Device

Avant-garde composer John Cage is famous for his experimental pieces and "chance music" but temporarily branched into video in 1992 with this art film about meaningless activity. The work is composed of two segments that are supposed to be played simultaneously: "One 11" contains the artistic statement, and "103" is a 17-part orchestral piece. Also included is a revealing documentary about Cage and director Henning Lohner.

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas follows the surrealist artist around the streets of New York documenting staged public art events.

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).

High school hotshot Zach Siler is the envy of his peers. But his popularity declines sharply when his cheerleader girlfriend, Taylor, leaves him for sleazy reality-television star Brock Hudson. Desperate to revive his fading reputation, Siler agrees to a seemingly impossible challenge. He has six weeks to gain the trust of nerdy outcast Laney Boggs -- and help her to become the school's next prom queen.

The second part: Brakhage’s layering of images spends less time with images of war, and begins filtering in scenes of Vienna and his home in Colorado. He sets up a comparison between “Kubelka’s Vienna” and his own.

The parents of an adult infant named "Child", played by Todd Haynes, attempt to expel him from their home, by casting magical spell seen in a television documentary about Malaysian rites of passage.

For years I've been looking for the means to capture everyday life just as it is perceived through a glance from the street. Twenty years ago, you could see young people standing with their bicycles on street corners, in fact, if the bicycles where there, you could be sure to find the young people standing there talking. I would like to document these kinds of events. On this occasion, I was presented with the opportunity to do so. For two and a half weeks, I walked around different parts of the city with my camera and collected images for the film. (Harun Farocki, 1979)

Gay, alienated Los Angeles teens have a hard time as their parents kick them out of their homes, they don’t have money, their lovers cheat, and they are harassed by gay-bashers.

The death of the minotavr talks about the concept of the heroine's journey. Suffering, horror and exhaustion lead the protagonist to a process of transformation, abyss and expiation, because only murdering to minotaur and everything he represents is possible to return to life. From the female gaze, it shows the depth of the emotional wounds caused by domestic violence; the same one that the surrealist Dora Maar lived and that ask why, as a society, instead of killing the minotaur, we blindly continue to send him women only to be devoured and ask them why they simply did not fight, why they did not try get out of the labyrinth.

Eleven young film-makers got together to collaborate in this atypical project. Atypical not only because of its technical specs, but because of its narrative structure. There are several scenes with only the city in common, and more as a conceptual presence at that than as a precise geography. None of those scenes contains a single "story": Each one of them is part of a larger situation that we cannot see, as though the beginning and end of each "story" had to be filled in by the audience.

Short experimental 16mm film.

Man Ray, the master of experimental and fashion photography was also a painter, a filmmaker, a poet, an essayist, a philosopher, and a leader of American modernism. Known for documenting the cultural elite living in France, Man Ray spent much of his time fighting the formal constraints of the visual arts. Ray’s life and art were always provocative, engaging, and challenging.

A young bride escapes her wedding ceremony with a stranger and together they set off on an epic journey though increasingly bizarre lands. They encounter talking animals and mournful exhibitionists, converse with a discoursing rock, journey through a surrealist's psychedelic hotel, instigate a prison riot, escape from naked cannibals living in a tree and battle a wind-up midget dictator!

A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.

Swain is inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe, features a dreamlike narrative of a young man’s ritualized rejection of heterosexuality, as a mysterious woman in white gossamer pursues him through a ruined landscape.

The first film made by Markopoulos after moving to Europe, Bliss was shot over the course of two days using only available light to create a lyrical study of the interior of the Church of St. John on the island of Hydra.

A quasi-sequel to Michel Houellebecq's novel The Possibility of an Island, Masbedo's short presents a post-apocalyptic landscape overseen by a distant mother nature or perhaps mother of nature portrayed by French icon Juliette Binoche.

Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive

The video revolution of the 1970s offered unprecedented access to the moving image for artists and performers. This Is Not a Dream explores the legacies of this revolution and its continued impact on contemporary art and performance. Charting a path across four decades of avant-garde experiment and radical escapism, This Is Not a Dream traces the influences of Andy Warhol, John Waters and Jack Smith to the perverted frontiers of YouTube and Chatroulette, taking in subverted talk shows and soap operas, streetwalker fashions and glittery magic penises along the way.