Jane

A hole gapes in a house wall. A small flaw, something imperfect that we seldom consciously direct our attention to. Filmmaker Ondřej Vavrečka finds holes in every corner. His focus is on the imperfections of human existence. A hole can also mean an uncertain future, or an empty stomach. The gap that partners leave behind after a breakup. Ondřej Vavrečka does not only deal with visible holes. He looks at the incomplete from a philosophical perspective. He also lets a nuclear physicist, a theologian and an ethnologist have their say. He underscores their thoughts and theses with absurd everyday scenes: a woman with a chair on her head or an invisible skier. These scenes combine with interviews, sounds and stop-motion sequences to create a playful collage.

Documentary footage, Hollywood cinema and video games collide, overlap and submerge into each other in a Dadaist collage inspired by the poetry of Hungarian poet Mário Z. Nemes. The hypermedia nature of the present is emphasised by fragments that are free of a clear narrative backbone.

A dancer moving through a city seeking a space in which to exist.

Taking a cue from Franz Kafka's "Letter to My Father," this highly personal film follows Czech director Jan Nemec as he attempts to engage in a dialogue with his deceased mother. While alive, Nemec's mother had a troubled relationship with her son; this rumination seems to be Nemec's public platform for coming to terms with unresolved familial issues. The director embellishes his film by linking personal events with 20th century history.

Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.

Pelle vegetale. Un'intervista

An experimental docu-fiction short from hours of collected material shot by the director. Different scenes, from drunk parties with friends to shots of the Dutch landscape during a train ride, are cut together to see if a narrative story can be constructed from nothing but randomly shot footage.

Two women – one passive and resigned, the other aggressive and domineering – interact in various locations in New York city. The film explores the dynamic between them before ending with a showdown at the roller-coaster on Coney Island.

Short experimental film.

Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.

The encounter of three movies, three territories. A personal story that portrays, through experiments revealed by images and extracts from a diary, lived meetings and inhabited places filled by forces of nature, colors, incidents and struggles.

A meditation on time and its effect on memory. About the rocks the sea tries to drag away from the shore, towards the ocean, with every wave.

"All Inclusive" tells the story of seven women who are going on holidays to Morocco, getting out of the hotel and confronting women from Morocco. They will look for their own way of life in the desert, confront their world, looking at the reality that surrounds them.

"…elegant yet rustic in its simplicity of execution; tugged gently toward different sides of the set by hints of color and motion interactions, positive and negative spaces, etc., and the unyielding delivery on one of the great apotheoses of poetic cinema at fade-out time." – Tony Conrad

This year our mid-summer’s night was adorned with a glorious full moon. The weeks and days preceding the solstice were magically alive with crisp, cool breezes, bright, warm sunlight, and a general sense of heartbreaking clarity. The Dreamer is born out of this most poignant San Francisco spring.

SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).

“It’s not my memory of it” is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979 following the takeover of the U.S embassy. A CIA film—recorded in 1974 but unacknowledged until 1992—documents the burial at sea of six Soviet sailors, in a ceremony which collapses Cold War antagonisms in a moment of death and honor. A single photograph pertaining to a publicly acknowledged but top secret U.S. missile strike in Yemen in 2002 is the source of a reflection on the role of images in the dynamic of knowing and not knowing.

Believe it or not, esoteric film sages, i.e., Phil Solomon, are open to the possibilities of working with video — and even video games. This is a film that takes images from the notorious wanton car-jacking shoot-em-up Grand Theft Auto video game.

Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.

Made for Milton Keynes Gallery's 10th anniversary using images from its archive and language from its press releases and catalogues.