In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.
The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.
This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.
This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."
An experimental film that lifts the veil on the world of African American drag racing.
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
The discovery of a human torso thrown into a waterway, leads the viewer to observe the work of modern criminology and the task of special agents to track and record the psychopath's mentality through the elucidation of techniques present in the reality of the police investigation.
What kind of power is accessible through the discovery of a voice? Morgan Quaintance interlinks two anti-racist and anti-authoritarian liberation movements in South London and Chicago’s South Side with his own biography to explore what happens when speech is ignored, and the voice fades.
A documentary portrait of Utopia, loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel.
An experimental and poetic portrait of a woman.
We live with stories. And it's hard for us to give up on these stories, which provide us our identity, a way of understanding ourselves. Reflections from three successive generations are dusted off and presented as remaining fragments. An attempt to archive thoughts on familial history, narrative traditions, human perception and "the story" from known and unknown sources. "There is history behind it and the history becomes the story and the story becomes the pattern and the pattern becomes rigidity."
An experimental journey into nostalgia, media, and ownership.
Mick Glasheen, an architect and pioneer of early cinema and experimental film, created work that was heavily influenced by media theorists. His video Teleologic Telecast from Spaceship Earth: On Board with Buckminster Fuller, 1970, is a re-mixed recording of a Buckminster Fuller’s lecture given at UNSW, presenting Fuller’s ideas on science, metaphysics and the universe, merged with just as radical techniques of moving image production, creating a multi-layered expression of image, voice, and sound.
Andy Warhol directs a single 35-minute shot of a man's face to capture his facial expressions as he receives the sexual act depicted in the title.
"This tape is an exploration of my latent heterosexuality with porn star / performance artist Annie Sprinkle as instructor and sage. After assuaging my fears that I can have sex with a woman & still maintain my gay identity, Annie warms me up with some playful, sensual wrestling. She then instructs in the use of a tampon while relating men's need to make war with their inability to menstruate. For the rest of the tape, she guides me through the specifics of sexual exploration, positions of coital congress as well as post- coital ritual."
The second entry in Velu Viswanadhan's series of experimental documentaries. This film traces the Ganges river upstream.
Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.
Experimental 8mm film by Karpo Godina.
Nadja is a guest student, who stays at Cité Universitaire and visits the Sorbonne, while preparing a thesis on Proust; she also likes to stroll about Paris.
An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories.