Hibiscus

Alexander V. Men was a Russian Orthodox priest, theologian and writer, whose influence is felt among Christians, both in Russia and abroad. He was murdered on September 9th, 1990.

Several fragments of one day in Leningrad in the autumn of 1989, refracted in the imagination of the artist.

An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories. 

"The evaporation or the centralization of the self. Everything is there." —Charles Baudelaire A sensorial approach to landscape In the deep contemplation of landscape the senses are altered. We feel a sublimation experience where the mental image of landscape undergoes a metamorphosis. The actual space is distorted, time flows in a different way: it stops in our consciousness. It is the connection at the "full instant," the idea of "durèe" of Henri Bergson, where the intensity of the experience makes the image of landscape expands.

Fragments 83 rediscovers—and repurposes—Richard Millen 1983 experimental film If You Can’t Be with the One You Love, shot in Brooklyn and the West Village in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. The resulting documentary explores the hunt for sex/love, the joy of making cinema, and the inexorable passage of time.

Experimental short documentary

We live with stories. And it's hard for us to give up on these stories, which provide us our identity, a way of understanding ourselves. Reflections from three successive generations are dusted off and presented as remaining fragments. An attempt to archive thoughts on familial history, narrative traditions, human perception and "the story" from known and unknown sources. "There is history behind it and the history becomes the story and the story becomes the pattern and the pattern becomes rigidity."

Portrait of Costa da Morte (coast region in Galicia, Spain) from an ethnographic and landscape level, exploring also the collective imagination associated with the area. A region marked by strong oceanic feeling dominated by the historical conception of world's end and with tragic shipwrecks. Fragmentary film that approaches to the anthropological from its protagonists: sailors, shellfish, loggers, farmers ... A selection of characters representative of the traditional work carried out in the countryside in the region, allowing us to reflect on the influence of the environment on people.

A monumental homage to Glenn Miller, a one shot film - Glenn Miller 2000. This 26- minute long piece, shot on a circular road in Novi Zagreb in many ways corresponded to the previously discussed attributes that linked Tom's homages and "uses" of Glenn Miller with Miller's music and personality.

“While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.“ (Kōbō Abe) Liminal zones. Floating particles. Fire, water, earth, air. Voices of fictional characters: sometimes suggestive, sometimes strict, leading the viewer away from the here and now. Who's talking? The relationship between the hypnotized subject and the hypnotist is mirrored in the spectator's relationship to the screen.

An Anders Weberg short film. Part of his Peer to Peer Art project.

Experimental video art compiled from video taken on an LG Env3 flip phone circa 2009-2010

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.

Experimental video art shot in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle

'Still Lives' comprises a trilogy of films by Patrick Sheard; Lamenta, Libertas and Exitus, anthologized here in their entirety.

"Ad Vice consists of a succession of colored projection surfaces with segments of text from the worlds of advertising, sport and popular culture." - Anita De Groot

In this meditation on contemporary race relations, two black men discuss in voiceover certain “casual” events in life and cinema that are unnoticed or discounted by whites—gestures, hesitations, stares, off-the-cuff remarks, jokes—details of an ideology of repressed racism.

This engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift. Cokes asks, “How do people make history under conditions pre-established to dissuade them from intervening in it?”

1996 Peter Rose short work. A magician-like figure delivers a peculiar speech that is embedded in extravagant arrays of time-delayed images that reflect and refract ideas about memory, time and language.

The innovative and influential British filmmaker Derek Jarman was invited to direct the Pet Shop Boys' 1989 tour. This film is a series of iconoclastic images he created for the background projections. Stunning, specially shot sequences (featuring actors, the Pet Shop Boys, and friends of Jarman) contrast with documentary montages of nature, all skillfully edited to music tracks.