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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.

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

A burst of cheer and refreshment that it seems perfectly suited to a late July afternoon.

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.

And And

Kappo

A person living in Liberty City goes to work, have some food & gets back home.

Three books: a film festival catalogue, a dictionary, the Bible. Three works whose materiality has become obsolete by the digital dematerialization. A commentary on the fragility of culture.

Odds & Ends is a sly comment on the collage film and Beat culture. To discarded travel and advertising footage found at a local film laboratory, Belson Shimane added a mélange of animation—assemblages, cutouts, color fields, and line drawings—and faux hipster narration by Jacobs (credited via the anagram Rheny Bojacs) punctuated by a bongo backing. Strung together with doublespeak and non sequiturs, the monologue skirts the edge of nonsense as Jacobs waxes on about poetry, jazz, “reaching the public,” “having a good time,” and—although “money doesn’t count”—the “possibility of subsidy” through grants. Footage of champagne, tropical beaches, and exotic peoples intermingle with rhythmic drawings and stop-motion flights of fancy. The visuals race on through dazzling transformations, both amplifying and undercutting the patter. —National Film Preservation Foundation. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Iota Center Collection in 2006.

Torn from their home by a hand in the sky, colorful entities seek freedom from a rigid binary in this short experimental animation.

An abstract animated film inspired by the work of jazz musician Chico Hamilton.

This newly rediscovered short was created in Jim's home studio in Bethesda, MD around 1961. It is one of several experimental shorts inspired by the music of jazz great Chico Hamilton. At the end, in footage probably shot by Jerry Juhl, Jim demonstrates his working method.

A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.

We watch white shapes dancing on black background, which changes when the white shape fills up the screen completely, and black lines and figures bounce around on the now white background.

Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create.

Claire is composed of digital scans and blow-ups of a series of three ink-on-paper artworks created in 2012 by French-Spanish researcher, publisher and artist Claire Latxague. While collecting drawings, written documents and other printed materials for a (yet unreleased) project called Un film de papier, I’ve stumbled upon Latxague’s artwork, entitled À la renverse. The blow-ups were made in an attempt of unearthing cartographic imagery in abstract compositions.

The weird hand creatures undergo different transformations in synchrony with the music.

Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.

From the film-almanac on musical works of classics for children "Children's Album". A little film about genesis.

The short film features Pyramid Head and a Lying Figure from Silent Hill 2, the Fukuro Lady, and many monsters from early sketches for Silent Hill 2. The film contains disturbing, surreal imagery.