Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to 'Peanut Vendor', a 1931 jazz hit for Red Nichols. The two foot high monkey had bolted, moveable joints and some 50 interchangeable mouths to convey the singing. To get the movements right, Lye filmed his new wife, Jane, a prize-winning rumba dancer.
Animation featuring dancing black and white shadows.
In the 40's, after the Spanish Civil War, many republicans defeated by the nationalist forces of Franco found refuge on the bordering mountains in the north of Portugal. Some saw them as brigands, others gave them shelter and helped them on the sly to police forces of Salazar. They were... the Outlaws.
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, one veteran dies by suicide in America every 80 minutes. While only 1% of Americans has served in the military, former service members account for 20% of all suicides in the U.S. Based in Canandaigua, NY and open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, the Veterans Crisis Line receives more than 22,000 calls each month from veterans of all conflicts who are struggling or contemplating suicide. This timely documentary spotlights the traumas endured by America’s veterans, as seen through the work of the hotline’s trained responders. CRISIS HOTLINE captures extremely private moments, where the professionals, many of whom are themselves veterans or veterans’ spouses, can often interrupt the thoughts and plans of suicidal callers to steer them out of crisis.
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
Norman McLaren instructs Grant Munro on the movements he is to make. The film technique for Two Bagatelles is pixillation, where the actor is animated frame by frame, as in the film Neighbours/Voisins.
Ra Paulette digs cathedral-like, 'eighth wonder of the world' art caves into the sandstone cliffs of Northern New Mexico. Each creation takes years to complete, and each is a masterwork. But patrons who have commissioned caves have cut off nearly all of his projects due to artistic differences. Fed up, Ra has chosen to forego all commissions to create his own Magnum Opus, a massive 10-year project.
The story of Alice Herz-Sommer, a German-speaking Jewish pianist from Prague who was, at her death, the world's oldest Holocaust survivor. She discusses the importance of music, laughter, and how to have an optimistic outlook on life.
A letter of love to my past self who discovered himself.
No clothes. No apologies. This film marks artist Spencer Tunick's third 'Naked' documentary which feature photo shoots that create art from the naked bodies of men and women. In this shoot, 85 HIV-positive men and women gather in a downtown Manhattan bar where they bare it all for Tunick's camera, creating an unsentimental look at life with AIDS in America today.
This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.
A short four-minute concept film unveiled in surprise at Studio SHAFT's 40th anniversary event in winter 2015, Madogatari. The first animated Puella Magi Madoka Magica work since Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie: Rebellion, it features the return of the full Madoka Magica cast and staff.
Academy Award winning film maker Hilary Harris’ epic vision of New York City shot over 15 years [1959-74] during which time Mr. Harris pioneered and contemporized time-lapse film making techniques to achieve this unique experiential view of the world we inhabit: chaos and confusion seem to multiply in every corner of the Big Apple. Yet there seems to be some order in all that chaotic and relentless system and things seem to work just fine. The same can be said about the human body. Director Hilary Harris proves with this short documentary that cities and organisms are all-alike.
50 years after the death of General De Gaulle, this film retraces his life, from his birth in 1890 to his burial at Colombey-Les-Deux-Eglises in 1970.
After her mother's death, Kim finds solace in wearing her mother's old sweater. However, the sweater begins to itch and even hurt her, but she still can't bring herself to take it off.
At the end of the eighth day the Creator has taken refuge in a dark dungeon . Obsessed with transcending he manipulates life to the extreme and tries to engender the perfect being that will immortalize him
A king hides an embarrassing secret - and it causes him to execute every barber who cuts his hair.
Every dog has his day, but poor Dante can't seem to catch a break.
Sketch Film #1 (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2005, 3 min., super 8, silent, 18/24fps, b&w, USA) As a painter carries a sketchbook and practices drawing, I carried a Super 8 camera and shot frame by frame, as an everyday exercise to make animations of lines and shapes found in the public space. The entire film was edited in camera and hand-processed afterwards.
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.