Ghost Cell

Of late, Kago has also taken to posting his even less-known video work to his YouTube channel. In these jokey short films, many of them crudely animated, Kago's sick sense of humor reaches its full heights of absurdity. There's a playful surrealist sensibility to Kago's work, as well as a tendency to revel in the ridiculous, the crude and the disturbing. His work straddles a weird boundary between avant-garde experimentation and low-brow fart jokes — the punchline of one of these films is literally an oozing torrent of shit — although, admittedly, his videos seem to lean a bit more heavily towards the fart jokes than his comics. But hey, who doesn't appreciate a good fart joke once in a while?

In a bold and original approach to memory, this Lettrist-inspired film maps an anxiety-ridden plane journey from Tokyo to Helsinki without the aid of photographic images. A variety of interventions on the film strip are combined with an atmospheric sound design to create a subjective story of displacement and containment. In an age when experience is increasingly mediated through digital technologies, Taanila seeks out an alternative language in the sensuous surfaces of the celluloid material.

This is one of those abstract animated films in which colored, richly textured light moves in a black, three-dimensional space. The pictures and the electronic score are unified in a strict structure made of three main sections which progressively develop three subsections. This film may look like it was made using computers or video to the uninitiated, but only animation and much optical printing are to be seen herein. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.

This dazzling stop-motion animation provided Vorkapich with a forum to demonstrate complex perceptual theories related to the persistence of vision and phi phenomenon. The dance of objects and their movements before the camera lens–somewhat similar to Oskar Fischinger’s abstractions–illustrate many visual sensations playfully executed by Vorkapich.

A meek office worker finds himself flung into a fantasy world as a naked muscleman. An early version of the Den character, known from the comic magazine Heavy Metal and the movie by the same name.

A psychedelic, avant-garde collage film designed to accompany PRPL PPL's experimental album of the same name.

Experimental short film by Michio Mihara.

The tv/video screen comes alive by a controlled beam of electrons in the cathode ray tube. For 'energie!' an uncontrolled high voltage discharge of approx. 30.000 volts exposes photographic paper which is then arranged in time to create new visual systems of electron organization.

Short film by Mary Ellen Bute

From 1967-71 Barry Spinello made films without camera or tape recorder by hand drawing both sound and picture directly onto clear 16mm leader. His interest and education (at Columbia) was in music, painting, and poetry. His effort was to merge these three: “to squeeze sound and picture out of the same tube – to weave a cloth with warp as sound, woof as picture, and meaning the fabric itself."

The mutating forms of Tensai Banpaku, or “Genius Expo” create a stunning abstract orchestra.

Part of Solomon’s acclaimed Grand Theft Auto series, titled “In Memoriam”, a body of work shot entirely within the virtual world of the Grand Theft Auto video game.

This experiment was a “prestige advertisement” for Shell Motor Oil. As conventional animation became dominated by Walt Disney, many European filmmakers turned to puppets as an alternative, and Lye enlisted the help of avant-garde friends such as Humphrey Jennings and John Banting to make the amusing puppets. Exploring the still-complex color process, which involved the combination of three separate images, Lye creates such a vivid storm scene that reviewers hailed it as “proof that the color film has entered a new stage.” The music is Holst’s The Planets. - Harvard Film Archive

It is well known that the disposition of the images drawn by Escher are neither for animation nor for pre-animation; actually, quite the opposite. His images appear to be the carrying out of metamorphic dissolves. A bird gives way to the recognition of a house, which turns into fish, which turns into birds, and so on. Not a single flapping of wings takes place; everything is reiterated and fixed, becoming immersed in and re-emerging from a static continuum. All of Escher is an homage to one of the major animating forces of the cinema: the cross-dissolve. Precisely there, I found cinematic attitudes: in the house which turns into fish and in everything that transforms into something else. I gradually managed to figure out various types of non-existent sequences and then finally found myself dissolved, crossing over metamorphically. —P.G.

From the infinitely small to the infinitely large, all things in the universe are tightly connected: they interact and restructure in a combination of movements and perpetual metamorphoses.

White Tape explores the theme of boundaries: the frame, the space between brushstrokes and the implications of occupation.

You Take Care Now, an early student film, is a perfect exemplar of Ann Marie Fleming's idiosyncratic vision and stands as one of her signature works. Made on 16mm, and incorporating found footage, original material, animation, and processed images (Vancouver's groundbreaking avant-garde cinema of the 1970s is a decided influence here), Fleming's film offers a visually dazzling, emotionally wrenching, oddly humorous account of two profound personal traumas.

White circles appear and disappear on a black surface.

Documentary recording of one day of children's play in the yard of a Warsaw housing estate.

Impressions on the topic of plastics set to Vivaldi's Winter: blizzard, dancing moons, beats ice, sparkling silver crystals, petrified wood frozen.