"Human qualities migrate through light and shadow... Like flames and waves, the dead and the living course through this world... without weight through space and time." Michael McClure and Joanna McClure along with the poet Kenneth Rexroth's daughter Mary make their way through SPECTRE MYSTAGOGIC.

Lily Dale is a spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, New York. Pilgrims and tourists swarm the hamlet in summer but, in the autumn, Lily Dale becomes a more intimate setting for spectral communions. SPIRITS IN SEASON explores the town's Leolyn Woods, pet cemetery, Inspiration Stump and Fai...

Animated by Norman McLaren, using his adroit ink-on-film technique, Mary Ellen Bute's film visualizes Camille Saint-Saëns' DANSE MACABRE. It features colored globes, ellipses and triangles that move ghost-like over monochromatic backgrounds, communicating the notion of spirits rising from a grave...

STAR OF DAY is simply the internal, subliminal (poetic) thoughts of an aging woman poet as she travels the world, alone, probably for the last time, thinking of a friend she has lost. Finally, she returns home to write ("write or die"). These story elements are all included in the last long poem ...

STATION DRAMA is a silent, black-and-white Super-8 film from RIGHT HAND SHADE, the fourth and final section of the twelve film series TALES OF THE FORGOTTEN FUTURE. This section explores via collage cutouts, thematics related to the genres of the bio-pic, home movies and the actuality film. It st...

This delightful silent short parodies feature films that flash the names of the big stars (“Liberty,” “Justice” and “Death”) before the title card, STUPOR MUNDI, appears. In something of a cross between a Keystone Kops comedy and an Edwin S. Porter melodrama, Lady Liberty, Justice (with her blind...

Ralph Steiner is interested in the capacity for film to invigorate everyday sight, to alert viewers to the simple, magical visual pleasures available in nearly any circumstance. The film is divided into sequences that focus on specific kinds of imagery in and around ocean surf. — Scott MacDonald
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Seeing sound. Music, in addition to pleasing the ear, brings something to the eye. SYNCHROMY NO.2 was designed by a modern (circa-1930s) artist to create moods through the eye as music creates moods through the ear. A pictorial accompaniment in abstract forms to the music of THE EVENING STAR (fro...

By 1940, Mary Ellen Bute's abstractions were shown at select theaters nationwide. Utilizing initial illustrations created by Norman McLaren for her earlier SPOOK SPORT, this "seeing-sound" film demonstrates her ability to visualize music in a style sympathetic to modernist painting. Squiggling li...

In opposition to conventional cinema, where emotional manipulation is the norm, Joseph Cornell's movies and "goofy newsreels" are highly suggestive enigmatic collages. His fractured narratives defy easy interpretation, even with those employed by the French surrealists of the 1920s. His elliptica...

In the rarely-seen THREE, one begat three became two and then one again.

The film unfolds in three acts: Act I ("Cyrano"), wherein Cyrano makes all manner of boasts and compares his lady-love to the marvels of the universe; Act II ("Prometheus"), in which pagan forces are compared with the supposed genteel nature of the 19th century; Act III ("Time Travel"), whereby t...

TODAY IS SUNDAY is both a still life and a landscape film in which the characters are described by nature. The relationship of the man and woman is articulated in dialogue with the external environment of clouds, wind and waves.

"TODAY IS SUNDAY, a lovely black-and-white, elliptical semi-narrati...

JR (Japan Railway Company) Yamanote Line is one of the Japan's busiest lines, consisting of twenty-nine stations and running as a loop. TOKYO-EBISU shows the views from the platforms of ten stations in Yamanote Line, from Tokyo Station to Ebisu Station clockwise. The in-camera visual effects and ...

Unfolding like a dream, TOTEM explores our evolving relationship to the animal world.

TOTEM reflects on the formative experience of living as a young adult for several years in remote areas of Latin America. The images for TOTEM were hand-drawn with ink on paper. Each image is 6" x 8". The major...

In EIN TRAUM DER LIEBENDEN [A DREAM OF LOVERS], Monk meanders through a maze of Minoan bull-leaping, satyrs and revelatory rainbows.

One of the few remaining authentically "Beat" films, made from the inside of that particular North Beach movement. Features artists Wallace Berman and family, artist John Reed and poets Michael McClure and Phillip Lamantia along with the growers of peyote in southern Texas. The film begins with a...

Ostensibly, a pataphysical card game played on the body of a nude woman. This bizarre concept (according to the director) could only come from a "very young, inexperienced would-be filmmaker." Lawrence Jordan shot the film in one night in the basement apartment of the small Victorian house rented...

In the year 1626, the Dutch bought from the Native Americans the island of Manhattan for the total sum of twenty-four dollars. Here they founded the city of New Amsterdam which, within thirty years, had a population of 1,000 people. Three centuries later, New Amsterdam grew into New York with eig...

A crime story told two different ways concerning the events of a two month period leading up to (and immediately following) a bank robbery. The imagery has all been "appropriated" (the fancy, art-world-sanctioned term for "stealing") from four issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the th...

Fantasy / psychodrama of the cat, the candle and the Christmas tree.
[Filmed in San Francisco at an apartment a street or so below McAllister off Franklin. The cat was named Tin Sing.]

"The second film by Stan Brakhage [starring Lawrence Jordan and a handful of other actors] originally featured original music composed by James Tenney. The score was never recorded. In its place, 'Mr. Tenney has selected [Béla] Bartok's SECOND PIANO CONCERTO as a suitable background for the film,...

"A short, quick, neat and amusing opener (for film programs) that will start the audience off in a good mood and clear you immediately of the suspicion of being arty. You won't go wrong with this one." — Journal of Popular Film

The starting point for VALERIA STREET was a frayed Kodak box of seven slides that fell off a shelf of collage materials in the studio of the filmmaker. Curious, she put them on a light box. The slides depicted a group of five men, staged around a conference table in a generic office setting, curt...