That's Life

Türkiye’s modernization adventure is an intermittent one that carries the pains of transition from empire to republic and of geographical liminality in every aspect of culture. At the center of this arduous modernist attitude in art is İlhan Usmanbaş, who was born in 1921 in the Ottoman Empire, whose atonal music of the 1950s influenced not only the field of music but also literature. As an essay film, Modernist: Usmanbaş both traces the composer's insistence on playing 20th century music in his compositions and visual notation and follows him in the private nursing home where he lived from the age of 100 to 103. While the film records Usmanbaş's curiosity in natural history and the intellectual structure he built between music, science and mathematics with the testimonies of the last years of his life, it also makes references to modernist art in formal terms as a meta attitude.

A young boy creates a make believe world to escape his truth, a world where, at the water's edge, beneath the shade of an ancient tree, a mother forms a perimeter to protect herself and her child from an unspeakable darkness.

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.

Dislocation in time, time signatures, time as a philosophical concept, and slavery to time are some of the themes touched upon in this 9-minute experimental film, which was written, directed, and produced by Jim Henson. Screened for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in May of 1965, "Time Piece" enjoyed an eighteen-month run at one Manhattan movie theater and was nominated for an Academy Award for Outstanding Short Subject.

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.

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

The Hypergaussian Wars is an AI-generated feature-length audiovisual work exploring algorithmic warfare, obsolete media and the transformation of images through repetition, saturation and collapse. Built from thousands of generated images, synthetic landscapes and references to 14th–16th century painting, the film stages a continuous conflict between historical visual culture and contemporary computational systems. Fragments of obsolete video games, ruined architectures, military simulations and post-human figures circulate through increasingly unstable environments. Rather than telling a linear story, the film operates as an image system in which visual excess progressively erodes meaning. The Hypergaussian Wars reflects on memory, obsolescence, artificial intelligence and the persistence of images after their original function has disappeared.

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

Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters.

When forest animals invade our cities, the world is in disarray. Office vixen Fiona struggles with her banana phone addiction. Will she succumb to it? Temperamental bunny Barbara only gives her stag sugar daddy Nestor his special massage, after he dines her and plays the big spender. This obscure short film pinpoints postmodern tropes of consumerism, eroticism, and art with an homage to the theater stage and references to literature. This work uses a fantasy language and needs no subtitles.

The last collaboration of Artavazd Peleshian and cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov is a film-essay about Armenia's shepherds, about the contradiction and the harmony between man and nature, scored to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Twenty-four images of a camera running in the woods, a moonlight and a cemetery through improvised gestures, mechanical abstraction and saturated colors

Exploring impressionistic, emotional and sensory environments found within the vast natural and urban landscapes of America. Neither image nor sound takes precedence: the two interact and combine preserving a raw sense of the discovery that field recordings and in-camera edited film rushes often yield.

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)

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.

William K.L. Dickson plays the violin while two men dance. This is the oldest surviving sound film where sound is recorded on the phonograph.

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.

Egglantine loves salt on her eggs. Eggbert prefers pepper. Who blinks first in this playful Easter ritual?

A gang of leather-clad, powerful women take over a traditionally male domain, and hairspray, eyeliner, and bare flesh are on full display in Beth B’s music video for the Arthur Baker–produced club hit from synthpop band Dominatrix. Banned at the time of release, it was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art.

It covers thirty percent of the Earth's land mass and yet, most of us barely scratch the surface. Now, discover what few people have seen, as The Green Planet follows the stories of forest inhabitants, from graceful red deer to cunning foxes and impressive wild boar. With cutting edge technology, we also explore some of the more bizarre and wonderful forest dwellers: the purple emperor, liverworts, stag beetles and corydalis. See flowers bloom and blades of grass cut through the snow. Spend time in a foxes den with her new born cubs and follow tiny insects and creatures with microscopic detail. Be a part of a journey that takes you through the seasons and be prepared to be amazed by the natural wonder of creation, destruction and rebirth in this incomparable landscape.