Trash Talking

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.

In Prague, a professorial puppet, with metal pincers for hands and an open book for a hat, takes a boy as a pupil. First, the professor empties fluff and toys from the child's head, leaving him without the top of his head for most of the film. The professor then teaches the lad about illusions and perspectives, the pursuit of an object through exploring a bank of drawers, divining an object, and the migration of forms. The child then brings out a box with a tarantula in it: the professor puts his "hands" into the box and describes what he feels. The boy receives a final lesson about animation and film making; then the professor gives him a brain and his own open-book hat.

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet on a trike captures a puppet bird-man.

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

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.

A woman sits alone on a chair at a table in a room on one of the top floors of an asylum. Bright spot lights dot the night, sometimes shining on her window. She sharpens pencils and writes on a page in a copy book. The pencil point often breaks under her fingers' force. She places broken points outside the window on the sill. A satanic figure is somewhere nearby, animated but of straw or clay, not flesh. She finishes her writing, tears the paper from the pad, folds it, places it in an envelope, and slips it through a slot. Is she writing to her husband? "Sweetheart, come."

A display at the strange and wonderful artifacts in a collection of medical curiosities.

Two men seek to negotiate an agreement of international significance.

Stop-motion animated short film in which, among other things, a man made of wire looks malevolent.

With harpsichord music in the background, a dandy, seated at a table, plucks a quill pen from a ceiling full of them above him, dips it in ink, thinks, then draws a straight line down the page in front of him, out of which sprout six more quill pens, each held by a hand. The calligrapher moves all the hands and pens in unison, drawing an elaborate feathered wing, which comes to live, peeling off the page, and, now a quill pen, slips in to his hand. He tucks it behind his left ear.

Stop-motion animated short film with a white ball, a rabbit, and a girl, and a voice singing "Are We Still Married".

Enigmatic, stop-motion, animated story of a man's day.

Near an extraordinary chair with many legs, a hand is visible gripping an edge. The hand is weathered, the fingers cracked and scarred. The end of a rifle appears and a shot fires. The bullet is visible whirling through space; it caroms and then goes through a pine cone. A long spoon emerges from a drawer in the chair and stretches toward the hand. The bullet is on the spoon. Later, the hand holds the bullet between two fingers; another shot is fired.

Short animated film featuring the song "Can't Go Wrong Without You" by His Name Is Alive.

A porcelain doll’s explorations of a dreamer’s imagination.

Computer Movie No. 2 is a CGI animation created in advance of video-editing software. CTG programmed graphics on an IBM computer, filmed the screen with a 16mm camera, and assembled the frames as an animated film.

Individual elements from a carrier of visual information have been isolated and used to construct alternative visual reagents. Repetition is administered as a binder to tame the wild particles in motion, achieving a golden ratio in the mind's eye.

“When he shot Une seconde (4 min., 20 sec.), a video animation without computer graphics, Richard Angers tried to adapt Norman McLaren’s animation techniques to video shooting and editing. A long-term solitary task, in which images are moved by hand, centimetre by centimetre, in which one plays with the number of images per second, and in which the ± pure quest for effects is more important than the message”. BLANCHARD, Louise. “Les vidéastes sont au ‘rendez-vous’”, Le Journal de Montréal, Montreal (9 February 1992), p. 38.

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!"

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.