Expanded Cinema

B. S. Johnson

2011-01-23T21:17:00.000-08:00

Fat Man on a Beach (1973)

British experimental novelist, poet, critic, and filmmaker B.S. Johnson, author of Alberto Angelo (1964) and House Mother Normal (1971) made several films in his brief ten year career. Fat Man on a Beach, finished just before his suicide at age 40, starts with Johnson's unique brand of the absurd and comic, and ends with him walking directly into the sea:

“A simple but audacious idea was proposed: Johnson should revisit his beloved Lleyn penninsula [setting of Johnson's first novel, Travelling People (1963)] . . . and he should make a film about it. The format would be quite straightforward: forty minutes of Johnson sitting on his favourite beach, Porth Ceriad, and talking directly to camera about anything that happened to come into his head" Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson

Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

Alain Resnais

2010-12-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)

"With its long tracking shots through cavernous library hallways and its skeptical corresponding text (courtesy of writer Rémo Forlani), Alain Resnais' short essay film Toute la Mémoire du Monde imagines the Bibliothèque Nationale as a forbiddingly inhuman landscape in which man attempts to imprison "knowledge" in an effort to counter the limits of his own memory. Only in the act of individual selection - a single patron choosing a specific text - is there hope that this undifferentiated mass of knowledge can be redeemed, as the reader makes discriminating use of the collective national memory for the fulfillment of a constructive individual purpose." Andrew Schenker

Henry Hills

2010-12-08T20:48:00.000-08:00

SSS (1988)

Henry Hills filmed several performers on the streets of New York's East Village, editing the footage with music improvised by Tom Cora, Christian Marclay, and Zeena Parkins.

Jean-Claude Risset/Lillian Schwartz

2010-11-27T16:00:00.000-08:00

Mutations (1969)

French composer Jean-Claude Risset helped to pioneer computer music at Bell Labs in the early 1960s. Made in collaboration with computer pioneer Lillian Schwartz, this film sets animations by Ken Knowlton and others to Risset's titular composition for solo tape, which features a seemingly infinite glissando among its effects. Click here for part 1 of a 1976 documentary on Schwartz's work with computers.

Forough Farrokhzad

2010-05-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

The House is Black (1963)

The only film directed by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, who died tragically just four years later at the age of 32, The House is Black is a documentary on a leprosy colony in Tebriz, Iran, with Farrokhzad's narration of Koranic verses and excerpts from her own poetry.

Elaine Summers

2010-05-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Windows in the Kitchen (1976)

The opening sequence of Elaine Summers' Windows in the Kitchen, part of the pioneering "intermedia" artist's collaboration with the Judson Dance Theater.

Robert Filliou

2010-03-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

And So on, End So Soon: Done 3 Times (1977)

According to Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, art was born on January 17th, somewhere around 1,000,000 years ago, when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.

Val Del Omar

2010-01-06T12:42:00.000-08:00

Fuego en Castilla (1960)

José Val del Omar's (Granada 1904-Madrid 1982) extraordinary film, centered around a series of Alonso de Berruguete and Juan de Juni sculptures.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Herbert Kosower

2009-12-18T08:00:00.000-08:00

The Face (1967)

Herb Kosower taught animation and film graphics in the USC film program in 1960-1907s; George Lucas and John Milius were among his students.

Paul Dougherty

2009-12-09T11:33:00.000-08:00

White Collar Funk (c. 1970s)

"It was a time when the novelty of having a video camera would stir interest and create interaction. Here on 23rd St. bet Park & Lex, uptown side. Back then I screened a work in progress to a video artist I worked with named Juan Downey. He suggested taking the edit I had and playing it back on the street I made it about to interact with people, which I did. That's the part you see here. I'm not nuts about my manner as an on-the-street reporter but hey, I was fresh out of college. It's called "White Collar Funk" because even though the area was filled with office workers from Met Life etc, it remained gritty and had none of the (then) glamor of midtown office district. Of all the dozens of NYC neighborhoods going upscale now, E. 23rd is still keepin' it real, relatively speaking."

Paul Dougherty

Pauline Oliveros

2009-05-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Performance at Cal State (2007)

Houston-born composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros performs an improvisational piece at Cal State.

Part 1

Part 2

Maria Lassnig

2009-03-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

Kantate (1992)

"The Austrian artist Maria Lassnig tells us the story of her life in 14 verses, beginning with her birth and ending with her life as it is today. Simultaneusly - in the background - we see the story as animated drawings, full of irony, humor and wisdom." (Hubert Sielecki)

Click here if above does not play

Tino Sehgal

2009-03-16T10:45:00.000-07:00

"This is so contemporary" (2000)

The uniformed museum guards of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi perform Sehgal's piece, also shown in the German pavillion of the 2005 Venice Biennale.

Olivier Messiaen

2008-12-24T13:51:00.000-08:00

Messiaen on birdsong (late 1960s?)

Composer Olivier Messiaen, whose compositions in the late 1950s and early 1960s often incorporated elements of birdsong, describes and mimes the nightingale’s song, as his second wife, pianist Yvonne Loriod, plays his own transcription on the piano.

Hotel Morphila Orchester

2008-12-08T23:08:00.000-08:00

What's in the brain (1979)

Founded in Vienna in 1978 by artists Peter Weibel and Loys Egg, Hotel Morphila Orchester plays "What's in the brain", based on William Shakespeare's Sonnet 108, in this Austrian television broadcast from 1979.

Pat O'Neill

2008-11-24T18:57:00.000-08:00

Saugus Series (1974)

Seven short 16mm vignettes, made up of meticulously assembled still lives, and displaying O'Neill's masterful use of optical printing.

Marcel Broodthaers

2008-11-23T17:20:00.000-08:00

Interview With A Cat (1970)
Click here

Recorded at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Düsseldorf, 1970

Mark Leckey

2008-11-23T16:59:00.001-08:00

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)

Using footage of discos, northern soul nights, and raves across Britain in the 70s, 80s and 90s, Leckey's film explores the ongoing subculture, and iconography, of nightlife, leisure, and consumption.

Charlemagne Palestine

2008-09-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

Schlingen Blaengen (2008)

Composer, and trained cantor, Charlemagne Palestine performs on the organ of the Lisbon Cathedral earlier this year.

Derek Bailey

2008-09-22T17:37:00.000-07:00

On the Edge (1992)

In this excerpt from the four-part, 55 minute film “On the Edge”, originally aired on Channel 4 TV in the UK in 1992, the late Derek Bailey, who wrote the series, talks about his views on improvised music, interspersed with clips of his wildly discontinuous yet fluidly creative playing---marked by the use of brevity, relentless invention, and wide melodic intervals.

Bailey’s obit from the Guardian.

Kurt Kren

2008-07-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

Sentimental Punk (1979)

"It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan. " Kurt Kren

Karlheinz Stockhausen

2008-06-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

Four Criteria of Electronic Music, 1972 (Excerpt)

This excerpt from Stockhausen's seminal, near-hypnotic lecture---complete with the composer's deft mimicry---focuses on the production of 'sounds,' and revolves around his central premise that electronic music should make use of sonorities not available to the voice or traditional instrumentation.

Chantal Akerman

2008-04-29T22:55:00.000-07:00

Hotel Monterey (1972)

Akerman's early feature, marked by the influence of structuralist film, explores the interior of a cheap New York hotel.

Harun Farocki

2008-04-29T22:44:00.000-07:00

The Interview (1998) (Excerpt)

"In the summer of 1996, we filmed application training courses in which one learns how to apply for a Job. School drop-outs, university graduates, people who have been retrained, the long-term unemployed, recovered drug addicts, and mid-level managers - all of them are supposed to Iearn how to market and sell themselves, a skill to which the term "self management" is applied. The self is perhaps nothing more than a metaphysical hook from which to hang a social identity. It was Kafka who Iikened being accepted for a job to entering the Kingdom of Heaven; the paths leading to both are completely uncertain. Today one speaks of getting a job with the greatest obsequiousness, but without any grand expectations." Harun Farocki

Rudolf Thome

2008-03-05T12:54:00.000-08:00

Rote Sonne (1969)

Trailer

Staring Uschi Obermaier, icon of the 1968 student-movement in Germany and one-time member of West Berlin's radical Kommune 1, Thome's second feature film revolves around four women whose own communal apartment is governed by a simple rule: male lovers must be killed after five days.

Emile Cohl

2008-02-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

Emile Cohl
Fantasmagoria (1908)

Emile Cohl's charming and surreal film, comprised of over 700 drawings, is considered the first fully animated film ever made.

Richard Long

2008-01-09T21:10:00.000-08:00

From Stones and flies: Richard Long in the Sahara by Philip Haas (1988)

British artist Richard Long draws rivers of the world in the deserts of North Africa.

Mary Ellen Bute

2007-12-15T10:20:00.000-08:00

Tarantella (1940)

As with many pioneer animators, Mary Ellen Bute is hardly known today, primarily because her films are not easily available in good prints. This was not always true. During a 25-year period, from 1934 until about 1959, the 11 abstract films she made played in regular movie theaters around the country, usually as the short with a first-run prestige feature, such as Mary of Scotland, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, or Hans Christian Andersen--which means that millions saw her work, many more than most other experimental animators.....Tarantella seems Mary Ellen's best film. Using an eccentric modern composition by Edwin Gershefski, Mary Ellen herself animated most of the imagery, using jagged lines to choreograph dissonant scales.
--William Moritz

Gordon Matta-Clark

2007-12-15T09:59:00.000-08:00

Fresh Kill (1972)

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Fresh Kill revolves around the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck at the eponymous landfill, and was shown as part of Documenta 5.

Ernie Gehr

2007-10-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

Serene Velocity (1970)

Ernie Gehr's structuralist masterpiece SERENE VELOCITY is a hypnotic film which is nothing more than a rapidly edited, rhythmic piece consisting of two shots of an office hallway (one long shot, one zoomed-in close up). Our persistence of vision makes us believe that this film is a perpetual zooming in and out from one end of a hallway to another. Rather, it is a carefully edited and timed film, which consistently cuts back and forth between these two shots. The result is a mesmerizing piece which, as it progresses, treats the eyes to much profundity out of something so simple. We begin to notice the perfect geometry of the composition as the lines of the hallway converge to the center. The film becomes some kind of cosmic heartbeat, as this meticulously timed work of art becomes visual music. There is no beginning, middle or end."---IMDB

Les Blank

2007-10-10T08:31:00.000-07:00

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)

An episode in Herzog's history of mock-heroic self-sacrifice [jumping into a cactus bush, walking from Munich to Paris in a blizzard], "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe" is a documentary short in which the German director fullfils his promise to Errol Morris that he would eat his shoe if Morris ever completed his first film (Gates of Heaven.)

The film features Herzog boiling his shoes (the ones he claims to have worn when he made the bet) in garlic and herbs for 5 hours. He eventually eats one of them before an audience at the premier of the film.

Blank went on to direct Burden of Dreams (1982), a feature-length documentary about the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

George Kuchar

2007-10-05T23:58:00.000-07:00

I, An Actress (1977)

George Kuchar, in typical form, outcamps and outacts [in his appropriately bad sense] his titular actress Barbara Lapsley in this low-fi, plotless and nearly themeless film 'about' directing.

John Zorn

2007-09-04T20:02:00.000-07:00

Cobra [1992]

John Zorn's improvisational game meets musical composition, Cobra is based on a loosely structured set of rules controlled by Zorn as 'prompter'. Working with a set of cues [as notations] on cards, and sets of basic rules corresponding to those cues, Zorn sets off an indeterminate play of instrumentation and improvisation. The basic form of the Cobra games works as follows:

Players raise hands to get the prompter's attention.
The prompter selects a player.
The selected player indicates the desired card by pointing to a body part that indicates the type of cue, and holds up the number of fingers indicating the specific cue to be given.
The prompter then shows the corresponding cue card to the ensemble---thus putting it into 'play'.
The ensemble performs according to the rule that is represented by the cue card.
This is repeated from until an ending cue is given.

Alexandr Hackenschmied

2007-09-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

Bezucelna prochazka (1930)

Bezucelna prochazka (Aimless Walk) in many ways inaugurated the avant-garde film movement in Czecholovakia, while also proposing early ideas of 'psychogeography' later developed by the Situationist movement. Alexandr Hackenschmied's first film, it made him a leading avant-garde photographer and filmmaker until he emigrated to the US in the late 1930s, marrying Maya Deren in 1942. The majority of the Hackenschmied archive was lost in World War II.

Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet

2007-05-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

En rachâchant (1982)

Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet have created some of the most intellectually demanding, formally austere, and yet politicized films in the history of postwar cinema. Prior to working with Huillet, his late wife and co-director, the French born Straub was an assistant to Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, and Robert Bresson. Their meeting in 1954 eventually resulted in a body of work of uncompromising rigour, defining not only New German Cinema in its attack on the conventions of film language and naturalistic acting, but the intellectual and formal potential of film art in general.

En rachâchant is based on Marguerite Duras’ story Ah! Ernesto, about a young boy who refuses to go to school because they teach him things he doesn't know.

Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen

2007-05-05T20:59:00.000-07:00

Helsinki Complaints Choir (2006)

Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collect the grievances and pleas of people in cities like Helsinki and turn them into affecting choral works in their ongoing "Complaints Choir" project.

Robert Breer

2007-04-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

69 (1968)

Robert Breer's career as an artist and animator spans over four decades, from his stop motion studies using an old Bolex 16mm camera, to his seminal animated films and large, site-specific installations. Since the 1950s, Breer's work has often focused on the mechanics of cinema---sometimes adapting the structure of flipbooks to film--- and has featured hand drawn 4x6 index cards that are composed into formalist, repetitive studies, such as '69'.

A Man and His Dog Out For Air (1957)

Joris Ivens (w/Mannus Franken)

2007-04-11T17:58:00.000-07:00

Regen (1929)

Joris Ivens captures Amsterdam in the rain with poetic simplicity. "Tough Ivens kept his camera within reach to film whenever it would rain, it rained so little that the film took much more time than anticipated"---Beeld en Geluid.

Iannis Xenakis

2007-04-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

Metastasis (1953-1954)

Metastasis is Iannis Xenakis' first major orchestral work, inspired by Einstein's conception of time, the composers own personal experience of war, and the mathematical ideas of Le Corbusier [whom Xenakis worked with as an architect]. The work calls for an orchestra of 65 players: 12 winds, 7 percussionists, and 46 strings, though no two performers play identical parts. The sound mass that defines the piece is thus created by each player performing a glissandi at different pitch levels, durations, and points, with the resulting score, followed in this video sequence, supposedly serving as the basis for the hyperbolic paraboloids of the Philips Pavilion.

Gaeudjiparl

2007-04-07T11:07:00.000-07:00

Mechanical Bird

Gaeudjiparl, aka Goodiepal [nee Kristian Vester] is a musician/performer who was born in a small town in the north of Denmark. Educated in Anthroposophy schools and reportedly a former pig farmer, he now lives in the Faroe Islands and performs with various small objects built by himself, such as miniature models of planets, and this sublime mechanical bird.

Bill Viola

2007-04-07T10:54:00.000-07:00

The Reflecting Pool (1977-1979)

"Movement and change in an otherwise still scene are limited to the reflections and ripples on the surface of a pond in the woods. Special video techniques form disparate layers of time into a final composite image, evoking a kind of baptism -- the emergence of the individual into the natural world." --original WGBH press release

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

2007-03-18T22:57:00.000-07:00

Das Kleine Chaos (1967)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second 16mm short--made while still a theatre director in Munich---shows the young filmmaker clearly under the influence of the French nouvelle vague [complete with a poster of Juliette Greco], yet already hinting at the recurring themes of his mature work. Theo (played by Christoph Roser, who financed the film in return for a staring role), Marite (Marite Greiselis), and Franz (played by Fassbinder) turn their love of American noir into a crime spree, even if one reflecting on the moral nature of violence and crime, and in typically Fassbinder fashion, the chaos of postwar culture [after breaking into a woman's house to rob her and putting a Wagner record on the phonograph, Fassbinder's character asks his hostage: "Do you love the Fuhrer?"]. Fassbinder himself appears under his frequent character alias of 'Franz'---inspired by his love of Alfred Doblin's novel 'Berlin Alexanderplatz.'

Paul Glabicki

2007-03-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

Five Improvisations (1979)

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An intricate series of hand-drawn animations--taking in a myriad of cinematic and cultural references---are arranged into five variations improvised during the act of shooting in Glabicki's film. An example of his diagrammatic style, it captures the filmmaker's emphasis on temporal and rhythmic play, as well as the generative focus of his drawings.

Gilbert & George

2007-02-19T18:50:00.000-08:00

Ten Commandments for Gilbert & George (1995)

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Thou shalt fight conformism
Thou shalt be the messenger of freedoms
Thou shalt make use of sex
Thou shalt reinvent life
Thou shalt grab the soul
Thou shalt give thy love
Thou shalt create artificial art
Thou shalt have a sense of purpose
Thou shalt not know exactly what thou dost, but thou shalt do it
Thou shalt give something back

Xander Marro and Matt Brinkman

2007-02-18T20:36:00.000-08:00

0106 (2006)
Selected by Lisa Oppenheim

To write "this film shows every object in the Dirt Palace, an art collective in Providence, Rhode Island," does not
even begin to describe Xander Marro and Matt Brinkman’s maniacal and anatomized document. This building is filled with stuff, found and made and pulled out of various dumpsters. To catalogue all the doll’s legs, mugs without handles, long ago ‘zines and letters, scraps of cloth, would be impossible. So instead they filmed each object for 1/24 of a second in this little film exploring a very domestic kind of psychedilia.

Martha Colburn

2007-02-18T20:30:00.000-08:00

Wrong Time Capsule (2006)
Selected by Lisa Oppenheim

Recently, Martha Colburn has amped up the political content of her stylistically raw and frenetic animations. Wrong Time Capsule, a not-so-MTV-friendly video she produced for the Bay Area band Deerhof, is a subversive and playful indictment of the commidification of a not-so-underground culture, as if to say, rock’n roll produces commodities and rebellion is one of the most valuable.

Kenneth Anger

2007-02-18T20:25:00.000-08:00

Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965)
Selected by Lisa Oppenheim

Pretty bikes, pretty boys and a girl group soundtrack to make you ache all over, this little film is usually thought of as a companion piece to Anger’s better-known Scorpio Rising. But the dark side here is more thoroughly sublimated, through the candy colored backdrops and shiny pomaded dos, and you get this aching feeling that all the buffing in the world will not make those bikes clean.

Owen Land

2007-02-16T15:03:00.001-08:00

Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970)
Selected by Lisa Oppenheim

In this seminal piece of structuralist film, Owen Land (nee George Landow) demythologizes the privileged position of dreams, shadows and the auteur in cinema, both experimental and “mainstream.” Dreams are only interesting if the audience is interested, shadows are always connected to bodies, not just displacements of light and, as Land tells us, “This film is about you, not the maker.”

John Akomfrah (and Black Audio Film Collective)

2007-02-11T18:04:00.000-08:00

Handsworth Songs (1986)
Selected by Lisa Oppenheim

More an experimental cinematic essay than a documentary, John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Collective’s Handsworth Songs (1986) is an erudite examination of race and class in grim Thatcherite Britain. Music becomes both a structuring framework of the film and a site of resistance. A 1988 quote from Michael O’Pray found in the program notes of a recent screening at Tate Britain seems to provide a particularly appropriate introduction to the film: 'The song, is a cultural form which can dig as deep as any analysis ... The poetry of song ... is a potent weapon…”
---Lisa Oppenheim

Claude Lelouch

2007-02-09T11:27:00.000-08:00

C'était un rendez-vous (1976)

French filmmaker Claude Lelouch (best known for his 1966 film A Man and a Woman) made C'était un rendez-vous by fixing a gyro-stabilised camera mount--which he was using for another film---to the front bumper of a car. The resulting eight-minute 140-mph drive through Paris at 5:30 AM is a single take with no editing, the length of the film limited by the camera reel.

The course starts in a tunnel of the Paris Périphérique, then past landmarks such as the Arc de Triomphe, Opéra Garnier, Place de la Concorde, Champs-Elysées, and the winding streets of Montmartre. The reckless speed is exacerbated by ignored red lights, one-way streets and center lines. Lelouch was arrested after the film was shown publicly, on the charge that his Ferrari 275 GTB, reportedly driven by a F-1 driver, was illegally driven at excessive speed and with no official permit.

Walter Ruttmann

2007-01-22T22:28:00.001-08:00

Lichtspiel Opus I (1921)

Like Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttmann was an early pioneer of experimental film in Germany. After studying architecture and having worked as a graphic designer, he began working in film in the early 1920s. "Opus I" was his first abstract short film. Ruttmann would often play the cello at screenings of his films, and pioneered several animation techniques, including the use of wax plates. Ruttman later went on to work with Leni Riefenstahl, editing "Olympiad" in 1936, and was killed during World War II while making a newsreel.

Mara Mattuschka

2007-01-22T22:12:00.000-08:00

Kaiser Schnitt (1987)

Sofia born, Vienna based filmmaker Mara Mattuschka has made her body both a medium and a site in her tenebrous and theatrical short films since the early 80s. Through her alter-ego Mimi Minus, she has herself shaved, wrapped in fabric, deformed via manipulated effects, or as in the case of Kaiser Schnitt, operated on.

Abbas Kiarostami

2007-01-13T16:35:00.000-08:00

Two Solutions for One Problem (1975)

Two Solutions for One Problem is one of the acclaimed Iranian director's first shorts, made after his work as a director of TV commercials and produced by a state organisation called the Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, or Kanun. A moralistic, pedagogical tale of two schoolboys who get into a fight after one of them, Dara, returns a borrowed book with a torn cover, the film was made two years before Kiarostami's debut feature The Report [1977].

Peter Greenaway

2007-01-07T23:54:00.000-08:00

Windows (1974)

In a small English country parish in 1973, several people have died as a result of falling from windows in Greenaway's short film. Greenaway had learned of stories from apartheid South Africa involving political prisoners dying in suspicious cases of 'defenestration'. His satirical faux documentary about window washers and aeronautics students--keeping with Greenaway's highly dense but false historical narratives--was made partly in his own country home and features the music of Jean-Philippe Rameau as its soundtrack.

Germaine Dulac

2007-01-07T23:31:00.000-08:00

The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928)

Along with being a central figure in the French avant-garde of the 1920s, Germaine Dulac was its only female director and the first decidedly feminist filmmaker, her debut film Mort du soleil (Death of the Sun, 1921) centered around a young female doctor torn between her career and the demands of family life.

Dulac had been a photographer and writer for feminist journals at the turn of the century, and founded her own production company, focused mostly on melodramas, in the mid-1910s. She was also active as a critic and theorist, writing early formative texts on avant-garde film.

The first surrealist film, The Seashell and the Clergyman was based on a scenario by Antonin Artaud, and made a year before Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.

Part II

Part III

Peter Tscherkassky

2007-01-03T10:06:00.000-08:00

Manufraktur (1985)

Manufraktur was Tscherkassky's first 35mm film, made from found-footage manipulated on an optical printer as well as sequences of still film.

Sergei Eisenstein

2007-01-02T22:32:00.000-08:00

Dnevik Glumova (1923)

Eisenstein's first film, made at the dawn of Soviet cinema, Dnevik Glumova is comprised of a series of short filmed sketches--part Futurist, part comic fantasy--that were inserted into his stage production of Alexander Ostrovsky's Tartuffe-like 19th century play "Even A Wise Man Stumbles."

René Laloux

2007-01-02T11:30:00.000-08:00

Les Temps Mort (1964)
with Roland Topor

A satirical if disturbing meditation on death and humanity, the late René Laloux's Les Temps Mort features the cross-hatched, macabre drawings of illustrator and writer Roland Topor, whose novel The Tenant was adapted by Roman Polanski in 1976. The duo is best known for their classic film, "Fantastic Planet."

Wolf Vostell

2006-12-29T22:15:00.001-08:00

Sun In Your Head (1963)

Sun In Your Head was first screened on September 14, 1963 as part of a larger 'happening' by Wolf Vostell called "9 Decollagen," which took place in nine different locations in Wuppertal, Germany. The film is based on Vostell’s principle of ‘décollage,' but since no commercially available moving image technology provided the playback aspects of video at the time, Vostell had to film distorted images off a TV screen and later compose the temporal sequence.

Maya Deren

2006-12-27T14:36:00.000-08:00

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)
(with Talley Beatty)

"The movement of the dancer creates a geography that never was. With the turn of the foot, he makes neighbors of distant places. Being a film ritual, it is achieved not in spatial terms alone, but in terms of a Time created by the camera."
--Maya Deren

Click here to read Erin Brannigan's essay on Maya Deren and the history of film utilising choreographic content and form.

René Viénet

2006-12-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)

"

"Imagine a kung fu flick in which the martial artists spout Situationist aphorisms about conquering alienation while decadent bureaucrats ply the ironies of a stalled revolution. This is what you’ll encounter in René Viénet’s outrageous refashioning of a Chinese fisticuff film. "
---Pacific Film Archive

Wojciech Bruszewski

2006-12-17T22:22:00.000-08:00

Matchbox (1975)

Matchbox is deceptively simple, consisting of only two brief shots: a hand striking a matchbox against a ledge, in the exact middle of the shot, and part of the rest of the window. Yet while the cut and the diegetic sound are synchronous at the beginning of the film, subsequent frame shifts create a subtle drift of time, eventually accumulating into the displacement of sound and image.

Popol Vuh

2006-12-14T01:02:00.000-08:00

Improvisation (1971)

Keeping with the sound-based, durational part of the theme, here is a modular improvisation by Florian Fricke and Holger Trulzsch, pioneers of electronic music as Popol Vuh, from 1971.

Len Lye

2006-12-14T00:53:00.000-08:00

A Colour Box (1935)

New-Zealand born Len Lye, who literally worked his way to London on a steamship in the 1920s, made A Colour Box, the first direct film screened to a general audience and widely considered one of the most important works in the history of animation, by painting his signature abstract patterns directly onto film.

Owen Land (ne George Landow)

2006-12-14T00:36:00.000-08:00

Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc (1965-1966)

With typical humor and mocking charm, Land explores the material qualities of celluloid film, turning its imperfections into content, in this early film, made from a brief loop of a Kodak colour test.

Lutz Mommartz

2006-11-27T22:28:00.000-08:00

Tango Durch Deutschland (1980)

Click here to watch.

3 Glaeser (1968)

Haircut (1974)

Soziale Plastik (1969)

Lutz Mommartz is a singular presence in the history of cinema, even if his remarkable body of work is virtually unknown in the US. A brilliant maverick director, as conceptually rigorous as he is touching and humorous, Mommartz has continued to make films of both poetic and intellectual complexity---including studies, abstract pieces, features, and documentaries--since the 1960s.

Tango Durch Deutschland is an ironic, full-length drama that plays on the b-movie stardom of American actor Eddie Constantine, less known for his starring roles in 50s film noir than his parody of them in Godard's "Alphaville." In Mommartz's aleatory film, Constantine, playing himself, is plagued by his own typecast alterego, Lemmy Caution.

In 3 Glaeser, three men meet and communicate only with the edge of glasses.

Soziale Plastik is a 1969 film by the Düsseldorf filmmaker, comprised of an eleven minute close up of the face of Joseph Beuys.

Abigail Child

2006-11-26T20:03:00.000-08:00

Perils (1985-1987)

Abigail Child's long-standing focus on gender and popular culture, as well as her masterful use of found footage, is evident in "Perils", a playful silent film parody with a chaotic, layered soundtrack, and ironic use of film cliches. Click here for more info.

Paul and Marlene Kos

2006-11-21T07:28:00.000-08:00

Lightning (1977)

Paul and Marlene Kos turn the "If a tree falls in the woods..." conundrum on its head in this seminal tape filmed inside a car.

Structured by a repetitive mantra---"When I look for the lightning, it never strikes. When I look away, it does"---the piece places the viewer in the privileged position that defines the visual logic of cinema, in a literal circumscribing of the act of seeing. Click here to watch.

Hollis Frampton

2006-11-19T23:33:00.000-08:00

Nostalgia (1971)
[Excerpt]

Hollis Frampton's 1971 short film, (nostalgia), is not only one of his best and most focused films, but a masterwork of the genre, exemplary in its rupture of conventional narrative and in the formal juxtaposition of word and image (much like in his masterpiece "Zorns Lemma"). The film revolves around twelve still images, each accompanied by voice-over commentary, though sound and image are continually out of sync. As part of an autobiographical account of his transformation from photographer to filmmaker, Frampton burns photographs on a hot-plate, each shot lasting as long as it takes the image to burn.

Lemon (1969)

Frampton's "Lemon", with commentary by Frampton and Robert Gardner.

Click here for an excerpt from "Zorns Lemma".

Joseph Beuys

2006-11-19T23:13:00.000-08:00

Sonne Statt Reagan (1982)

Joseph Beuys attacks Ronald Reagan's arms policy in this 1982 music video for his 'pop' single, "Sonne Statt Reagan."

Ed Emshwiller

2006-11-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

Sunstone (1979)

Ed Emshwiller's "Sunstone" is a pioneering, three-minute 3-D computer animation from 1979.

Viking Eggeling

2006-11-12T21:04:00.000-08:00

Symphonie Diagonale (1924)

From early work with Hans Richter, Swedish filmmaker Viking Eggeling began developing a musical-cubist style of cinema in the summer of 1923, when he making the paper cut-outs and then tin foil figures that make up Symphonie Diagonale; he died sixteen days after it's public premiere in Berlin two years later.

Charles and Ray Eames

2006-11-12T21:00:00.000-08:00

SX-70 (1972)

Ostensibly a commercial for Polaroid, SX-70 transcends its intended use through the unique aesthetic acuity of Charles and Ray Eames.

Georges Schwizgebel

2006-11-10T00:03:00.000-08:00

Le Vol d'Icare (1974)

Schwizgebel's pioneering animation looks more at home today than it ever did in the early 1970s.

Peter Kubelka

2006-11-09T23:32:00.000-08:00

Adebar (1957)

Adebar is the first of Peter Kubelka's 'metric films', in which every element of the composition is precisely ordered and in relation to the gestalt. The film is made up of single units---13, 26 and 52 frames long---which are subjected to a complex rule-system, including a strict use of positive and negative space, that determines their structure within the film.

Norman McLaren

2006-11-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

Scherzo (A non-objective study)
1939

Hand drawn onto 35mm film, this early study in color hints at McLaren's coming work in animation, and his poignant, classic films like Neighbors (1952), Blinkity Blank (1955), A Chairy Tale (1957) and La Merle (1958).

A Chairy Tale (1957)

Other McLaren films:
Stars and Stripes (1940)
Neighbors (1952)
Blinkity Blank (1955)
Synchromy (1971)

Groupe Medvedkine

2006-11-08T23:27:00.000-08:00

Nouvelle Société No. 5 (1969)

The Medvedkine group united young workers with filmmakers in the spirit of the post-’68 era, in an attempt to document the condition of workers at factories like Rhodia in Besançon, the Peugeot facility in Sochaux, and Kelton-Timex watch factory. The « Nouvelle Société » series captures the group's attempt to develop the revolutionary potential of cinema---with a logic akin to that of television.

"Medvedkin was a Russian filmmaker who, in 1936 and with the means that were proper to his time (35mm film, editing table, and film lab installed in the train), essentially invented television: shoot during the day, print and edit at night, show it the next day to the people you filmed (and who often participated in the editing). I think that it’s this fabled and long forgotten bit of history (Medvedkin isn’t even mentioned in Georges Sadoul’s book, considered in its day the Soviet Cinema bible) that underlies a large part of my work - in the end, perhaps, the only coherent part. To try to give the power of speech to people who don’t have it, and, when it’s possible, to help them find their own means of expression. The workers I filmed in 1967 in Rhodesia, just like the Kosovars I filmed in 2000, had never been heard on television: everyone was speaking on their behalf, but once you no longer saw them on the road, bloody and sobbing, people lost interest in them. To my great surprise, I once found myself explaining the editing of Battleship Potemkin to a group of aspiring filmmakers in Guinea-Bissau, using an old print on rusty reels; now those filmmakers are having their films selected for competition in Venice...."

Chris Marker

Marie Menken

2006-11-08T21:53:00.001-08:00

Glimpse of the Garden (1957)

Marie Menken's noted but rarely seen five minute film is a classic of experimental cinema. In contrast to the avant-gardist gestures of many of her contemporaries, Menken offers a simple yet expressionistic view of a garden accompanied by the sound of birdsongs.

Raul Ruiz

2006-11-07T22:44:00.000-08:00

Colloque de Chiens (1977)

Chilean expatriate director Raul Ruiz weaves a lurid, circular tale of murder and fate in this 20 minute film, comprised mostly of still photos.

Taking its title from the series of barking dogs interspersed throughout the film, the narrative centers on Monique, a woman who descends into a world of exploitation, betrayal, and eventually, murder. Told through a combination of voice-over narration, still images, and passages of 35mm film, it makes deft use of repetition, humor, deadpan narration, and visual economy to create a sense of fatal recurrence in this tabloid-inspired melodrama.

Martin Arnold

2006-11-07T21:48:00.003-08:00

Cinemnesis (1989-1998)

Collecting Martin Arnold's seminal distortions of popular cinema, Cinemnesis includes Piece touchee (1989), Passage a l'acte (1993) and Alone: Life wastes Andy Hardy (1997). Throughout the three, the Austrian filmmaker explores part of what Benjamin called the 'optical unconscious', revealing the repressed violence underneath the world portrayed by Hollywood cinema (and like the Ruiz film, the emphasis is also on repetition and circularity.)

Toshio Matsumoto

2006-11-07T09:05:00.000-08:00

Phantom (1975)

Originally trained as a painter, Toshio Mastsumoto is a pioneer of avant-garde documentary, experimental film, multimedia, and video art, and his work has been influential across several disciplines and media.

Walerian Borowczyk

2006-11-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

Les Astronautes (1959)
Dir. Walerian Borowczyk [co-directed by Chris Marker]

Renowned Polish animator and erotic film director Walerian Borowczyk--a key influence on directors like Terry Gilliam--is at his best in this Chris Marker co-directed short about an eager inventor and his homemade spaceship. Click here to watch (AVI file).

Click here for a critical essay on Borowczyk.