lasso the moon

In 1944 Lye moved to New York City, initially to direct for the documentary newsreel The March of Time. He settled in the West Village, where he mixed with artists who later became the Abstract Expressionists, encouraged New York’s emerging filmmakers such as Francis Lee, taught with Hans Richter, and assisted Ian Hugo on Bells of Atlantis. Color Cry was based on a development of the “rayogram” or “shadow cast” process, using fabrics as stencils, with the images synchronized to a haunting blues song by Sonny Terry, which Lye imagined to be the anguished cry of a runaway slave. —Harvard Film Archive

As a teenager, I used to take a bus, whose ticket had the inscription "To the Flores Cemetery" as the end of its route. At that time, whenever I saw the ticket, I thought of Charles Baudelaire's "The Flowers of Evil" and of imaginary walks the bus would take me on until I reached the Flores Cemetery. Thirty years later, I found one of those tickets in a box, and it makes me think of finitude and the transient. Film made with Floripondio flowers, Hollyhock and Santa Rita petals, blood, cobwebs, insects found after a storm, mushrooms, onions, and hair on 16mm film.

A woman experiments with a Dreamachine, hoping to escape trouble. Within the light and dark of the machine, violent emotions awaken.

‘Films to Break Projectors’ glues, scrapes and splices 35mm, 16mm and 8mm film to create unprojectable celluloid collages. Reanimating the material reveals the colour music within and traces of ambiguous narratives that emerge from the complex loops.

A film by Paul Clipson.

Symphonic documentary exploring the Miami identity in six movements. It was performed and projected live by the New World Symphony, led by Michael Tilson Thomas on Feb 22, 2018. The film is made up of five separate and synchronized video channels, projected onto the walls of the New World Center concert hall, above a full symphony orchestra.

Celina y Chichi

In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve positive ends-- Namely, the intercontinental exchange of culture, combining both highbrow and entertainment elements. A live broadcast shared between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, linked up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, reached a worldwide audience of over 10 or even 25 million (including the later repeat transmissions).

Quatre altitudes bosniaques is an exercise in topographic cinema shot in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The document draws on the geography of the city of Sarajevo, from which the filmmakers construct a visual ethnography fragmented into four levels of elevation.

"Untitled begins with a flat, out-of-focus, reddish-pink screen on which blurry white patterns quickly appear and disappear. After awhile a space seems to emerge behind the screen. The swiftly changing patterns generate an experience of soft floating motion, through a field of snowflakes that whirl about in the wind. There is simultaneous serenity and agitation in the portrayed motions. The background appears soft, almost quivering at first, as if alive, and the reddish color suggests warmth and contrast with the snow. As the film progresses the snowflakes get smaller and better focused, yielding a kind of distance perspective and the background acquires more and more substantiality. At some point and often quite suddenly, the trans-like floating experience is broken by the discovery of what lies ahead: a red brick wall! The entire meaning of the earlier experience undergoes a sudden shift as this prototype of the impenetrable obstacle becomes apparent."– Robert Becklen

The union of the Indestructible Objet (1923-1959) by Man Ray and L'Infiltration homogenee for grand piano by Joseph Beuys (1966). Here the intersection of two temporalities is at stake: one punctuated by the pulsations of the metronome, the other marked by the continuous silence of Beuys’ piano.

"In the final format for MAGELLAN, Frampton had planned to disassemble these two films into twenty-four 'encounters with death' that were to be shown in five-minute segments twice a month. In their present state, seen together and roughly the length of an average feature film, the two parts of MAGELLAN: AT THE GATES OF DEATH constitute perhaps the most gripping, monumental, and wrenching work ever executed on film...Frampton in 1971 began his filming of cedavers at the Gross Anatomy Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to the lab four times over the course of the next two years and then spent nine months assembling his 'forbidden imagery' into an extraordinary meditation upon death."–Bruce Jenkins

memory file 01

The first 12 minutes would later be released as "Fountain of Dreams"

Four Poems is a series of video poems in which the horizontal lines of a poem, usually composed of text, have been substituted for horizontal lines of moving image. The piece explores what remains of a poem when its language is removed, and how images might interact with each other in similar or different ways to words. It asks whether rhyme, rhythm, sibilance, or dissonance, might be effectively created by juxtaposing images. It also asks whether arranging images might create a sense of authorship, intentionality, or a tone of voice, in the way that arranging words might. Finally, Four Poems invites the viewer to consider how they might ‘read’ a poem – does a reading have to occur from top-to-bottom, or might new interpretations be possible when the moving parts of the poem can all be seen at once?

Broken

Made using footage from USA Olympics in Los Angeles 1984 and snippets of Alistair Cooke's America: A Personal History of the United States. The footage was combined at Goldsmith's Art Department using an unusual Grass Valley mixer that had oscillating wipes which created the signature colours and wiggly lines. (Modern Art Oxford) Barber was always the most polished of the Scratch video artists, and Tilt shows his ability to make seductive, easy-viewing pieces, while maintaining a subversive undercurrent.

The Lesbian Almanac is a Situationist calendar of dyke objects. This video features 12 paintings from the dyke community, examples of word play and literal interpretation through political claims and personal visions that become a lesbian collective unconscious.

After the mysterious disappearance of a mayor in the El Retiro neighborhood, east of Mexico City, Miguel Ángel "el Apá", a retired resident, wanders the streets with a video camera interviewing locals about what happened, with the intention to make a documentary film to uncover the truth.

There's nothing but red stains in the path.