images. In this way Cohen tries to bring across an experience to the viewer that relies on absence, waiting and the effort to hear something in the dark.

A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.

The second half of Gustav Deutsch's experimental Film ist. series, constructing new narratives and moods out of existing footage, mostly from early silent era films.

Openland is an art film guided by issues surrounding micro states and its derivative definitions. Through intertwining interviews, meta-narratives, and digital landscapes, Openland unfurls a dialogue between consciousness, individuality and collectivity.

Sylvia Kristel – Paris is a portrait of Sylvia Kristel , best known for her role in the 1970’s erotic cult classic Emmanuelle, as well as a film about the impossibility of memory in relation to biography. Between November 2000 and June 2002 Manon de Boer recorded the stories and memories of Kristel. At each recording session she asked her to speak about a city where Kristel has lived: Paris, Los Angeles, Brussels or Amsterdam; over the two years she spoke on several occasions about the same city. At first glance the collection of stories appears to make up a sort of biography, but over time it shows the impossibility of biography: the impossibility of ‘plotting’ somebody’s life as a coherent narrative.

A short documentary about Jörg Buttgereit's father.

From radical turntablism (Otomo Yoshihide) to laptop music innovation (Numb), via classical instrument hijacking (Sakamoto Hiromichi), Tokyo's avant-garde music scene is internationally known for its boldness. While introducing some of the greatest musicians of this scene, "We Don't Care About Music Anyway..." offers a kaleidoscopic view of Tokyo, confronting music and noise, sound and image, reality and representation, documentary and fiction.

An odyssey through Beethoven’s lasting presence and influence in our modern world – viewed through the eyes of the composer himself.

One morning, the late Karlheinz Stockhausen awoke from a dream that told him to take to the sky. Stockhausen envisioned four helicopters swirling in the clouds, with each of a quartet’s members tucked inside his own chopper, communicating through headsets, stringing away in sync to the rotor-blade motors. He immediately set forth to make that dream a reality. In 1995, Dutch film director Scheffer followed Stockhausen in the days leading up to the premiere performance of his Helicopter String Quartet in Amsterdam. The resulting film offers a rare glimpse of Stockhausen as he patiently dictates every agonizingly detailed measure to the Arditti Quartet.