"THE OLD HOUSE PASSING is, to me, more than just a 'great film' / 'a work of art.' It is, as a matter of careful thought, the only motion picture drama I have ever seen which engenders vision, rather than cutting it back to 'sights' of minded hieroglyphs in movement and / or shifts of symbol stas...

In many ways a more searching (and certainly a more complex) film than OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE. We are first presented a cobweb castle, filled with the haunting doubts of the young protagonist. Spirits appear on the screen and are heard on the soundtrack. Gradually a female guide emerges and escor...

The film was completed in 1956 in its present form using a Dmitri Shostakovitch track although some of the footage was photographed in the winter of 1952-1953 at Harvard University. Although Lawrence Jordan worked on other films during this time, he considers this be his first truly completed fil...

"Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb." - W.B. Yeats, Vacillation

To most of us, music suggests definite mental images of form and color. The picture you are about to see is a novel scientific experiment. Its object is to convey these mental images in visual form.

A milestone in object animation, Oskar Fischinger manipulated hundreds of paper cut-outs hung on ...

Technology sees our corporeal existence as burdensome, resulting in the dissolution of the body and disconnect from the very ground beneath our feet. Hand-processed 16mm film and the electronic flicker of an old CT computer monitor create degrees of purity, traversed by the movements of a dancer....

A compact, full-color cut-out animated film as ephemeral as the colors swimming on the surface of a soap bubble. The eternal round shape, the orb (sun, moon, symbol of the whole self) balloons its inimitable and joyous course through scene after scene of celestial delight, fixing at last as the m...

Animation. The mystical Lady with the orbital head moves through the carnival of life in a surreal adventure. A classic. Show it to anyone who likes movies.

"A beauty... a genuinely mystical exercise." - Howard Thompson, New York Times

The "gravity" throughout OZ seems spell-bound, shifting from heavy to almost non-existent. Most often this gives the characters, objects and animals an ability to take off, float and ignite into a sparkle of incandescent intensity. Carried aloft by John Davis' music, the cosmic and spectacularly ...

"Sculptor Rutherford Boyd worked in collaboration with Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth [under the banner of Expanding Cinema], whose New York City production facilities were placed at his disposal. Filmed frame-by-frame in a sequence of stills that varied the arrangement of sculptural pieces under...

"Rock Ross’ ironically titled, time-lapse record of a 1980s Gay Pride parade in San Francisco is hardly the celebration of a celebration one would expect. By stationing his camera at a jog in the route so that the floats and people head right at us and then veer off at the last minute (and speedi...

PAREIDOLIA is an abstract narrative exploring the landscape/architecture of the body as a container of memories. The film uses bleached and distressed film stock, cut-paper puppets, stop-motion sets, hand-drawn animation and various hybrid techniques. Through a re-imagining of family stories and ...

PATTERN LANGUAGE is a term coined by architect Christopher Alexander describing the aliveness of certain human ambitions through an index of structural patterns. Some advocates of this design approach claim that ordinary people can use it to successfully solve very large, complex design problems....

PHANTOM CANYON explores the fantastical journey through the memories of a woman. Over four-thousand meticulous collages incorporate figures from "Human and Animal Locomotion" by Eadweard Muybridge (first published in 1887).

PHOSPHENA is a cut-paper stop-motion animated film exploring the layers of consciousness connecting dreams, memories and death. Loosely based on the incredible bower bird and its constructions, the film is a tale of love, deception and tragedy. "Phosphena" (also known as "phosphene") is an “entop...

Roughly twenty-three million years ago, multiple volcanoes erupted, flowed and slid to form what would become Pinnacles National Park. The resulting spires are home to a diverse range of animals, revered as sacred by the Chalun and Matsun tribes as the birthplace of the Firebird / Thunderbird (Ca...

PIPPA PASSES or THE SONG OF CONSCIENCE, adapted from the poem-of-the-same-name by Robert Browning. Preserved from the paper-print (and presented without musical accompaniment).

"A most artistic subject handles in a manner never before excelled, with keen appreciation of its poetic and dramatic v...

Neon ghosts dream in dead landscapes, the genesis of consciousness begins to explore finite territories and infinite loops within the digital walls of amusement. A creature born of abstraction interferes with a simple system never meant to be pushed so far.

"...the films is a plotless mood piece...

In the dada tradition: ball bearings, horses and angels dance with gears, wheels and hair brushes to a Beatles song. PINK SWINE is a sleeper in the repertoire of the many fantastic animated films of Lawrence Jordan.

One of the favorites of the filmmaker, Mary Ellen Bute stated that POLKA GRAPH "uses the graph pattern of the music as a springboard for the visual interpretation" of the Polka (Allegretto) movement from Dmitri Shostakovich's ZOLOTOI VEK [THE AGE OF GOLD / THE GOLDEN AGE] suite. — Kit Basquin / B...

Beat Era poets, Kirby Doyle and Sharon (DiDi) Morrill, in a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria in the form of a jazz duet with motorcycle, trumpets and foliage.

The poet dreams the bubbles of a maiden through edifices of forest and eclectic contagion.

The mystery and beauty of a high desert colonial town in Mexico, its churches, its abandoned silver mine, its statues and colored streets. [Lines from Federico García Lorca.]

Delicate threads of energy spiral and transform into mysterious microscopic cells of golden dust: these are the luminous particles of the alchemist's dream. PRIMA MATERIA is inspired by the haunting wonderment of Lucretius' "De rerum natura" and is an homage to the first, tentative photographic r...