Money, a Mythology of Darkness

An artist holds a pen on paper and slowly starts drawing the line. The line gradually increases its pace, leading to curves, reversions, curveballs, and inconsistencies. As the artist nearly finishes, the artist lifts the pen to show the entire drawing. The artist slowly returns to drawing and continues the following chapters of life.

Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.

The Listener

Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

Visceral is an exploration of love and vulnerability found in new relationships. Meat and organs mix under the camera in a beautiful union to represent the intricacies of a relationship.

Reya’s World delves into the raw and poignant struggle of a young woman navigating the depths of depression. Feeling trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of isolation, Reya finds solace and gradual healing through small moments of self-connection and genuine friendships, gradually lifting the heavy burden that envelops her.

A dreamy lo-fi pseudo-intellectual experimental short contemplating the role of the number 7 historically as a symbol across cultures filtered through the lens of 8th graders

After a period of time where her hearing begins to overtake her sight, Casandra searches for the cause of her problem, isolating herself from society. She starts having visions that remind her of the past and promise an apocalyptic future.

Swain is inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe, features a dreamlike narrative of a young man’s ritualized rejection of heterosexuality, as a mysterious woman in white gossamer pursues him through a ruined landscape.

Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive

Erin. He thinks he's in 4th period math. Oh he's wrong

A weekend in the city park is meant for recreational activities. During a twenty minute period, several men seek out a way to pass their time at a cruising spot located in the heart of a small peninsular grove.

Searching for life in daily rituals, Losing Touch undertakes a shift in perception and presents the city as an ugly yet ecologically rich landscape. The film depicts the internal dialogue on coping with the grief and fear of ecological degradation, using the local streets of Berlin as a means to materialise and confront these emotions. As both the body and mind begin to wander, encounters with the landscape over a 24 hour period are transformed into an overstimulating and emotionally charged journey. Camcorder footage, film developed in beer and cyanotype create sensational and playful depictions of the surroundings, joining the rats scurrying on the ground and fleeing the night lights with the moths. Creatures of metal and flesh interact within and between the frames, coming together as an ugly yet vibrant community. Subverting the nature-culture dichotomy, a new image of nature is formed, not only as a romantic, distant place, but rather a dirty, omnipresent force.

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In an inner world suspended between oblivion and creation, a female figure moves through a dreamlike space where forgotten ideas take shape. Genesis is an experimental piece that explores the journey toward the origin of an idea — of oneself.

Yukari Nishihara, 25, earns her living as an art model and aspires to become an actress. One day, while she was out, she saw “a man's face about to jump off the roof of a building”, and since then she has been suffering from a peculiar constitution: she sees a suicide while on her period, faints, and develops a fever. The goddess of love does not smile on Yukari, who is unable to become a sweet girl with a nice boyfriend. The only things that can save Yukari now are her best friend Hana, who has a keen intuition, and a suppository that can break a fever in one shot. On the day of an important audition, Yukari has decided that this is her last chance. However, Yukari realizes that she has forgotten her antipyretic suppositories, and her eyes meet those of another soon-to-be suicide victim. She is in a desperate situation. What does Yukari do?

Pigpen has a snore. Bailey has a lot of nerve. And Curt Garrish has a gun.

A woman goes to a cold and inhospitable abandoned cove to try to summon the spirit of her only son, who passed away during the war.

Rain

“For my film portrait of Sasha Grey, I wanted to focus on her expressive and psychological transformation into a cinematic actor, separate from the cues that have associated Sasha with her previous career as a performance artist working within the adult film world.” – Richard Phillips