Point and Counterpoint

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.

The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.

When taking a microscopic view of a dot of the printer ink, it begins to transform into unstable forms. The other sphere/eyeball which appears when moving away from the dot, suggests the overlay of the swaying of the retina that occurs when staring, and the motion within animation.

Shot in Ireland and Poland - a journey that explores ideas of decision, choice, consequence, circumstance and time among other things, a personal perception on how we try to find whatever it is we are searching for.The film looks at objects, people, and places which share common properties, our connection with one another and our environments in the very similar yet very different paths we share.

The human eye, a well-known psychedelic motif, is multiplied and sharpened in Keiichi Tanaami's film trip 4 Eyes. Using his experience designing nightclubs, Tanaami projects two copies of the same film with a slight delay, so that it appears as if the ghost is losing consciousness. (IFFR)

The experimental animated short is a collaborative work between Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara.

Landscape

The bridge as the channel between worlds: between the living and the dead, between male and female, between sacred and profane.

The experimental animated short is a collaborative work between Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara.

The hilarious hour-long episode follows the bipolar, beer-swilling dog, Barkley, and the Critters, the band he fronts. His rocker menagerie includes a vulture, a snake, a tracksuit-clad paranoid schizophrenic crow, a Buckethead-esque farm boy on harmonica, and a manic- depressive canine drummer.

A small white box. Everything happens in that little world. A woman's face comes out from the side of the room and roars, birds peck at human flesh, trains run through, and a couple quarrel begins. When the billiard ball penetrates the room, the billiard ball changes into various shapes ... Each room is a world, and what happens there is a microcosm of modern times.

Dramatic story of a man and a woman that had a short but passionate love story.

16 mm, color, 3:35 or 10 min. Study for No. 11. "An exposition of Buddhism and the Kaballah in the form of a collage. The final scene shows Agaric mushrooms growing on the moon while the Hero and Heroine row by on a cerebrum."

Of late, Kago has also taken to posting his even less-known video work to his YouTube channel. In these jokey short films, many of them crudely animated, Kago's sick sense of humor reaches its full heights of absurdity. There's a playful surrealist sensibility to Kago's work, as well as a tendency to revel in the ridiculous, the crude and the disturbing. His work straddles a weird boundary between avant-garde experimentation and low-brow fart jokes — the punchline of one of these films is literally an oozing torrent of shit — although, admittedly, his videos seem to lean a bit more heavily towards the fart jokes than his comics. But hey, who doesn't appreciate a good fart joke once in a while?

In a bold and original approach to memory, this Lettrist-inspired film maps an anxiety-ridden plane journey from Tokyo to Helsinki without the aid of photographic images. A variety of interventions on the film strip are combined with an atmospheric sound design to create a subjective story of displacement and containment. In an age when experience is increasingly mediated through digital technologies, Taanila seeks out an alternative language in the sensuous surfaces of the celluloid material.

Prelude 14 begins in deep brilliant red which darkens into deeper reds and lavender shapes, disrupted by a variety of colors settling into browns and grays and shapes most rock-like, all of which is then shot-thru with sufficient yellow to break up all hard-edge form and give a molten aspect to the mixtures of shapes.

Three memories that become one. An attempt to merge heterogeneous materials: a film sequence shot in Rome, a photo from the 1930s, a noisy soundtrack. Fragmented lines, exploding bass frequencies and flickering.

Untitled / Aubrac

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.

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.