Dolls

Anatomy of a moth

James Sumner directs and animates the entire Dirty Projectors’ The Getty Address.

A film in five different sections, each containing a different soundscape by Ostrowski. Hand painted film, intense exposure, morphing textures and shapes into a seamless whole; geometrical games sabotaging themselves; and the incessant lure of the abstract paint drift. The soundscapes, of course, build up like fountains of picture, oscillating between contemplative sculptures with electronically manipulated strings and harsh noise attacks on our senses. Despite the use of sound as a central filmic element, Cyanonide stands as a proof of the enduring influence of Brakhage on american avant-film.

Blu animation takes a circular trip around a room

A young girl’s fiery dance, accidentally caught on 16 mm film in the street. The viewer is confronted by the sacrificial and the passionate, the strong and the fragile, the fleeting and the eternal. These are the faces of femininity.

Ostensibly searching for an emotional connection with her aging father, the woman contemplates her own inherited culture and familial touchstones. Her North American pop culture sensibility fuses with a distorted Japanese perspective to create a surreal interpretation of a “Japan of the imagination.” This fictional landscape is peppered with invented Japanese myths, ruminations on memory loss, the temporal space of digital photography and the ghosts of inherited imagination.

The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh.

A bohemian painter named Artist and a guitarist named James meet at a concert and have an instant connection. They start a philosophical discussion at her apartment, but they are interrupted by strange occurrences which reveal they are no longer in reality but an ominous dream world. Both Artist and James are confronted by characters and situations from their past, and they must work together to put the memory pieces together and escape to reality, if they can.

Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.

Clapperboard claps, from rushes from a film I worked on as an editor, synced with gunfire.

DEAR ROBERT_

It started with filming the tree. Something was released in that manner of filming seemingly farthest removed from the procedure of the early films. I first thought a simple ordering of this rich material might be enough, something related to BARN RUSHES [...] But the film only came into its form-life with the idea of linking this deep-rooted and far-outreaching tree material with that film on paranoia that had fascinated me for many years. –L. G.

Experimental short film playing with light and how it appears through reflections, lenses, and distortions

Performance video about a holiday romance at St Ives, Cornwall.

"With characteristic wit and rigor, experimental filmmaker Larry Gottheim here applies his impressionistic editing style to footage collected during his travels in the Dominican Republic. Gottheim’s formal emphasis on repetition and fissures between sound and image resonates here as a mode of sociological reflection (with the fragmentary montage mirroring elements of ritual while also destabilizing the ethnographic gaze). A largely overlooked antecedent to the contemporary blending of avant-garde and ethnographic filmmaking, MACHETTE GILLETTE… MAMA still poses a potent challenge to documentary convention." - Max Goldberg

A meditative journey, using and manipulating archival silent film footage, that investigates the look of the "New Woman" in Chinese silent screen.

The film is a stage play hybrid showcasing dark and absurd sketches based on contemporary Hungarian news of the 2000's with campy, senseless musical interludes in-between. Highly experimental in nature that - like Marmite - will split its' crowd into ones that'll love it and others that'll loathe it. There's no middle grounds here. The topics included are: The Hungarian Olympians' doping scandal, political terrorism, the national elections... and more.

“Peter Kubelka…was teaching at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule (Städel) at the time. His classes, filmmaking and cooking, were very unique, and this film was made around the time I was studying with him at Städel… This is a single-shot film, moving along the passageway using a handmade dolly. I used an Arriflex 16ST camera, and I changed the filming speed from 48fps to 4-6 fps while shooting.” - Yo Ota

“The visual harmony of the landscape is disturbed by a screen that allows us to see into the distance (television). The film is composed of six scenes that feature a television in the landscape. The speed of the television (in NTSC) is 30 frames per second, and never changes in this film. But the landscape views pass at different speeds.” - Yo Ota

“The structure of human vision is the visual knowledge of the world. Individuals do not visually understand the world through the eyes, but through the brain. That is to say, human vision has been formed by knowledge and experience. The film can show a new vision, provided that the cinema is also a kind of visual experience and visual knowledge.” - Yo Ota