A newly arrived guest of a Hollywood hotel charms and amazes the regulars, and they decide to invite him to their Christmas dinner.
Porky sets sail for the Boola-Boola islands in the South Seas with a ship full of general merchandise and plans to open a 5 & 10 cent store. But a swordfish cuts a hole in the ship and Porky's goods fall into the ocean, where the fish make creative uses of them, ultimately opening a Hollywood nightclub, complete with fish impersonating various stars.
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.
Professor Pierre Ginsberg is having wife trouble and, on the advice of his lawyer, sets out to wear her down with kindness; she wants constant entertainment his lawyer promises him that a month of dancing and entertainment will eventually kill her or, at least, calm her down some. The exact opposite happens and Professor Ginsberg stands a good chance of dying himself. He manages to sing a song, in the best Willie Howard style, along the way.
Emerging from the LA underground in year 2000, a self-proclaimed "video band" called TV Sheriff & The Trailbuddies hit the scene with their twisted take on performance art and VJ remixing. They have since taken their unique act to venues worldwide, providing animated commentary on the state of mind control in the USA. The Trailbuddies focus on the banality of television, creating rhythmic collages from appropriated clips of the most absurd broadcast moments. And besides their virtuoso sampling, the madcap ensemble creates original—and hilarious!—karaoke-style melodies on mass-media manipulation. Behind TV Sheriff & The Trailbuddies is the ingenious, Emmy-award-nominated Davy Force, an exceptional combination of brilliant director and hands-on computer artist. His recent projects include music videos for Devo, animated commercials for Bandai and the show open for Tim & Eric's Awesome Show Great Job.
Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature" and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.
In an effort to cure her smoking habit a middle-aged woman discovers that she can communicate with her long lost son while watching a Halloween safety program on TV. After suffering a nervous breakdown, her husband, a used car salesman, is revitalized when he travels back in time to drive the first car he ever sold. Seventeen years later a powerful canned food manufacturer crashes the same car into a toaster truck while endorsing a brand of yams on live TV. At the funeral his clergyman experiences a crisis of faith when he and a lifelike Mexican continue their search for a married couple who have befriended an insect who enjoys drinking lime soda. They later meet a young man whose bizarre murder scheme involves four innocent members of an experimental rock band who have all given up smoking.
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.
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...).
A man and a woman have an awkward encounter at an indoor playground.
Flubs and bloopers that occurred on the set of some of the major Warner Bros. pictures of 1938.
Documentary about the ten days the director spent in Moscow, during the 1986 Moscow Youth Festival, as kind of a gay delegate.
Alex and Gershon are both playwrights and lovers. Although Gershon is older and they are not both sucessful, they manage to maintain a long term relationship.
Best known for his work in video, Richard Fung has made the politics of gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation his central focus. Chinese Characters (1986) examines the ambiguous relationship of gay Asian men with white gay porn.
Writes Ando, "Oh! My Mother was the first work I made using a newly bought 16mm camera I had purchased with the writer Shuji Terayama in Paris. This piece was selected for the Oberhausen International Film Festival. In 1969, there were, of course, no video cameras like ones we see now, and color TVs were only found at broadcast television studios. I had just been employed at the TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System), and I often snuck into the studios after hours to experiment with the equipment. Oh! My Mother was made using the feedback effect, which is produced by infinitely expanding the image by looping the video."
In Search of Avery Willard iIlluminates the life and work of the groundbreaking, and mostly forgotten, artist Avery Willard — photographer, filmmaker, writer, publisher, leatherman, pornographer.
In this educational short film, tips are given on proper nourishment.
Danny ponders a way for rival gangs to avoid violence at an upcoming dance.
In this tape, Ko Nakajima and Video Earth Tokyo interview a homeless man. The subject is initially angry and frustrated, but gradually opens up and shares stories about his life. Under A Bridge was later broadcast on cable television.
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.