A collection of Jim Henson's commercials, industrial reels, short films and some related talk show appearances. Includes Henson's Oscar nominated short, "Time Piece," in its entirety. Part of the Jim Henson Legacy's "Muppets, Music & Magic" program that debuted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2004.
The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience's sense of gravity. The camera's movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice
Cassette-Television
Using morgue photos, newsreel footage, and a recording by Lena Horne, Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez fired off 'Now!', one of the most powerful bursts of propaganda rendered in the 1960s.
Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair's liminal, laminal tribute to underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead, featuring image manipulation by Dave Mckean & reminiscences from various countercultural characters. A fitting epitaph for an English margin walker.
Only at a crisis do I see both the scene as I've been trained to see it ( that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic–colors as we've been trained to call a color a color, as so forth) and patterns that move straight out from the inside of the mind through the optic nerves... spots before my eyes, so to speak... and it's very intensive, disturbing, but joyful experience. I've seen that every time a child was born... Now none of that was in WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING; and I wanted a childbirth film which expressed all of my seeing at such a time.
Impressions of New York City. Experimental short.
Archive film showing possibly the first example of digital rendering, made by Pixar co-founders Ed Catmull and Fred Parke in 1972, was stumbled upon by the son of Robert B Ingebretsen, who also set up the world-famous U.S. studio. A six minute version shows additional CGI animation of an artificial heart valve, and human heads.
Chao-Li Chi shadow boxes indoors and practices with a sword outdoors. Theoretically, the film describes in a single continuous movement three degrees of traditional Chinese boxing, Wu-tang, Shao-lin, and Shao-lin with a sword. A long sequence of the ballet-like, sinuous Wu-tang becomes the more erratic Shao-lin; in the middle, there is an abrupt change to leaping sword movements, in the center of which, at the apogee of the leap, there is a long held freeze-frame.
Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.
A man reads a letter from his away girlfriend while he contemplates on some memorable places in Jakarta, where they had spent time together.
Experimental, cinematic symphony of Granada, José Val del Omar's birthplace.
An overdressed girl tries her luck in dance events that are for Finnish tourists in a small Estonian health resort town, Pärnu.
A young man in a tram is asking a bit too much from a stranger.
An elderly lady pushes the limits of customer service at an up-market department store by continuously requesting announcements for interesting-looking men.
The absurd logic of the ‘real character’ and the extreme rules of Disneyland become apparent when a real fan of Snow White is banned from entering the theme park dressed as Snow White.
A further endulgance into analog media
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.
Stunning slow-motion and timelapse cinematography of the landscapes, people and wildlife of the American South West.
The discovery of a human torso thrown into a waterway, leads the viewer to observe the work of modern criminology and the task of special agents to track and record the psychopath's mentality through the elucidation of techniques present in the reality of the police investigation.