Filmed in an empty shop, the remaining features of the space are used to create a kaleidoscopic-light film. Ceiling lamps become coloured spheres and circles that sweep across the frame. Pillars provide wipes and fades, window shutters are hole punched stencils, passing buses shoot beams of light...

"Beautiful Lissajous curves [curved lines that pass through a pair of harmonic motions in perpendicular directions] can be put through a choreography that inspires—and startles—the imagination," writes Mary Ellen Bute of her quest to visualize invisible rhythms. In ABSTRONIC, she uses a cathode r...

Frame-by-frame, letter-by-letter, ACROSS AND DOWN aligns riddles/answers from six rolls of Super-8, with the structure, poetry and imagery posed by Ugandan crossword puzzles. ACROSS AND DOWN is a study of simultaneous simplicity and complexity and the resulting serendipity and chaos.

An exploration into 19th century death mystique(s), which rely heavily on the supernatural, along with a belief in (or at least a fascination with) fairy magic, much of it implied through subtle imagery. In all, it is a fascinating and astonishingly replete compendium of spiritual endeavor. The 1...

In a time and place where the gracious mother Sophia, Goddess of Wisdom, weaves her tapestry from illustrations of William Blake and Arthur Rackham with assorted ephemera of men, animals and the flora of the world; where balloons sail to the moon goddess and the ancient world protrudes; where the...

"You are on a train and you are in a well and you are lying beneath the nighttime sky and as your eyes open and close, you find yourself learning not what looking feels like (as Bridget Riley painted) but what feeling looks like. There is no landscape without a body and no vision without a self. ...

A time-lapse animated meditation on geothermal energy, erosion, seismic activity and magma. Shot above the Yellowstone Caldera and amongst the Bryce Canyon hoodoos, the film explores how they connect these past cataclysms to the present endangered environment within the sixth mass extinction and ...

The stark compilation of newsreels entitled AMERICA TODAY represents a key work in the origins of American social documentary film. Under the direction of Leo Hurwitz, the images—primarily photographed by Leo Seltzer between 1932 and 1934—are edited to create a powerful record of a country in nee...

ANCESTORS relates spiritual forefathers and foremothers in a purely fanciful sense. These are classical figures, anatomical figures, fairy tale figures and romantic figures all thrown in together, all from Lawrence Jordan's creative root-sources, in a kind of playful tribute. Like the second part...

Thought-provoking and offensive are possible ways to interpret the ten optical discs and corresponding puns displayed in the film. The word play of French syllogisms gleefully collides with the protruding-receding optical illusions of the rotating spheres. Julien Levy called the film SPIRALS and ...

An exploration of the evolutionary arc of the natural world from the primeval environment to the Anthropocene.

and just as the swelter plateaus toward a vertical horizon
the curtain falls flat in motion
a hinge unlatches from sill
and a slab of paint is finally relieved, alighting
the window continues to open

and the window continues to open, continuing so
so that it has gone off the frame
a swift a...

Poet Joanna McClure requested a film with the collages of Max Ernst and Lawrence Jordan decided to make a tribute to the two men who most influenced his film-work at the beginning: Max Ernst (collage) and Luis Buñuel (surrealism in cinema). A few years earlier, from late-2011 until October 2013, ...

Writer / director Lawrence Jordan's intention was to follow the idea of James Agee to present "an imaginary story against a background of reality." The imaginary story in this instance is of Paul Rose and his past incarnation in classical Greek times. Jordan collaborated with George Kuchar (who c...

The glorious nature of a phantom-like entity.

From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. ARBOR suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings...

A muscular movement from a Sergei Prokofiev symphony commands our attention even against the blackness of a blank screen. The darkness eventually gives way to a roasted-pumpkin orange title card and images of a lovely nude running through the woods. Scratches in the film [celluloid!] correspond t...

This breezy, frenetic work was once described by filmmaker Rock Ross as “an original mambo-rap creation myth of chaos of vacation.” Indeed, the film begins with the bold, declarative text, “In the beginning there was only Chaos.” Nocturnal grown-up party scenes alternate with children posing, pla...

BAGLIGHT, as the title implies, was inspired by Stan Brakhage’s legendary MOTHLIGHT. Only this version, as the filmmaker aptly describes, is “cruelty free” (and it has a score).

Fernand Léger's BALLET MÉCANIQUE occupies a preeminent place in modern art. There is no other film quite like it. One reason is the collective effort of the Americans who participated in its creation, including Ezra Pound, Alvin Langdon Colburn, Man Ray and especially co-director Dudley Murphy an...

In a timeless world of surreal possibilities, the conjunctions and strange meetings of humans, animals and improbable objects coalesce, linger and move on to the truly timeless and ethereal music of John Davis.

There are no hidden meanings in these conjunctions except those that form in the mind...

Where all is static motion, where music and light become one, where change and motion become one and where the end is the beginning. Black-and-white cut-out animation with touches of color. Ladies of the past encounter science and natural phenomena.

A hypnotic, visual frenzy of Kabuki imagery gone mad; the magical and ritualistic confrontation between a magenta-haired Western intruder and a Japanese recluse turns into a mesmerizing dance for domination. Live actors and objects filmed in stop-motion animation.

An "in-camera" document or journalistic writing on film with no subsequent deletions or re-ordering. The first partly-pixilated "diary film" of which the filmmaker is aware.

As with RODIA-ESTUDIANTINA, only one shot (which probably was the result of lapse in concentration), deleted from the orig...