Always on Time, Always Outta Line

A short film by John G. Avildsen.

An audio collage of snippets of narration culled from true crime TV shows, juxtaposed against serene Super-8 nature footage.

The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.

A collage of newsreels, trailers, clips and other visionary and unseen fragments of sight and sound regarding the late plastic artist Helio Oititica.

The Greek island of Syros is visited by a series of unexpected guests. Immutable forms, outside of time, aloof observants to human conditions.

On the Various Nature of Things

Part of a collection of restored early works by Nam June Paik, the haunting Beatles Electronique reveals Paik's engagement with manipulation of pop icons and electronic images. Snippets of footage from A Hard Day's Night are countered with Paik's early electronic processing.

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.

Alban lives in a castle that he has just inherited in a small village in Charente-Maritime. Inside, the dilapidation has long since taken hold. He meets Jérôme, a young gypsy from the neighbouring town, with whom he has a sexual relationship. In this space that is impossible to rebuild, a strange intimacy is gradually invented, barely disturbed by the interruption of a young woman who has come to spend a few days in this residence.

A visit to the Rotoli cemetery in Palermo, while film director Carmelo Bene reads a fragment of Antonio Pizzuto's book "Signorina Rosina".

A Japanese salaryman finds his body transforming into a weapon through sheer rage after his son is kidnapped by a gang of violent thugs.

"Ryuta is 5 years old. Even though he is my son, I sometimes wonder what this small person is to me. Even though I see his joys and sadnesses and know the feel of his warmth on my skin when I hold him, there are moments when my feelings for him become vague and blank." - Takashi Ito

A work produced for the Morimura Yasumasa Exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art, (April 6 to June, 1996). It was shown in an old-style theater constructed within the exhibit space that featured photographs of Morimura playing famous foreign and Japanese actresses.

A multiple-superimposition hand-painted visual symphony of animal life of earth. THE LOOM might be compared to musical quartet-form (as there are almost always four superimposed pictures); but the complexity of texture, multiplicity of tone, and the variety of interrelated rhythm, suggest symphonic dimensions. The film is very inspired by George Melies: the animals exist (in Jane's enclosure) as on a stage, their interrelationships edited to the disciplines of dance, so therefore one might say this hardly represents "animal life on earth"; but I would argue that this work at least epitomizes theatrical Nature, magical Creature, and is the outside limit, to date, of my art in that respect. (The balance-of-light was so perfectly realized in making the neg. of this print that I wish to credit Western Cine Lab's "timer" Louise Fujiki as creative collaborator in the accomplishment of this work.)

La Maison en Petits Cubes tells the story of a grandfather's memories as he adds more blocks to his house to stem the flooding waters.

Faces pass by in quickly edited, split-screen recordings. A 'structuralist' film in which the film material itself plays an important role. Grain, scratches and flickering give the film texture. The music is by Steve Reich.

This hand-painted step-printed film begins in a field of white light slightly bespeckled with ephemeral glazes of flecks of silver which gradually give way to pale suggestions of pastel colors. These take shape occasionally and flicker the forthcoming bits of solid colored and multiply formed abstract images, a few brief sequences-of-such intersperced with the cloud-suggestive silvered passages as at beginning, which eventually end the film.

The evolution of mainstream pornography’s extremities and the early days of pay-per-view channels' noise.

"My last image of Jonas."—Ken Jacobs

This highly stylized, critically acclaimed film from the 70's mixes silent film cards, a soundscape, color, opera music and atmosphere to explore the Freudian truths about men's fear of women that Wedekind powerfully exposed. A kinetic melodrama of the rise of a femme-fatale and her fate at the hands of Jack-the-Ripper. Rethinking Pabst's silent film and Alban Berg's opera.