Perspectrum

A trip towards abstraction, as an hypothesis on how mountains might have been formed.

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.

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

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked separately, preferring to see if the score and visual track would synchronise by chance. Lye also experimented with a new Direct Film technique, drenching the filmstrip in colourful paint and marker pen.

In Flesh Flows we see a balance of Beckett’s keen drawing ability, in the probing erotic forms, and his technical acuity, which transforms the carnal images into a compelling, transcendent experience. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.

Three books: a film festival catalogue, a dictionary, the Bible. Three works whose materiality has become obsolete by the digital dematerialization. A commentary on the fragility of culture.

A mathematical play on one repeated movement. It imparts a sense of possibilities: that something simple can produce complex and unexpected patterns. As with an atom, the variety of possibilities from a base movement is potentially infinite.

Repetition and distortion drive this audiovisual collaboration between composer Lux Prima and visual artist Max Hattler, where fuzzy analogue music and geometric digital animation collide in an electronic feedback loop, spawning arrays of divisional articulations in time and space.

Peter Larsson’s Keyhole Conversation draws the eye down to the small gate of the camera. From there, through quivering and percussive forms of direct and stop-motion animation, the eye begins to experience the scale of an image anew. At times segueing into a flicker, but maintaining a charmed form of attention to the marks of pencils and the channels dredged in emulsion by a paintbrush, all to a curious soundtrack of pulses and bleeps.

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

D'art moderne

The screen is divided again and again until the picture arranged in ever changing strips bursts into whirring dynamic.

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.

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

Serlasanha

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.

From the film-almanac on musical works of classics for children "Children's Album". A little film about genesis.

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.

Enigma is something of a more glamorous version of White Hole, with a wide variety of elaborate textures (often composed of iconographic and religious symbols) converging towards the centre of the screen.