LOOK PARK presents close-up shots of a country stream viewed in bright sunlight. The film opens with wide shots of the park to establish the location, then focuses on the abstract selections and shadows. The music—initially a piece by Jacques Offenbach which segues midway into an electronic recor...

LOST MOTION uses small cast metal figures, toy trains, decayed skyscrapers and other found objects to follow a man’s search for a mysterious woman. From an illegible note found on a dollhouse bed, through impossible landscapes, the man waits for her train that never arrives. His wanderings lead ...

Robert Florey, a French cineaste, and William Cameron Menzies, a top art director, combined talents to show the influence of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920) and other European film experiments which tended to be ignored by Hollywood productions. Florey went on to make the the expressionistic M...

A Lithuanian-born artist, Boris Deutsch worked as an industry set designer for three years before making LULLABY, his single foray into filmmaking. Like his paintings, it treats a Jewish theme expressionistically, remarkably anticipating the themes and methods of Maya Deren's seminal MESHES OF TH...

A woman reads Philip Lamantia's poem (from which the film gets its title) which evokes masculine angst as a hand acts out the scenario of the poem.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, artists Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand collaborated on an abstract film of New York. Although neither was a filmmaker, their short lyric film has had a profound influence on world cinema. The original negative of MANHATTA remains lost and only one 3...

As disembodied cries move through the rooms of a house, their emotional intensity provokes a reanimation of the dead, cosmic shifts and the manipulation of time and space.

For the first time, Lawrence Jordan animated hand-painted engraved cut-outs on a full-color background. The film is mood-filled: a duel scene in a snowy forest, obviously the morning after a masquerade ball. Harlequin lies dying, while Red Indian walks away with the wings of victory. The woman be...

Round-and-round go the gears in this extraordinary study. The follow-up to H2O from photographer / filmmaker Ralph Steiner is mesmerizing in its attention to concentric, repetitive mechanized motions. Far from being pedantic or boring, the movements fascinate and titillate. The comedic is equally...

MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE pivots on the precise movements of Chao-Li Chi, a solitary Chinese martial artist, performing a ritualized dance set against white and black backgrounds. It reaches an epiphany when he abruptly moves outside, jumps and freezes in mid-air, then resumes the dance in reverse o...

MEMORIA DATA collects the moments of connection from various and distant familial archives. Familiar eyes make contact with the lens, gestures are are tossed to the camera operator and mouths spill unheard words. These images remind us of why we keep records, who we set our sights upon and exactl...

Mexican singer Alejandro Fernandez’s international hit “Como quien pierde una estrella” overlays posterized images of a teeming city and of a couple looking upward as an airplane moves like a fly across the sky with blank frames that translate the lamentations of the broken-hearted singer into En...

With MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, the wife-and-husband team of Maya Deren and Alexander Hackenschmied created one of the keystone achievements of American avant-garde cinema in their Hollywood home. During its first decade of release, this captivating psychodrama was presented silent (with no soundtr...

A journey to the threshold of a utopian labyrinth. We follow the perspective of a solitary woman who descends into an abandoned subterranean arcology. She is tasked with cleaning up the mess that has spawned from this feral structure, becoming lost in the process.

It premiered in 2016 at the Int...

From a central pivotal position, the camera eye (in this case, the hard and inflexible eye of Minerva) looks out upon twelve passing scenes. None of the scenes are necessarily associated with specific signs of the Zodiac. Lawrence Jordan instead assembled twelve of his collages and passed them in...

Actual pictures of sound captured on Cathode Ray Oscilloscope. Music now entertains eye as well as ear. Film artist Mary Ellen Bute combines Science and Art to create SEEING SOUND. A Ted Nemeth Studio production.

"A charmingly lyrical interpretation of [Nikolai] Rimsky-Korsakov's HYMN TO THE SUN...

Animated to the rhythms of the fifth "Gnossienne" by Erik Satie. The moon and moonlight are the guiding lights of this visual interpretation and Lawrence Jordan kept the backgrounds in soft greens and blues accordingly. Only the cosmic tumbler, whose enigma is emphasized by his red color, breaks ...

MOUNTAIN VIEW thinks about framing, movement, surface and depth. The film consists of three continuous zooms towards a landscape that are deconstructed into a discontinuous sequence of single frames. Movement is exposed as an illusion of twenty-four static frames per second, the organic movement ...

Since the founding of our country, the American people have had to fight for the freedom in every generation. NATIVE LAND is a document of America's struggle for liberty in recent years. It was in this struggle that the fascist-minded on our own soil were forced to retreat and the people gained t...

As editor of New Left Notes, the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Saul Levine was at the center of multiple radical political movements. For NEW LEFT NOTE, he employs a rapid-fire editing style to create a frenetic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the anti-war movement, the Black P...

Mary Ellen Bute's most compact abstract film energizes a jazzy advertising jingle [by Raymond Scott!] to promote RCA Victor's new stereo recordings! The barrage of visuals features a panoply of animated techniques among which eloquent oscilloscope patterns dance in complex synchronization to the ...

In this handmade film, composed of more than four thousand collages, the actress Lillian Gish is seamlessly appropriated from silent-era cinema and plunged into a new and haunting role. NIGHT HUNTER evokes a disquieting dreamscape, drawn from allegory, myth and archetype.

Primarily in black-and-white with touches of color, the engraved artwork was filmed on color negative in order that subtle variations in tone are recorded.

The mood—enhanced by John Davis’ original music—is dream-like. It is both lyric and crackling, producing a kind of anticipatory tension. The...

Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker made UNE NUIT SUR LE MONT CHAUVE [NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN] using a pinscreen animation technique, arranging and rearranging thousands of pins so that, when illuminated, they produced variations in shadow from black to white. The effect resembles a mezzotint. T...