Part lyrical document, part farce, Animals Under Anaesthesia: Speculations On the Dreamlife of Beasts explores the imaginary unconscious minds of animals. Images of sex, death and the natural world are made manifest in the murky and disquieting dreams of a dog, a cat, a pig and a rabbit.
Experimental film about rhythm as corporal expression of a culture. Presents various choreographies and does not include the participation of men.
Combines animation, documentary footage, and hand-painted film as well as slide projections, a painted 12" x 24" backdrop, and sculptural palm tree to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Puerto Rican psyche.
A mysterious web of international shortwave radio towers once dominated the Tantramar marshlands near Sackville, New Brunswick. For almost 70 years the RCI shortwave towers broadcast around the world. Due to budget cuts, the site was decommissioned in 2012 and dismantled in 2014. Examining themes of identity and memory, the film captures images of the towers over four seasons in various weather conditions, accompanied by the voices of residents and technicians narrating accounts of hearing radio broadcasts emanate from their household appliances.
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 theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.
A fantasia of post-indoctrination, immigration, and iconography. A pageant of wanderers and searchers: Mormon missionaries, a pioneer, polygamists, scouts, hunters, church-goers, and an aspiring prophet walk and walk and walk. A pilgrimage of memory, history, ancestry, and place.
A 1963 timelapse recording shows the effects of air pollution during an entire day on Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles. A machine interpretation of an unstable version of the original file is divided into slits and rearranged in time, giving rise to a time panorama that mirrors an uncertain, abstract future lying ahead of us.
A song of love to the city of Genoa. The film wanders the streets of the city center and explore the beautiful cemetery and then climb the hills which offer an amazing view over the old town crossed by a highway and port.
Maniac Summer consists of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer of 2009. It is a sprawling triptych without a beginning or end and with no specific subject or topic. The camera is positioned in front of a window and left running. It observes movements, registers noises coming from the street or nearby park, captures Chantal Akerman going about her business in her apartment: smoking, working, talking on the telephone. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are featured in the installation’s central video, while the adjoining panels are more symbolically charged; in them, various images from the former have been isolated, modified and repeated. These abstract afterimages act as a kind of memory, looking back to the images in the installation’s centrepiece as so many shadows of its reality.
A completely new story based on existing footage from the series Columbo.
The short film is a montage of sped up clips of The Ringling Brothers Circus in action set to a musical track. The film is separated into four segments, each segment which focuses on different acts within the circus. The later segments often incorporate clips from earlier segments, mostly as background to the featured acts. The speed of the clips match the tempo of the soundtrack music.
Multi-faceted artist Phil Niblock captures a brief moment of an interstellar communication by the Arkestra in their prime. Black turns white in a so-called negative post-process, while Niblock's camera focuses on microscopic details of hands, bodies and instruments. A brilliant tribute to the Sun King by another brilliant supra-planetary sovereign. (Eye of Sound)
A compilation of avant-garde artwork and talent of the mid to late 20th century hosted by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
The Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor, daughter of a former advisor of Ahmadinejad's, has been living in exile in Germany for four years. When she hears that the fellow Iranian rapper Shahin Najafi, who is also living in exile in Germany, faces death threats and has to hide because of one of his songs, she doesn't hesitate and has to find him. On her search she encounters fear everywhere. Narges Kalhor has to face her inconvenient memories of suppression, hatred and anger for her past in Iran.
In a horror twist on a classic fairytale, struggling art student Frankie is amazed when one morning she awakes to see that someone — or something — has completed her paintings for her.
In Untitled (Pink Dot), Murata transforms footage from the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood (1982) into a morass of seething electronic abstraction. Subjected to Murata's meticulous digital reprocessing, the action scenes decompose and are subsumed into an almost palpable, cascading digital sludge, presided over by a hypnotically pulsating pink dot.
Chantal Akerman reads a script detailing the woes that befell her on the day she thought about "The Future of Cinema". The camera continuously rotates 360 degrees around her apartment as she rereads the script at an exponentially increasing speed. At its heart, an homage to Godard.
A postmodern Swiss-Tyrolean ensemble ventures into remote mountainous regions, embracing the sonorous variety of local vernaculars. A poetic road movie with stunning shots and an emphatic approach to a new alpine aesthetics.
Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity… With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating “richness” of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image. - Deke Dusinberre