Mirror

Filmmaker and teacher, Stéphane Marti has been researching experimental cinema as an art form liberated of aesthetic codes and the economics of big budget cinema. His work is primarily focused on the themes of the sacred and the human body. An avid supporter of the Super-8 format, he has been fighting for its merits as a tool. He has used this format film after film and has been sharing his experiences with new filmmakers during his workshops at the Sorbonne’s College of the Arts (Paris I).

Stochastics investigates the possibility of making a primitive film, using a flea market Rolleiflex from 
the fifties, shooting on 120 (6 X 6) black and white film on which each roll takes twelve pictures.

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."

In an ironic reference to body art, process art and performance, Baldessari challenges definitions of the content and execution of art-making. Performing with deadpan precision, he moves his hands, arms and entire body in studied, minute motions, intoning the phrase "I am making art" with each gesture. Each articulation of the phrase is given a different emphasis and nuance, as if art were being created from moment to moment. This index of body movements is ironically offset by the repetitive monotony of the exercise.

"There will be no winters" - a film consisting of 14 short novels, each with its own plot and a musical theme. In fact, this is a screen version of the same album of Russian avant-garde singer Leonid Fedorov.

Early Barbara Hammer film shot on Super 8mm in color and silent.

YYAA shows film's capacity to manipulate the represented reality through montage. The artist filmed himself screaming "Yyaa!" in the same room, but lit in various ways. Then, he edited these takes into a single scream - impossibly long and impossible in reality.

Goodbye Fantasy is about two bodies in relation to each other as they let go of multiple cinematic universes they occupy together. Transforming from a fantasy body to a dreaming body to a dying body, they enact different constellations of social and political power as they relate to each other within the tight construct of the frame.

The strange voice of Yukie guides us through her memories before the end of time. Yukie awakens in the bodies of other women and recognizes herself in different places. William Vega, who premiered his first feature La Sirga at the Cannes Director’s Fortnight, takes material from diverse sources and assembles it to show, with sensual melancholy, the fate of a woman in her transit through the “final days” of a world that, like in Eliot’s poem, ends not with a bang but with a whimper.

In 1429 a teenage girl from a remote French village stood before her King with a message she claimed came from God; that she would defeat the world's greatest army and liberate her country from its political and religious turmoil. Following her mission to reclaim god's diminished kingdom - through her amazing victories until her violent and untimely death.

A man faces a life-changing decision to make; one of the two choices that could make a huge impact to his life.

Fragments 83 rediscovers—and repurposes—Richard Millen 1983 experimental film If You Can’t Be with the One You Love, shot in Brooklyn and the West Village in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. The resulting documentary explores the hunt for sex/love, the joy of making cinema, and the inexorable passage of time.

A very personal interpretation, to say the least, of the passion of the Christ According to St. John.

This metaphorical surrealist tale is an allusion. NIGHTINGALES IN DECEMBER is a trip into the memories, and the fields of the current realities. What if the Nightingales were working, instead of singing and going south? Is the innocence the only savior of birdsongs? There are no Nightingales in December... What is left, is only the history of our beginning, and our end.

A non-narrative visual short film made on 8mm Cassette Tape.

Experimental film by Stan AbsurDovv

A poetic essay. An Algerian soldier wanders through Algiers and the countryside, whilst a voiceover of the soldier's mother laments his death.

An experimental short.

A bowl of blueberries in milk, changing light radiant on the berries and on the glazed bowl, the ever more radiant orb of milk transforming into glowing light itself, with a brief shadow coda answering the complex play of shadows. The regular pulses of light framing the looser rhythmus of the spoon, itself a frame. A charging of each of the frame's edges with its own particular energy. Within and without, whites and blues, lines and curves. The pulses of vision, the simple natural processes, lift the spirit.

A fixed camera companion to FOG LINE. Bright green leaves stripped from ears of corn, and later, the vibrant yellow ears placed steaming in the waiting bowl. Each of these actions inaugurates a period in which one contemplates an image whose steady transformation is barely perceptible–the delicate slow movement of light and shadow, the evolution of subtle steam into the film grain. A meditation on the fragile moments of corn's passage from living sun-nourished plant to food to light image. The mind attempts to grasp duration itself, to distinguish its own creating from its perceiving, but distictions blur in the wholeness of times's and consciousness' flow.