Cameras Pointed Straight into the Sun

A daily gif created over 100 days.

It is well known that the disposition of the images drawn by Escher are neither for animation nor for pre-animation; actually, quite the opposite. His images appear to be the carrying out of metamorphic dissolves. A bird gives way to the recognition of a house, which turns into fish, which turns into birds, and so on. Not a single flapping of wings takes place; everything is reiterated and fixed, becoming immersed in and re-emerging from a static continuum. All of Escher is an homage to one of the major animating forces of the cinema: the cross-dissolve. Precisely there, I found cinematic attitudes: in the house which turns into fish and in everything that transforms into something else. I gradually managed to figure out various types of non-existent sequences and then finally found myself dissolved, crossing over metamorphically. —P.G.

Mona relates her dream. Crawling through an apparently endless wooden crate, she encounters diverse characters while the crate itself is moving towards a fiery destruction.

The mysterious mechanism of a music box keeps playing different versions of the same melody. In isolation and an atmosphere of fear you might think that other melodies do not exist because it helps to bear the constant pain. False notes give hope for a better fate and freedom but no one knows what price they'll have to pay.

When professor Stein's dog dies in an accident, he's ready to do whatever it takes to get him back. He builds an incredible life-reviving machine but instead of a cute pup a hideous monster comes out of it. How can the monster prove that it has the dog's good heart inside?

Short film by Mary Ellen Bute

From 1967-71 Barry Spinello made films without camera or tape recorder by hand drawing both sound and picture directly onto clear 16mm leader. His interest and education (at Columbia) was in music, painting, and poetry. His effort was to merge these three: “to squeeze sound and picture out of the same tube – to weave a cloth with warp as sound, woof as picture, and meaning the fabric itself."

Hand-painted experimental short by Cioni Carpi.

The Mumps

A contemporary man in the eye of the cyclone created by information. He finds no support for his hands and feet. It’s like in a poem by Tadeusz Rozewicz (‘falling in every direction’), he turns to dust when his time finally comes.

Black kites soar on thermals along the Kamo river in Kyoto. Flags billow. Cacti spin. Plum trees blossom. Pigeons make love atop a clock. Friends chat by the riverside. Filmed February/March 2019 on a single 40 year old cartridge of Kodachrome Super 8 and hand-developed in Caffenol. The film was heavily fogged, but there are some (real) images.

"The Immortality of the crab" is an experimental animated short film shot on super 8 film, made with in-camera editing and no post production. In this movie, the synaesthetic research between sound and image is accomplished by connecting the animations, made on 1125 cardboard frames, with an original soundtrack produced using only sounds sampled by handling pieces of cardboard. The title refers to the time spent between the birth of the embryonal idea and the production of the short. "The Immortality of the crab" is a south american expression, almost no longer used, which indicates the act of daydreaming. This film symbolizes the director's release from the spectre of procrastination, a condition he sistematically faced when daydreaming about possible ways to give shape to his idea.

The Philosophy of Horror is a seven-part abstract adaptation of Noël Carroll’s influential film theoretical book of the same title (published in 1990), which is a close examination of the horror genre. The film uses hand painted and decayed 35mm film strips of the classic slasher movie A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) and its sequel A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985).

Barry Doupé’s Thalé (2009) experiments with the phenomenology of light and colour through fiber-optic flower arrangements. Doupé’s animations are inspired by the Thale Cress plant, which is commonly used in biological mutation experiments. His rotating electronic floras, which resemble neon lights, sex toys and fireworks, glow in the dark digital void. - Amy Kazymerchyk, Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film

In 2013, Lei Lei and Thomas Sauvin collected numbers of black-and-white photos from Chinese flea markets and imagined that all of them belonged to one fictional Chinese person. Through rendering, collage, and a cyclical process of hand coloring, scanning, and printing, connections among the photos were created.

My Mother's Pain

Enducated

A bus full of people on a trip is stopped by a policeman who isn’t satisfied with the bribe he is offered for granting the bus passage. To continue on their journey, the passengers will have to join forces.

A woman wanders through an unusual landscape and blissfully enjoys touching plants. But that stops when this dreamland is ravaged by a strange infection destroying everything that brought pleasure.

The name of the film is taken from the book “Liquid Love” by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. The film investigates the tension and the pendulum swing between freedom and belonging in the context of relationships. An attempt to express two opposing worlds trying to co-exist, where one will always overcome the other in a constant, endless tension.