Mushroom

In a department store in a town not far from Silent Hill, Heather goes to purchase an item commissioned by her father. After the initial meeting/clash with Douglas, a private investigator (who has some important revelations about the girl's past), Heather runs away, leaving the building. As soon as he returns, however, there no longer seems to be a living soul: instead of the normal buzz present in a shopping centre, now only a dark silence can be heard, broken only by her footsteps and the distant cries of terrible creatures lurking in the darkness. [A documentary about the making of the 2003 video game Silent Hill 3.]

James Sunderland is an ordinary man who received a very cryptic letter written by his wife Mary Shepherd, despite her death three years earlier. Seeking an explanation for this inexplicable letter, James drives to Silent Hill using his car. However, when he reaches Nathan Avenue, he notices that the place is abandoned. He leaves his car and heads into town. [A documentary about the making of the 2001 video game "Silent Hill 2".]

Abstract animation by Satoh Yoshinao

Black-and-white abstract animated short of light, shadows, and reflections by The Dodals (Karel Dodal (1900-1986) in collaboration with his wife, Irena Dodalová).

“Leda + Swans” depicts an infernal, mythic birth of cinema, dredging the violence and horror from Wallace McCutcheon’s comic short film “Photographing a Female Crook” (1904). Leda, who may or may not be a falsely accused young woman, is brought in for a mugshot by two officers. She first attempts to avoid the camera’s gaze, and, when overpowered and manhandled, contorts her face to ruin the photograph. However, her small rebellion proves futile; she was already being recorded, objectified, mapped, and co-opted by the Godhead of the director. As her body and image are repurposed and transmuted ad infinitum, the filmic universe also explodes into a supernova. What is born out of this suffering and manipulation is another example of our sublime medium and modern muse. She will not be last the Leda, and she may not even be the first. Who is the guilty party here? Is beauty a chimera in traditional cinema? Has the ephemeral cinema of the attractions and distractions era gone anywhere?

Scroll paintings prepared like film strips with successive images.

An interactive flash animation from Dutch digital artist Han Hoogerbrugge.

Cut up animation and collage technique by Harry Smith synchronized to the jazz of Thelonious Monk's Mysterioso.

An abstract film on the music 'Unfinished' 8th Symphony, part 1, by Franz Schubert by Oerd van Cuijlenborg

In Scratch both the animation and the soundtrack are abstract. The movie is a conversation of sounds and images. Soundtrack and animation are scratched directly on 35 mm film.

A man's car somehow becomes completely autonomous and takes the powerless driver, to a scrap yard, or a 'cemetery for cars', where several more vehicles are waiting to be crushed by powerful reducing machines, their passengers still inside.

A man is horribly tortured by another who wants him to reveal where his girlfriend is hiding.

Rose, a desperate mother takes her adopted daughter, Sharon, to the town of Silent Hill in an attempt to cure her of her ailment. After a violent car crash, Sharon disappears and Rose begins a desperate search to get her back. She descends into the center of the twisted reality of a town's terrible secret. Pursued by grotesquely deformed creatures and townspeople stuck in permanent purgatory, Rose begins to uncover the truth behind the apocalyptic disaster that burned the town 30 years earlier.

This animation can be watched in 2D or using Chromadepth Glasses in 3D.

Exploring helplessness, Pyre is an experimental short film which personifies death as a ghoul in a dress, drawing closer and closer until striking.

Abstract animation

Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.

An abstract animation with a motif of a dragonfly, and a complex multi-exposure landscape of a field and a woman's naked body overlap.

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.

Sketch Film #3 (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2006, 3 min., super 8, silent, 18/24fps, b&w, USA/Japan) The third film in the series, which starts with a sequence of paired images: a focused image and a blurred image of the same subject, which was caused by a diagonal camera movement. Later, it shows an experiment to produce an apparent depth by rotating an apparent shape. It was edited in camera and hand-processed afterwards.