This documentary interweaves celluloid and voice recordings by Maya Deren, and colleagues who knew her firsthand: Jean Rouch, Jonas Mekas, Alexander Hammid, Cecile Starr etc. Maya Deren (1917-1961) was an experimental filmmaker. In the 1940s and 1950s she made several influential avant-garde films, such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Images from this and her other work are used in this documentary. You can also hear her voice, as well as accounts by contemporaries such as Jean Rouch and Jonas Mekas.
An experimental documentary about the intertwining of bodies and lives in a cattle ranch in Les Avins, Belgium, with cattle of the breed Blanc Bleu Belge, known for its fascinating musculature.
Portrait of Costa da Morte (coast region in Galicia, Spain) from an ethnographic and landscape level, exploring also the collective imagination associated with the area. A region marked by strong oceanic feeling dominated by the historical conception of world's end and with tragic shipwrecks. Fragmentary film that approaches to the anthropological from its protagonists: sailors, shellfish, loggers, farmers ... A selection of characters representative of the traditional work carried out in the countryside in the region, allowing us to reflect on the influence of the environment on people.
The second entry in Velu Viswanadhan's series of experimental documentaries. This film traces the Ganges river upstream.
Experimental film directed by Dmitry Frolov, shot in the midst of perestroika in the USSR. February 1991. Starring the drummer for the MEANTRAITORS Vladislav Lyashchuk - a very peculiar musician played without bass drums and Toms.
We live with stories. And it's hard for us to give up on these stories, which provide us our identity, a way of understanding ourselves. Reflections from three successive generations are dusted off and presented as remaining fragments. An attempt to archive thoughts on familial history, narrative traditions, human perception and "the story" from known and unknown sources. "There is history behind it and the history becomes the story and the story becomes the pattern and the pattern becomes rigidity."
A monumental homage to Glenn Miller, a one shot film - Glenn Miller 2000. This 26- minute long piece, shot on a circular road in Novi Zagreb in many ways corresponded to the previously discussed attributes that linked Tom's homages and "uses" of Glenn Miller with Miller's music and personality.
A man reads a letter from his away girlfriend while he contemplates on some memorable places in Jakarta, where they had spent time together.
"The evaporation or the centralization of the self. Everything is there." —Charles Baudelaire A sensorial approach to landscape In the deep contemplation of landscape the senses are altered. We feel a sublimation experience where the mental image of landscape undergoes a metamorphosis. The actual space is distorted, time flows in a different way: it stops in our consciousness. It is the connection at the "full instant," the idea of "durèe" of Henri Bergson, where the intensity of the experience makes the image of landscape expands.
"Ad Vice consists of a succession of colored projection surfaces with segments of text from the worlds of advertising, sport and popular culture." - Anita De Groot
In this meditation on contemporary race relations, two black men discuss in voiceover certain “casual” events in life and cinema that are unnoticed or discounted by whites—gestures, hesitations, stares, off-the-cuff remarks, jokes—details of an ideology of repressed racism.
This engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift. Cokes asks, “How do people make history under conditions pre-established to dissuade them from intervening in it?”
'Still Lives' comprises a trilogy of films by Patrick Sheard; Lamenta, Libertas and Exitus, anthologized here in their entirety.
Experimental short documentary
An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories.
An exploration of Rodez Cathedral and its stained glass windows: praying figures and scientific imagery. A study on color, repetition and flickering consisting of 292 photographs.
Two different women, from opposite sides of the country, look for distractions from the mundane and the malaise of modern life.
In this short film, the French photographer, Valérie Jouve explores the way in which an era constructs countless layers of time and space without feeling any need to establish connections between them. The film is about time or, more precisely, the various times that today make up our everyday life.
This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.
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.