Reflecting Thought: Stan Brakhage

EstrAtti (Passages) is a docufilm that alternates five excerpts from poems, songs, and adapted texts by the following authors: Gianni Rodari (The Sky Belongs to Everyone), Omar Khayyam (the Persian poet who composed a series of poems, including Rubaiyat No. 2), David Bowie (lyrics from Quicksand), Jorge Luis Borges (excerpt from The Aleph), Alejandro Jodorowsky.

310 Tung Chau Street is a tenement building in Sham Shui Po. Three Vietnamese from the same province share a subdivided flat. Unemployment, drug addiction, and arguments brew and breed incessantly in this heated environment. During filming, the two young directors were encumbered by a series of obstacles, which turned the process into a chance to reflect on documentary truth.

Video Fanzine featuring: Half Japanese, Redd Kross with Sky Saxon as Purple Electricity, R Kern, Sonic Youth, White Flag, Psycho Daisies, Charlie Pickett, Nick Zedd, Morbid Opera More R&R, Film, Prose. Pencil numbering indicates there was a run of 600 tapes.

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

In 1975, as America faced social and political upheaval, filmmakers turned chaos into art.

A camera crew travels through Thailand asking villagers to invent the next chapter of an ever-growing story.

'Afloat' is an experimental film that paints a portrait of Japanese performance artist: Ayumi Lanoire. The film opens as a telephone call between Ayumi and Person X, which meanders the audience through the various layers that make up her personas leading one to wonder whether she is in fact a myth or reality.

The author's erotic imagination is mixed between desire and magazine clippings, and the trade of collage becomes a ship that travels from outer space to the city itself.

Filmmaking icon Agnès Varda, the award-winning director regarded by many as the grandmother of the French new wave, turns the camera on herself with this unique autobiographical documentary. Composed of film excerpts and elaborate dramatic re-creations, Varda's self-portrait recounts the highs and lows of her professional career, the many friendships that affected her life and her longtime marriage to cinematic giant Jacques Demy.

An immigrant's last attempt to restore childhood innocence on strange lands.

In the middle of the night, a sleepless subject rediscovers the ability to use their hands to produce and play with shadows on the ceiling.

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Landscapes revealed themselves through text, paper through movement, while the sun gave them relief. This is a journey across found words, enunciating a discovery, their textures constructing the sea and the waves, in a travelogue from the first exploration, the first step over the sand towards the shore. “Amor” writes this joy to underline it in its time, captured on paper. This film has been composed through a scanner, and it’s the first chapter of the “Reír al Sol” series.

P. Adams Sitney, Professor of Visual Art at Princeton University, wrote a short essay for Artforum International "Medium Shots: the films of Morgan Fisher" in which he describes the film "()." "Fisher's most recent film, (), succeeds astonishingly where Frampton's parallel effort, Hapax Legomena: Remote Control (1972) failed; it uses aleatory methods to release the narrative unconscious of a set of randomly selected films. () is made up entirely of "inserts" from feature films organized according to Oulipian principles. Inserts were usually shot by assistants when star actors, large crews, or expensive sets were not needed. These include details of weapons, wounds, letters, signs, tombstones, machinery, games of chance, timepieces, money, and even intimate caresses.

Women from the different Spanish regions dress in their traditional costumes to attend the triumphal parade celebrating the victory of Francisco Franco and the rebel side over the Second Republic in 1939; the deeds of past heroes are remembered; and a patriotic poem by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío is recited.

Las Preguntas que Perdimos

a 32-minute color film by Gwen Brown, featuring precious footage of Living Theatre productions “Mysteries” and smaller pieces, “Paradise Now” and “Frankenstein.” “The fusion of Brown’s freewheeling direct cinema and the Living Theatre’s performance for revolutionary change (amidst the heydays of both) unite as a dynamic concoction of the era, yielding for the viewer a shifting terrain of both critical insight and ecstatic zeal, not as a vacant nostalgia for a pre-commodified radicality, but as tactical inspiration for future days.” – Andrew Wilson (Artist’s Access Television)

New York City's Monterey is a residence hotel, whose inhabitants are older and primarily live alone. The camera, usually stationery, observes the lobby. No score, the lobby is clean with granite floors, men wear hats, people enter and exit an elevator, the camera looks out from within the elevator as doors open and close. People sit alone and motionless in their apartments. There are long shots of empty halls. Paint peels. The flooring on upper levels is linoleum. Hall lights are florescent. Doors open a crack then close.

An experience of a camera swinging in different gestures facing the optical distortion of the Sun. The last appearance of the smudge.

A film essay that intertwines the director's gaze with that of her late mother. Beyond exploring mourning and absence as exclusively painful experiences, the film pays tribute to her mother through memories embodied by places and objects that evidence the traces of her existence. The filmmaker asks herself: What does she owe her mother for who she is and how she films? To what extent does her film belong to her?