Artificial Intelligence, 2023

Psychedelic animation that impresses with eyeballs and other motifs.

A psychedelic animation that starts with an irregular ink spread and develops while increasing the degree of confusion.

Séance provides one of the first cinematic examples of a flicker effect.

Odds & Ends is a sly comment on the collage film and Beat culture. To discarded travel and advertising footage found at a local film laboratory, Belson Shimane added a mélange of animation—assemblages, cutouts, color fields, and line drawings—and faux hipster narration by Jacobs (credited via the anagram Rheny Bojacs) punctuated by a bongo backing. Strung together with doublespeak and non sequiturs, the monologue skirts the edge of nonsense as Jacobs waxes on about poetry, jazz, “reaching the public,” “having a good time,” and—although “money doesn’t count”—the “possibility of subsidy” through grants. Footage of champagne, tropical beaches, and exotic peoples intermingle with rhythmic drawings and stop-motion flights of fancy. The visuals race on through dazzling transformations, both amplifying and undercutting the patter. —National Film Preservation Foundation. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Iota Center Collection in 2006.

Isabel - Der Film

This newly rediscovered short was created in Jim's home studio in Bethesda, MD around 1961. It is one of several experimental shorts inspired by the music of jazz great Chico Hamilton. At the end, in footage probably shot by Jerry Juhl, Jim demonstrates his working method.

The film follows a rebellious teenager on leave from the Marines who falls in love with a female musician. The relationship is threatened when she develops a mental illness...

An abstract animated film inspired by the work of jazz musician Chico Hamilton.

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked separately, preferring to see if the score and visual track would synchronise by chance. Lye also experimented with a new Direct Film technique, drenching the filmstrip in colourful paint and marker pen.

"Light animation and original poetry in this initiatic journey by Dennis Pies, who is now known as Sky-David." - Daily Psychedelic. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

In 2057, a smart house remains standing in a world without humans after a nuclear war, along with the robots inside it. The robots continue their daily routines meaninglessly. While humanity has been destroyed by a power of its own making and greater than itself, this artificial order, in parallel, is also unable to withstand the greater force of nature for long.

A young man has an anxiety attack and in an attempt to feel something, he skips through Kanye West's 2018 release, ye, until he lands on Ghost Town.

A fiddler's hand creates its own choreography is music is performed. This film is an attempt to share the dance. In the tradition and spirit of a Norman McLaren short, a light attached to a fiddle bow traces a dancing dot of light in darkness. The music was composed and is performed by Gordon Stobbe on fiddle and accompanied by Bill Doucette on guitar.

After a threesome proposal, Beatrix drinks cranberry juice non-stop hoping it will improve her sexual life.

A prisoner belonging to a void known as “Lacuna,” longs to escape their entrapment. As they search for a way out, they confront the unchecked mental illness that plagued their former life.

The Possible Fog of Heaven is a consideration of the dimensionality of metaphysics and the metaphysics of dimensionality. Elvis speaks for the first time from the afterlife, describing in voice over and graphic text, his experience in Heaven. The Structure of the tape follows the King’s last prescription.

Minimalist, geometric shapes are set to processed found noises in a film that takes familiar noises and makes them strange.

As a mysterious silhouette wanders through a dreamscape, a strange blue light begins to follow him.

After a breakup, a sleepless young man begins closing the countless tabs open on his computer until only one memory remains.

From the vast randomness of the universe, countless alternative life forms emerge. Among them, fragile and delicate, human life reveals itself as something precious, quietly worthy of celebration.