A first feature based on sexual events. An actress undertakes her desire of directing her first movie, without a budget or any production company funding her project. She gathers a group of professional actors and actresses, and proposes a project based on a very particular experience: stepping on their fears through a metaphorical 'leap of faith'. As the project advances, individual conflicts will arise affecting the shoot, making the movie crew wonder whether or not they should go on. Will they take the leap of faith with all its consequences?
"A fisherman, dark-skinned and shirtless, sits in a boat on a quiet river and, before long, catches a fish. The fish gasps for air and the fisherman holds it to his chest until it dies. This sequence—performed by a series of fishermen, of various ages and using various styles of capture—is the spine of the work, interrupted by passages of quiet natural beauty; one shot is a steady, stately pan through scores of trees and empty air behind." - Vinson Cunningham
In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.
This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.
"Thornton's magnum opus, this ongoing and open-ended serial follows its two improvisatory protagonists, children “raised by technology,” through a surreal landscape where pop culture and history, science and science fiction blur." - BAM
In 2015, 4 reels of 8mm with hardcore pornographic films from the 60s are found in a Federal Capital dump truck. In 2019 we intervened them with sulfuric acid and caustic soda. The emulsion expands and contracts with the bodies, melting together until completely abstracted. A duel between censorship and the explicit. - ML
Geometrics of the Kabbalah (1975) Short film Dir. Storm De Hirsch "5 is water, 5 is the letter X. 5 is distance. 5 says no. 5 laughs when divided into 2. 5 swims backwards, and space is five. The cherry tree is one. The hurt is 1 plus 1, the wish is two. The wonder three. The absence four, and the five is the Universe. The Universe in the head, the universe in the eye, the sky and the waterdrop."–from Brook 16, "Source Books of Storm De Hirsch," 9/24/66.
A filmmaker recalls his youth in the town of Onomichi. In the present, he shoots a film in Onomichi alongside his cast, crew and family.
WHAT YOU MEAN WE is a surreal short film by experimental artist Laurie Anderson.
We were slightly feverish when we started working with a particular color process. At the development, we had obtained wonderful tones of blue and yellow as well as colored solarizations. Thus, this process was used for 15 days then the fever subsided. At that time they listened to the music of Gilbert and Lewis, and that is why they put a piece on the soundtrack.
Burford met Breer in February 1992 and filmed his actions. Breer manipulates some of his mutoscopes: he leafs through some cards of his film in the making, Sparkill Ave! A dome-shaped sculpture slowly moves across the space.
A film that places the bright and dark sides of life close together. From an understatement beginning, the movie drives up to an ecstatic highlight with a love act between two young people. The orgasm becomes an enormous image flow into the crematorium's death machine.
Using both found footage and her own material, Nina Fonoroff recollects the memory of her father. Constructing and deconstructing a portrait, she weaves family and friends’ remembrances with an inquiry into her own work process. Her searching attitude suggests that with the loss of her father came a question of the role, not of a particular father, but the father figure—a refusal of authority, and an appreciation of her father’s cycles of learning, teaching, learning. As Danny Kaye, playing Hans Christian Andersen, tells a group of children the story of the piece of chalk that saw itself as a the source, not the transmitter of knowledge, one senses Fonoroff’s sorrow at the loss inherent in the film image, and a yearning for the source of the image, not just its projection.
A experimental animated film featuring moving shapes and lines.
Eye candy as a special treat. Let Your Light Shine is the ultimate Spectrum Short film, a photokinetic stroboscopic spectacle for spectacles. A work in the tradition of the absolute animation film of the 1930s, which requires prismatic glasses to achieve the maximum result.
"Filmed in 16mm and hand processed in a week at Phil Hoffman's Film Farm in Canada, this film was a treasure map to lead my husband to his gift, a little pet pig." — Helen Hill
This fantastical movie inspired by the music of Michael Jackson features imaginative interpretations of hit tracks from the iconic 1987 album “Bad”.
A tale of 2 passages within the Spirit house. This is the first in a series that looks at the places we find our spiritual presence augmented, inflamed, or simply acknowledged.
A bride walks on the desert. She takes off her bridal ornaments and turns into a harlot. A multitude of people crawl on their bellies, become sick and soon die. A volcano erupts. White ashes of lahar cover the earth. The bride remembers her betrothal and repents--symbolically paving the way for the resurrection of her people. A final bridal march into a new heaven and earth takes place.
Documentary on the interdependence of the world of the living and the dead, and 'the infernal influence on the thoughts and actions of living people.