Through the uses of kinescope, video, multimedia, and direct painting on film, an impression is gained of the frantic action of protoplasm under a microscope where an imaginative viewer may see the genesis of it all. – Grove Press Film Catalog
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.
Glimpses and sparkles of light lead us onto the dreamy path of a timeless place, immersed within ancient nature. There, the ancestors move beyond the darkness, seeking to create another (im)possible world.
Like reading the back pages of a discarded journal revealing the thoughts of a young man slipping into madness, Hers Is A Lush Situation mixes a disjointed narrative with an underlying thread of black humor to give a subtle view on what young, urban lives really look like today.
A poetic exploration of the presence and absence of a mother.
Melting shows the natural monostructural disintegration of a strawberry sundae, its passage from rigidity to softness, from edibility to waste. The spoon resting on the plate refers to the human presence, which lurks behind the screen, declining to interfere with what transpires. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2009.
A film about the dominance of time and space over a human being. A poetic reflection on the transience of material life characterized by a Mediterranean ambience, contemplation, mosaic structure, and repetitive editing patterns.
Three people become connected through mysterious circumstances involving electronic devices which spontaneously appeared in their world.
A 1963 timelapse recording shows the effects of air pollution during an entire day on Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles. A machine interpretation of an unstable version of the original file is divided into slits and rearranged in time, giving rise to a time panorama that mirrors an uncertain, abstract future lying ahead of us.
Farewell letter to an old love.
Mona relates her dream. Crawling through an apparently endless wooden crate, she encounters diverse characters while the crate itself is moving towards a fiery destruction.
It is well known that the disposition of the images drawn by Escher are neither for animation nor for pre-animation; actually, quite the opposite. His images appear to be the carrying out of metamorphic dissolves. A bird gives way to the recognition of a house, which turns into fish, which turns into birds, and so on. Not a single flapping of wings takes place; everything is reiterated and fixed, becoming immersed in and re-emerging from a static continuum. All of Escher is an homage to one of the major animating forces of the cinema: the cross-dissolve. Precisely there, I found cinematic attitudes: in the house which turns into fish and in everything that transforms into something else. I gradually managed to figure out various types of non-existent sequences and then finally found myself dissolved, crossing over metamorphically. —P.G.
Russian emigré Dimitri Kirsanoff’s film, alternatively titled Death of A Stag and Une chasse à courre, is a post-war study of a traditional stag hunt. The pursuit of the animal finds a cross-cutting parallel in the felling of a tree in the forest.
"After chasing sunsets, one of life's simple joys is playing with the boys." - Kenneth Clark Loggins
"My name, melancholia".
As a family struggles to survive in rural isolation during the Great Depression, their daughter's secret affair begins a journey into the unknown.
The Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor, daughter of a former advisor of Ahmadinejad's, has been living in exile in Germany for four years. When she hears that the fellow Iranian rapper Shahin Najafi, who is also living in exile in Germany, faces death threats and has to hide because of one of his songs, she doesn't hesitate and has to find him. On her search she encounters fear everywhere. Narges Kalhor has to face her inconvenient memories of suppression, hatred and anger for her past in Iran.
Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.
A man in drag sits on a couch holding a fan. The wallpaper behind him is floral patterned. Although the man does little more than looking around and waving his fan, Zwartjes created enormous tension.
Renowned artist Krzysztof Wodiczko creates powerful responses to the inequities and horrors of war. This in-depth investigation into the artist focuses on the recurring themes of war, trauma, and displacement in his work. An instigator for social change, Wodiczko’s powerful art interventions disrupt the valorization of state-sanctioned aggression.