before cinema

My Mother Paused By My Father/Usama Alshaibi

2011-09-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Usama Alshaibi (Arabic: أسامة الشيبي‎) (born in Baghdad, Iraq on November 20, 1969) is an Iraqi-American independent filmmaker and visual artist..."

My Mother Paused By My Father from Usama Alshaibi on Vimeo.

MPG: Motion Picture Genocide/Robert Banks

2011-09-17T19:21:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "MPG: Motion Picture Genocide is a 1997 film (revised 2002) by Robert Banks. It is an examination of 100 years of African Americans being murdered in movies..."

Re:WORDS/Everynone

2011-09-10T13:08:00.000-07:00

Everynone is a production company located in New York & Los Angeles, founded by Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante, Julius Metoyer III.

About "Re:WORDS": "We decided to reword our film "WORDS" using exclusively clips from YouTube." (view more)

Re:WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

Shout/Jeff Perkins

2011-09-02T18:36:00.000-07:00

Jeff Perkins’ short film “Shout” was created for the 1966 Fluxus Film Festival held at the Cinamatec Theater on West 41st Street in New York. This silent 2 ½ minute film shows a close crop of two men in profile having an argument. Their wild facial expressions break in and out of the camera frame.

Mommy Mommy Where's My Brain/Jon Moritsugu

2011-08-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Jon Moritsugu (born 1965 in Honolulu, Hawaii) is an American underground filmmaker. Moritsugu's films are defined by their "lo-fi" aesthetic, and are often shot on very poor, 16mm film stock to give them a homemade, muddled quality..."

Without Qualities/ Claude Pérès

2011-08-15T04:36:00.001-07:00

''The TAZ is an uprising, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it."

Starring Myriam Brabant + Heike Fiedler + Natal Haziza + Claude Pérès + Michael Salerno + Sharon Tate + Voin de Voin + Ann Liv Young

Directed By Claude Pérès

Website http://www.without-qualities.com

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y/Johan Grimonprez

2011-08-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "Johan Grimonprez was born in Roeselare, Belgium in 1962. He studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York.

Grimonprez achieved international acclaim with his film essay, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. With its premiere at Centre Pompidou and Documenta X in Kassel in 1997, it eerily foreshadowed the events of September 11th. The film tells the story of airplane hijackings since the 1970s and how these changed the course of news reporting. The movie consists of recycled images taken from news broadcasts, Hollywood movies, animated films and commercials. As a child of the first TV generation, the artist mixes reality and fiction in a new way and presents history as a multi-perspective dimension open to manipulation..."

Candy Is Dandy/Russ Forster

2011-07-22T18:58:00.000-07:00

ZINEWIKI: "Russ Forster is a writer and documentary filmmaker living in Chicago. He is the publisher of the zine 8-Track Mind and has been a contributor to Roctober, Crimewave USA, Hard Times, and other zines..."

The Craven Sluck/Mike Kuchar

2011-07-15T18:48:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Mike Kuchar (born August 31, 1942, New York City) is an American underground filmmaker and actor.[1] His films are notable for the low-budget, high-camp/pop aesthetic that influenced subsequent artists such as Andy Warhol, John Waters, and David Lynch. Raised in the Bronx, he made his first films as a teenager in the 1950s with his twin brother George Kuchar and participated in New York’s underground film scene in the 1960s and 1970s..."

Now/Santiago Álvarez

2011-07-06T18:42:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Santiago Álvarez Román (March 18, 1919– May 20, 1998) was a Cuban filmmaker. He wrote and directed many documentaries about Cuban and American culture. His "nervous montage" technique of using "found materials," such as Hollywood movie clips, cartoons, and photographs[1], is considered a precursor to the modern video clip..."

Saila/Julia Ostertag

2011-06-28T18:37:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "born in Stuttgart... Lives in Berlin and Hanover..." website...

the third body/Peggy Ahwesh

2011-06-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Peggy Ahwesh (born 1954 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American avant-garde filmmaker and experimental video artist. She received her B.F.A. from Antioch College. Ahwesh's work has been shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, the Balie Theater, Amsterdam, Filmmuseum..."

the third body from Peggy Ahwesh on Vimeo.

Altair/Lewis Klahr

2011-06-09T18:20:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "Lewis Klahr is an experimental filmmaker who specializes in cut-and-paste animation techniques using found photos and illustrations. His work is in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. When not working on his own films, Klahr has created the animated openings for TV shows, music videos and commercials. He is also currently a film and screenwriting professor at the California Institute of the Arts."

Removed/Naomi Uman

2011-06-01T18:15:00.000-07:00

IMDb: "Starting with a piece of vintage porn, filmmaker Naomi Uman painstakingly removed each female figure from the footage using nail polish remover, leaving a striking absence where there's usually a fleshy presence. Uman's celebrated film is a smart retort to pornography's obsessive gaze at the female body."

Middletown/Philip Botti

2011-05-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

IMDb: "Filmmaker Philip Botti sets out in his hometown of Middletown, New Jersey to make his first film for free with the help of a super-electronic's store 33 day money back gurantee return policy on video cameras. With camera in hand, Botti documents his oddball group of friends and family: including; a couch potato mother, a chemically imbalanced/g-string wearing hot body contestant, Middletown's number one sex crazed son, a talk show addict and a guy named Sweet Lou."

Very Nice, Very Nice/Arthur Lipsett

2011-05-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

WIKI: In the 1960s he was employed as an animator by the National Film Board of Canada. Lipsett's particular passion was sound. He collected pieces of sound from a variety of sources and fit them together to create an interesting auditory sensation. After playing one of these creations to friends, they suggested that Lipsett combine images with the sound collage. The result is a 7 minute long film Very Nice, Very Nice which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects in 1962. Despite not winning the Oscar, this film brought Lipsett considerable praise from critics and directors.

Rose Hobart/Joseph Cornell

2011-05-09T02:38:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Rose Hobart (1936) is a short, 19-minute experimental film created by the artist Joseph Cornell, who cut and re-edited the Hollywood film East of Borneo into one of America's most famous surrealist short films. Cornell was fascinated by the star of East of Borneo, an actress named Rose Hobart, and named his short film after her. The piece consists of snippets from East of Borneo combined with shots from a documentary of an eclipse.

Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man/Ron Rice

2011-04-30T15:16:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1963) is an experimental film by Ron Rice. It stars Winifred Bryan as the Queen of Sheba and Taylor Mead as the Atom Man. Featured players are Ron Rice, Julian Beck, Judith Malina, Jack Smith, and Jonas Mekas. Rice died before the editing was complete, so Mead finished the project in 1981.

"The film describes, poetically, a way of living. The film is a protest which is violent, childish, and sincere-a protest against an industrial world based on the cycle of production and consumption." --Albert Moravia, Rome L'Espresso.

watch here

Les Mains Négatives/Marguerite Duras

2011-04-21T21:52:00.000-07:00

France | 1978 | 18mins | 16mm
Les Mains Negative was shot from the window of a moving car in the early hours of the morning, during a popular holiday season. The deserted boulevards of Paris are punctuated by interspersed groups of dark-skinned workers, stray prostitutes and vagabonds.
Duras alternates between speaking to a man who painted a prehistoric stencil of hand (main négative) or talking as if she were that man...

狂った一頁/Teinosuke Kinugasa

2011-04-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

WIKI: A Page of Madness (狂った一頁, Kurutta Ippēji or Kurutta Ichipeiji) is a silent film by Japanese film director Teinosuke Kinugasa, made in 1926. It was lost for fifty years until being rediscovered by Kinugasa in his storehouse in 1971. The film is the product of an avant garde group of artists in Japan known as the Shinkankaku-ha (or School of New Perceptions) who tried to overcome naturalistic representation.

The film takes place in an asylum. Although cut together in an ever maddening maelstrom, the film loosely tells the story of the janitor of the asylum. His wife is one of the patients. One day their daughter shows up at the asylum to tell her mother about her engagement. This sets off a number of subplots and flashbacks which stitch together the family history.

Vase de Noces/Thierry Zéno

2011-04-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Vase de Noces (1974) is a Belgian arthouse film directed by Thierry Zéno and stars Dominique Garny.

The film deals openly, and sometimes graphically, with bestiality, and is informally known as The Pig Fucking Movie. It also features real animal killings and coprophagia, and has been labeled obscene by many sources, notably by the OFLC of Australia.

Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain/Tony Conrad

2011-03-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Tony Conrad (born Anthony S. Conrad in 1940 in Concord, New Hampshire) is an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer.

ABOUT: The performance begins with a violin drone from Conrad, punctuated by a slight glitch whenever his bow reverses direction. O’Rourke starts to add resounding bass notes, first irregularly, later settling into a steady pulse. The piece is “Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain,” composed in the early seventies.

Cuadecuc, vampir/Pere Portabella

2011-03-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Vampir-Cuadecuc is a 1970 experimental feature film by Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella.

The entire film is photographed on high contrast black & white film stock, which gives it the appearance of a degraded film print, evoking early Expressionist horror films such as F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu or Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr. It was shot on the set of Jesus Franco's Count Dracula, starring Christopher Lee and Herbert Lom. The sound track is by frequent Portabella collaborator Carles Santos, and the only spoken dialogue in the film appears only in the last scene, which features Lee reading from Bram Stoker's original novel.

Landscape Suicide/James Benning

2011-03-04T08:52:00.000-08:00

ABOUT: "The murderers in James Benning's LANDSCAPE SUICIDE are a paranoiac teenage girl and a taciturn Wisconsin farmer. The reconstructive narratives take the viewer through the slants of minds in disturbance, through the ambiguities that surround any act of violence. Both Bernadette Protti, who killed a more popular classmate with a kitchen knife, and Edward Gein, who shot a storekeeper's wife and then took her body home and cut it up, provide exemplars of 'I couldn't stop.' The homicides allow Benning to deal in emotion that is external to him (yet deeply felt), while imbuing his trademark 'still' images of roads, trucks, billboards, buildings and trees with newly charged meaning. ... As strong as Benning's photography is, it's the talking head sequences that prove most chilling. The power of Rhonda Bell's portrayal of Protti is such that there are moments when we're convinced she's the real killer. So, too, with Elion Sucher's Gein, who looks like he's been struck between the eyes with a heavy object, his head so caved-in by dementia. There is no actual violence here - save the disembowelment of a deer - but LANDSCAPE SUICIDE leaves you feeling like a witness nonetheless." - Katherine Dieckman, The Village Voice

A Fire in My Belly / David Wojnarowicz

2011-02-19T12:17:00.000-08:00

David Wojnarowicz (September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.

A Fire in My Belly was made by Wojnarowicz from footage that he made while visiting Mexico. His use of powerful and sometimes brutal imagery expresses his suffering from AIDS and his need to speak out against those who oppress the afflicted.

Controversy:

In November 2010, G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian, removed Wojnarowicz's short silent film A Fire in My Belly from the exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery after complaints from the Catholic League and Rep. John Boehner. One segment of the film shows ants crawling over a crucifix.

In response, The Andy Warhol Foundation, which had co-sponsored the exhibition, announced that it would not fund future Smithsonian projects, while several institutions, including SFMOMA and Tate Modern, scheduled showings of the removed work.

Человек с киноаппаратом/Dziga Vertov

2011-02-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

WIKI: Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov.

This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

(nostalgia)/Hollis Frampton

2011-02-04T17:31:00.000-08:00

WIKI: (nostalgia), is a 38 minute 1971 film by artist Hollis Frampton (1936–1984). The film is composed of still black and white photographs taken by Frampton during his early artistic explorations which are slowly burned on the element of a hot plate, while the soundtrack offers personal comments on the content of the images, read by fellow artist Michael Snow. Each comment/story is heard in succession before the related photograph appears onscreen, thus causing the viewer to actively engage with the 'past' and 'present' moments as presented within the film.

Borderline/Kenneth MacPherson

2011-01-25T17:20:00.000-08:00

WIKI: Borderline is a 1930 experimental silent film by Kenneth MacPherson and the Pool Group, starring Paul Robeson. In the film two couples-White and Black-intersect with racial values, each other, and the small town in which they find themselves. The Pool Group consisted of Winfred Ellerman, her bisexual husband Kenneth McPherson and her lover (and Kenneth MacPherson's), the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Borderline was the last film that the Pool Group would complete before disbanding and has become a classic of early experimental cinema.

Le Sang d'un Poète/Jean Cocteau

2011-01-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

WIKI: The Blood of a Poet (French: Le Sang d'un Poete) (1930) is an avant-garde film directed by Jean Cocteau and financed by Charles, Vicomte de Noailles. Photographer Lee Miller made her only film appearance in this movie, and it also features an appearance by the famed aerialist Barbette.[1] It is the first part of the Orphic Trilogy, which is continued in Orphée (1950) and was concluded with Testament of Orpheus (1960).

Decasia/Bill Morrison

2011-01-04T17:01:00.000-08:00

WIKI: Decasia is a 2002 found footage film by Bill Morrison, featuring an original score by Michael Gordon. The film is a meditation on old, decaying silent films and is similar in spirit to Lyrical Nitrate. It begins and ends with scenes of a dervish and is bookended with old footage showing how film is processed. Some of the deterioration was enhanced with computers to create more meaningful abstract imagery.

The Hart of London/Jack Chambers.

2010-12-19T16:27:00.000-08:00

WIKI: The Hart of London is a 1970 experimental Canadian film directed by Jack Chambers. Stan Brakhage proclaimed it as "one of the greatest films ever made". Shot in black and white and colour, the film is preoccupied with the tensions between nature and the city of London, Ontario.

Ten seconds film/Bruce Conner

2010-12-14T16:18:00.000-08:00

WIKI: Bruce Conner (November 18, 1933 – July 7, 2008) was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines.

His innovative technique of skillfully montaged shots from pre-existing borrowed or found footage can be seen in his first film A MOVIE (1958). His subsequent films are most often fast-paced collages of found footage or of footage shot by Conner; however, he made numerous films, including most notably CROSSROADS, his 30 plus minute meditation on the atom bomb, that are almost achingly deliberate in their pace. Conner was among the first to use pop music for film sound tracks. His films have inspired generations of filmmakers, and are now considered to be the precursors of the music video genre. When told of his impact on music videos, Conner would reply, "don't blame me."

24 Hour Psycho/Douglas Gordon

2010-12-04T16:11:00.000-08:00

WIKI: 24 Hour Psycho is a film made and produced by the British artist Douglas Gordon in 1993. The film consists entirely of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho slowed down to approximately two frames a second, rather than the usual 24. As a result it lasts for exactly 24 hours, rather than the original 109 minutes. The film was an important work in Gordon's early career, and is said to introduce themes common to his work, such as "recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light." Gordon would show the film to interested viewers in his own bedroom.

Deux fois/Jackie Raynal

2010-11-27T16:02:00.000-08:00

WIKI: Deux fois is a 1968 experimental film by Jackie Raynal. It is one of the most notable of the Zanzibar Films, a group of feature-length experimental work made from 1968 to 1970 with the financing of Sylvina Boissonnas. It is also considered a landmark of Feminist filmmaking. Raynal shot the film in nine days in Barcelona, Spain, casting a man she had met there, Francisco Viader, as one of the leads.

Trash Humpers/ Harmony Korine

2010-11-12T02:40:00.000-08:00

WIKI: "Trash Humpers is a 2009 American drama film directed by Harmony Korine. Using a visual style that mimics a worn VHS home video, the film features a "loser-gang cult-freak collective" and their whereabouts in Nashville, Tennessee."

WEBSITE

TRASH HUMPERS TRAILER from Trash Humpers on Vimeo.

Infidèles (Unfaithful)/Claude Pérès

2010-10-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "Director Claude Pérès takes viewers on a haunting journey with this groundbreaking drama.

The premise is simple: Pérès and a man he's never met will sleep together while the cameras roll. No contract, no film crew, no boundaries. The end result is a film that challenges viewers to look into the heart of human desire.

There’s palpable tension as "the director" (Pérès) and "the actor" engage in conversation and gradually give in to the film’s unusual and unpredictable scenario. Pérès loosely structures the encounter as an interview in which he poses piercing questions to his onscreen lover, himself, and the audience.

It’s is the kind of film that seeps into the viewers’ subconscious and rattles their comfort levels.

After watching Unfaithful, audiences will never look at cinema the same way again."

Website

The Lead Shoes/Sidney Peterson

2010-10-24T15:07:00.000-07:00

WIKI: The Lead Shoes (1949) is an experimental or surrealist film directed by Sidney Peterson at Workshop 20 at the San Francisco Art Institute. The film was made using distorting lenses.

On December 30, 2009, it was selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant and will be preserved for all time.

The Lead Shoes (1949)
envoyé par Lost_Shangri_La_Horizon. - Regardez des web séries et des films.

The lollipop generation/G.B. Jones

2010-10-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

WIKI: G. B. Jones is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, musician, and publisher of zines based in Toronto, Canada. Her drawings have been featured at galleries around the world, and her films screened at numerous film festivals, both in Canada and abroad.

The Lollipop Generation is an underground experimental film. "Shot on Super 8 and video, The Lollipop Generation takes these tools of the traditional home movie and uses them to make a fucked up family film." The film was made over a period of 13 years, "one Super-8 reel at a time", whenever the director could afford to buy another cartridge of film. In the end, the Toronto band Kids on TV organized a benefit so that GB Jones could finish it.

HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA/Jean-Luc Godard

2010-10-02T14:38:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "The densest of Godard's films, Histoire(s) du cinéma is an examination of the history of the concept of cinema and how it relates to the 20th century; in this sense, it can also be considered a critique of the 20th century and how it perceives itself. The project is considered the major work of the late period of Godard's career; it is alternately described as an essay and a poem."

Tomato Kecchappu Kôtei/ Shuji Terayama

2010-09-22T06:46:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Shūji Terayama (寺山修司, Terayama Shūji?, December 10, 1935—May 4, 1983) was an avant-garde Japanese poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. According to many critics and supporters[1], he was one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan.

Emperor Tomato Ketchup: A young boy is the emperor of a country in which children have overthrown the adults.

Tromeo and Juliet/ Lloyd Kaufman

2010-09-11T06:41:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Tromeo and Juliet is a 1996 independent transgressive comedy film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet from Troma Entertainment. The film was directed by Lloyd Kaufman and co-directed by James Gunn, who also wrote the film's screenplay.

The film is more or less a faithful adaptation of the play except with the addition of extreme amounts of Troma-esque sexuality and violence. The title of the film is a portmanteau of "Troma" and "Romeo & Juliet".

Sentimental Punk/ Kurt Kren

2010-09-02T06:32:00.000-07:00

WIKI:

Kurt Kren (September 20, 1929 - died in Vienna on June 23, 1998) was an Austrian avantgarde filmmaker. He is best known for his involvement with the Vienna Aktionists and the group of films that resulted.

Shabondama Elegy/ Aryan Kaganof

2010-08-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Aryan Kaganof (born Ian Kerkhof) is a South African film maker, novelist, poet and fine artist. In 1999 he changed his name to Aryan Kaganof.

Le sexe enragé de la fée sanguinaire/Roland Lethem

2010-08-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Roland Lethem (born 1942) is a Belgian filmmaker and writer.

Influenced at his beginnings by Bunuel, Cocteau, the surrealists and by the Japanese cinema (Seijun Suzuki, Ishirô Honda, Koji Wakamatsu, Yoko Ono), stunned by the Festival of the film expérimental of Knokke in 1967 and by May 1968, Roland Lethem wants to push the people to look at the things of which they say they are freed, it's to say to place them in front of their responsabilities. Even if sometimes the results leaves much to be desired, the idea of each one of his films is seductive and exemplary. A fact is certain, his films are disturbing, they are sometimes unpleasant to look at.

Fame Whore/ Jon Moritsugu

2010-08-10T15:43:00.000-07:00

IMDb: This film involves three interwoven stories with the only seeming connection being the delusions of the involved leads. In the first element of the film, a hot-tempered world tennis star loses endorsement contracts when the press outs him even though he claims the report is false. In the second, a talent-less woman struggles to make it in the world of fashion design or the music video business. In the last, an animal activist runs a dog-adoption agency and has an imaginary friend who appears in a St. Bernard suit. Written by John Sacksteder

I Was a Teenage Serial Killer/Sarah Jacobson

2010-08-02T15:34:00.000-07:00

WIKI: I Was a Teenage Serial Killer is an underground no budget film written and directed by "The Queen of Underground Film", Sarah Jacobson. It is a short black and white film of a 19 year old girl who is sick of sexist men and kills them. It was Jacobson's first film and it was released through her own company, Station Wagon Productions.

Sins of the Fleshapoids/the Kuchar Brothers

2010-07-20T15:31:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Sins of the Fleshapoids is a 1965 underground film directed by Mike Kuchar. It is a low-budget, campy sci-fi movie about an android revolt a million years in the future after humans have become too lazy and selfish to take care of themselves. The film was a major influence on cult director John Waters who has said that Sins of the Fleshapoids "really shows what an underground movie was."

Blood of the Beasts/Georges Franju

2010-07-10T02:22:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des bêtes) is a 1949 short French documentary film written and directed by Georges Franju. Blood of the Beasts was Franju's first film and is narrated by Georges Hubert and Nicole Ladmiral.

Franju's film contrasts peaceful scenes of Parisian suburbia with scenes from a slaughterhouse. The film documents the slaughtering of a horse, sheep, and calves; once the horse is stunned by a pistol, it is bled and butchered. The film is narrated without emotive language."

Recreation/Robert Breer

2010-07-01T02:15:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "A founding member of the American avant-garde, Robert Breer (b. 1926) has been working at the forefront of experimental animation for over fifty years.

Recreation
Directed by Robert Breer, Appearing in Person
US 1956, 16mm blow-up to 35mm, color, 2 min.

Featuring a commentary by Noel Burch (in nonsense French), Recreation's rapid-fire montage of single-frame images of incredible density and intensity has been compared to contemporary Beat poetry."

In The Street/Helen Levitt

2010-06-27T02:08:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "In the Street is a short 1948 silent film shot in New York City directed and edited by American photographer Helen Levitt, assisted by novelist and critic James Agee and fellow photographer Janice Loeb. In the Street was shot with small 18mm hidden cameras and documents the grim realities of Harlem street-life, especially that of its children at play. It can be seen as a continuation of Levitt's exploration of children's street culture prevalent in her photography, but also explores the mundane life led by their working class parents."

The Geography of the Body/Willard Maas

2010-06-20T02:01:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Willard Maas (24 June 1906 - 2 January 1971) was an American experimental filmmaker and poet.

He was the husband of filmmaker Marie Menken.

ABOUT: "A quotation from Aristophanes, "The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love," precedes views of a man and a woman's bodies, often in extreme close up. Off-screen, a voice recites fragments of oracular literature and purple prose. We see an eye, an ear, a mouth, a tongue, bits of hair, a hand, the tips of fingers, toes... "

Visual Variations on Noguchi/Marie Menken

2010-06-16T01:54:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Marie Menkevicius (25 May 1909 in New York City, New York – 29 December 1970) was an American experimental filmmaker and socialite.

Damelo Todo (Give Me Everything)/Wu Ingrid Tsang

2010-06-08T02:57:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "DAMELO TODO depicts the creativity and struggles of a unique community within Los Angeles bar Silver Platter. A refuge for transgender women who have immigrated from Mexico and Central America fleeing war, poverty, and prejudice, the bar is a present-day Stonewall, where drag shows meet avant-garde performance artists, giving rise to new alliances and modes of resistance."

Website

Anonymous/Todd Verow

2010-06-02T00:27:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: A man's sexual addiction threatens to take over his life, costing him his lover, his apartment and possibly his job. After five years, Todd escapes from his stale relationship by secretly prowling public toilets and the Internet looking for anonymous sex.

Ritual in transfigured time/Maya Deren

2010-05-26T15:12:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev – October 13, 1961, New York City), born Eleanora Derenkowsky, was an American avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer.

Deren was a key figure in the creation of a New American Cinema, highlighting personal, experimental, underground film."

Whispering Pines 3/Shana Moulton

2010-05-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "Shana Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny."

Undertone/Vito Acconci

2010-05-08T14:46:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera/spectator and himself, Acconci sexualizes the implicit contract between performer and viewer - the viewer serving as a voyeur who makes the performance possible by watching and completing the scene, believing the fantasy."

L'Ange/Patrick Bokanowski

2010-04-30T14:41:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "Patrick Bokanowski. French filmmaker and artist developed a manner of treating filmic materiel that crosses over traditional boundaries of film genre : short film, experimental cinema and animation. His work lies on the edge between optical and plastic art, in a « gap » of constant reinvention."

Pièce touchée/Martin Arnold

2010-04-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Martin Arnold (born 1959 in Vienna, Austria) is an experimental filmmaker known for his obsessive reworkings of found footage.

Arnold's films are intensely cut sequences in which several seconds of found footage are taken and stretched out into much longer works. The figures on the screen flip back and forth between frames, as the motion is repeated, reversed, and numerous single frame cuts are made. His intent is to create, or possibly unearth, narratives concealed within the mundane films from which he samples."

Flaming Creatures/Jack Smith

2010-04-08T22:24:00.000-07:00

WIKI: Flaming Creatures (1963) is an American experimental film by filmmaker Jack Smith. Due to its surreal, graphic depiction of sexuality, the film was seized by the police at its premiere, and was officially determined to be obscene by a New York Criminal Court. The 43-minute featurette attracted media and public attention, and has been described as a "controversial featurette". This also made Jack Smith famous as a film director across North America. Smith himself described the film as "a comedy set in a haunted music studio."

JLG by JLG/Jean-Luc Godard

2010-03-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

IMDb: "Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art."

Uliisses/Werner Nekes

2010-03-17T21:54:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: Werner Nekes, born on April 29 1944 in Erfurt.
In November 1967 Nekes comes to Hamburg with Dore 0., whom he marries the following month. Co-founder of the Filmemacher-Cooperative and of the Hamburger Filmschau. Film events in his apartment, Brüderstraße 5. Film seminars and retrospectives in various European cities...

ULIISSES: 1982, 35/16 mm, color, 94 min., English/German dialogue
"Nekes' films derive from and thrive on Art, set light, color, man and music in estranging motion and show disconcerting, stimulating possibilities for play. It is in experiments such as these that the language of film is developed." (Brigitte Jeremias, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Oct. 14,1982)

"It is not easy to animate poetry visually since the fascinating Power of the imagination is all too easily numbed by pictures. Nevertheless, Uliisses is a masterpiece." (Doris J. Heinze, Oct. 1982)

Free Radicals/Len Lye

2010-03-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

WIKI: Len Lye, born Leonard Charles Huia Lye (5 July 1901, Christchurch, New Zealand - 15 May 1980, Warwick, New York), was a New Zealand-born artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture.
In Free Radicals he used black film stock and scratched designs into the emulsion. The result was a dancing pattern of flashing lines and marks, as dramatic as lightning in the night sky.

Portrait of Jason/Shirley Clarke

2010-02-20T00:28:00.000-08:00

ABOUT: "As a performer in his own Portrait, Jason Holiday is prodigious, altogether tireless. Despite his ironic refrain of "I'll never tell," the only evident limits on what he's willing to recount are fixed on how much anyone wants to listen. There's his years of playing Houseboy to wealthy, dysfunctional white couples on Nob Hill in San Francisco, for instance. Or his other, more durable vocation as a male trollop, a "stone whore," in his words, "balling my way from Maine to Mexico, and I ain't gotta dollar to show for it," There's his turbulent childhood as Aaron Payne, an almost militant sissy living in the same house with a father who was anything but. And, of course, there's that nightclub act. All of it is baseline raw material for the film, and he knows it."

The Idea of North/Rebecca Baron

2010-02-12T15:03:00.000-08:00

In the guise of chronicling the final moments of three polar explorers marooned on an ice floe a century ago, Baron's film investigates the limitations of images and other forms of record as a means of knowing the past and the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph.--New York Film Festival, 1997, "Views from the Avant-Garde" program notes

http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$misc?clips/IDEAOFNORT.mov

Onan/Takahiko Iimura

2010-01-30T14:39:00.000-08:00

ABOUT: "Iimura is one of the pioneers of Japanese cinema and video art. He directed his first experimental films in New York during the 1960s. His work explores a variey of subjects from ecology, erotic imagery, and social critique. In the 1970s he began working with video. In the 1990s he discovered the domain of multimedia and created interactive art where the visitor can become an integral part of the installation."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3osBbn5bo4Q

Ballet Mécanique/Fernand Léger

2010-01-21T06:38:00.000-08:00

WIKI: "Ballet Mécanique (1924) was a project by the American composer George Antheil and the filmmaker/artist Fernand Léger. Although the film was intended to use Antheil's score as a soundtrack, the two parts were not brought together until the 1990s. As a composition, Ballet Mécanique is Antheil's best known and most enduring work. It remains famous for its radical style and instrumentation as well as its storied history."

Looking for Jimmy/Julie Delpy

2010-01-10T06:57:00.000-08:00

Synopsis: "Julie Delpy describes her directing debut, LOOKING FOR JIMMY, as "more of an experiment than an actual film." Shot on digital video, at a cost of about $3000, it was shot over a 24-hour period in Los Angeles, stopping the camera only to change the tape. It's a freewheeling excursion through contemporary Los Angeles."

Plus d'infos sur ce film

La jetée/Chris Marker

2010-01-03T06:44:00.000-08:00

WIKI: "La jetée (English: The Jetty or The Pier) (1962) is a 28-minute black and white science fiction film by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel."

365 Day Project/Jonas Mekas

2009-12-28T06:49:00.000-08:00

WIKI: "Jonas Mekas born December 24, 1922 in the village of Semeniškiai, near Biržai) is a Lithuanian filmmaker, writer, and curator who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema. His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals across Europe and America.
Beginning in the fall of 2006, Mekas planned to film 365 short videos for Apple Computer's Video iPod, releasing one a day on his website."

Anemic Cinema/Marcel Duchamp

2009-12-18T06:33:00.000-08:00

WIKI/ "Anemic Cinema or Anémic Cinéma (1926) is a Dadaist, surrealist, or experimental film made by Marcel Duchamp. The film depicts whirling animated drawings -- which Duchamp called Rotoreliefs -- alternated with puns in French. Duchamp signed the film with his alter ego name of Rrose Sélavy."

Inferno/Dario Argento

2009-12-13T06:27:00.000-08:00

WIKI: "Inferno is a 1980 Italian supernatural horror film written and directed by Dario Argento. The convoluted story concerns a young man's investigation into the disappearance of his sister, who had been living in a New York City apartment building that also served as a home for a powerful, centuries-old witch."

Eros+Massacre/Yoshishige Yoshida

2009-11-30T06:21:00.000-08:00

WIKI: "Eros + Massacre (エロス＋虐殺, Erosu purasu Gyakusatsu) is a Japanese black and white film released in 1969. It was directed by Yoshishige Yoshida, who wrote it in cooperation with Masahiro Yamada.

The film is a biography of anarchist Sakae Ōsugi, assassinated by the Japanese military in 1923. The story tells of his relationship with three women."

Celestial Subway Lines/Ken Jacobs

2009-11-24T14:35:00.000-08:00

"released on tzadik 2004(www.tzadik.com)
the nervous magic lantern is a late optical invention, technically possible long before film or even photography, for projection of images that move through impossible changes in a vast illusionary depth, visible to even a single eye.
music: john zorn(&ikue mori) "

Looking for Langston/Isaac Julien

2009-11-18T18:14:00.000-08:00

WIKI: "Produced in 1989, the film is presented in black and white combining authentic archival newsreel footage of Harlem in the 1920s with scripted scenes to produce a non-linear impressionistic story line celebrating black gay identity and desire during the artistic and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance in New York."

Irène/Alain Cavalier

2009-11-10T16:48:00.000-08:00

ABOUT: "Small digital camera in hand, Cavalier dives into the memories he set down in his diaries from the early 1970s, in search of the essence of Irène, the love of his life, who was killed in a car crash…
"She's at the door," Alain Cavalier confesses. "For years, I’ve heard her, knocking gently. Why has it taken me so long to open the door to her? Am I afraid of the claims she might make? Afraid of some kind of confession? Am I unwilling to shine a light into the dark corners? One thing I know: she stands there, alive, stands before me, steers my hand. I am trying to go beyond where we left off – only yesterday.."

Vampyr/Carl Theodor Dreyer

2009-11-01T14:30:00.000-08:00

WIKI: "Vampyr is a 1932 horror film directed by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer. The film was written by Dreyer and Christen Jul based on elements from J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly. Vampyr was funded by Nicolas de Gunzburg who starred in the film under the name of Julian West among a mostly non-professional cast. Gunzberg plays the role of Allan Grey, a student of the occult who enters a small village outside of Paris which is cursed by supernatural creatures known as Vampyrs who lure townspeople to suicide so they can become servants for the devil."

Like a virgin, relax/Virginie Marchand

2009-10-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

"A little trip to Goa, India, to escape bad stuff and return to the sea, the waves, the sacred cows, under the sun, sometimes the rain."

Sordid/Johnny Terris

2009-10-12T06:16:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "Canadian filmmaker and actor Johnny Terris started out doing short films in the late 80’s and early 90’s in Canada. Starting at the age of 14 and leaving home at 16 years of age his films viciously delved into trailer park comedy that centered on a comedic annihilation of family values and structure.
In 2005, he released Sordid; a grotesque experimental horror journey through death and rebirth which sold out the first 200 copies within a 24 hour period."

Serene Velocity/Ernie Gehr

2009-10-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

Imdb: "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)."

Mr Hayashi/Bruce Baillie

2009-09-29T14:07:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "Bruce Baillie's innovative films grab the viewer with eloquent and rich imagery as well as a heartfelt humanism and concern for his subjects expressed through a lyrical sensibility.
The natural and intimate pictorial handling of Mr. Hayashi is characteristic of all of Baillie's work, especially the deeply moving Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1963-1964)."

Giardini/Steve McQueen

2009-09-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

The Guardian's review:
""Turner," said Steve McQueen at yesterday's opening of the Venice Biennale, "does not own sunsets, and he doesn't own Venetian sunsets." And so it is that the London-born artist, who this year represents the UK at the world's most important and unashamedly flamboyant art event, has dared to make a romantic, lyrical, melancholic film that shows Venice hazed through mists and sunsets, dripped in wintry rain.
It ought to be a cliche, but it is not, for the Venice of McQueen's minutely observed 40-minute film is not the Venice of St Mark's Square or humpbacked bridges over picturesque canals. His Venice is the Venice of the Giardini, the city's municipal gardens. In this park stand the pavilions, each devoted to a different nation, that are filled with art every other year during the Biennale – where, in the summer, art world types air-kiss and gossip. But McQueen's film was shot in the dim light of February, after the art from the last Biennale had long gone, the pavilions were boarded up and piles of rubbish lay scattered over the lawns and paths.
The plangent film, called Giardini, is already causing a stir at Venice as one of the most talked about of the 77 national offerings for the festival, which opens to the public on Sunday."

Seele Brennt (Soul is Burning)/Peter Sempel

2009-09-16T14:02:00.000-07:00

no sex last night/Sophie Calle

2009-09-04T06:09:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "In 1996, Calle released a film titled No Sex Last Night which she created in collaboration with American photographer Gregory Shephard. The film documents their road trip across America, which ends in a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. Rather than following the genre conventions of a road trip or a romance, the film is designed to document the result of a man and woman who barely knew each other, embarking on an intimate journey together."

Rythmus 21/Hans Richter

2009-08-24T08:57:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "Rhythmus 21 is Hans Richter’s first film…Richter went on to make Rhythmus 23 (1923)…and Rhythmus 25 (1925). In this first of the series, originally known as Film ist Rhythmus, he experiments with square forms. These forms appear in very simple to very complex compositions-from the beginning shots where the squares with the frame. The effect is a subversion of the cinematic illusion of depth."

Live-taped Video Corridor/Bruce Nauman

2009-08-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

"Nauman set two monitors above one another at the end of a corridor almost ten meters long and only 50 cm wide. The lower monitor features a videotape of the corridor. The uppermost monitor shows a closed-circuit tape recording of a camera at the entrance to the corridor, positioned at a height of about three meters. On entering the corridor and approaching the monitors, you quickly come under the area surveyed by the camera. But the closer you get to the monitor, the further you are from the camera, with the result that your image on the monitor becomes increasingly smaller. Another cause of irritation: you see yourself from behind. Moreover, the feeling of alienation induced by walking away from yourself is heightened by your being enclosed in a narrow corridor. Here, rational orientation and emotional insecurity clash with each other. A person thus monitored suddenly slips into the role of someone monitoring their own activities.

(source: Dörte Zbikowski, in: Thomas Y. Levin (ed.), CTRL[SPACE]. rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to big brother, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe 2001)"

Art of Mirrors/Derek Jarman

2009-08-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Jarman's first films were experimental super 8 mm shorts, a form he never entirely abandoned, and later developed further in his films Imagining October (1984), The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990) as a parallel to his narrative work."

Derek Jarman - Art of Mirrors

Blowjob/Andy Warhol

2009-07-28T07:13:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "The first public screening of BLOW JOB took place at Ruth Kligman's Washington Square Gallery in March 1964.
The person getting the blow job in Andy Warhol's film of the same name was DeVerne Bookwalter who had earlier appeared in the Shakespeare in the Park production of Macbeth in the summer of 1963. "

Pipilotti Rist

2009-07-16T05:44:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Elisabeth Charlotte Rist was born in 1962 in Grabs, Sankt Gallen, in Switzerland. Since her childhood she has been nicknamed Pipilotti. The name refers to the novel Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren.

Her works generally last only a few minutes, and contained alterations in their colors, speed, and sound. Her works generally treat issues related to gender, sexuality, and the human body.

In contrast to those of many other conceptual artists, her colorful and musical works transmit a sense of happiness and simplicity. Rist's work is regarded as feminist by some art critics."

Hoist/Matthew Barney

2009-07-10T06:17:00.000-07:00

SYNOPSIS: "Hoist was shot in Bahia, Salvador as one facet of a longer film titled DE LAMA LÂMINA. Hoist is the literal underbelly of that project: a non-site through which the history, ritual, mythology, and deities invoked in DE LAMA LÂMINA have been refracted and processed. It is a film about the meeting of chthonic libidinal energy and the destructive forces of technology."

Nathalie Granger/Marguerite Duras

2009-07-05T08:40:00.000-07:00

REVIEW: "the camera records the physical appearance of two expressionless women who look a lot like Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bose. They share a house with their two children, one of whom, Nathalie, is apparently a problem. "She wants to kill everyone," says one of the women, who seem to be interchangeable. "She wants to be an orphan, or a Portuguese maid."

Nathalie, however, remains docile—this being a minimal movie."

Missed/Claude Pérès

2009-06-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

ABOUT: "Claude Pérès refuses to give any biographic information, thinking what ought to be known is in his work.
To the question:"What do you do for a living?" He will answer: "I write stuff, I film stuff".
He directed his first feature Unfaithful feat Marcel Schlutt, music by Lydia Lunch."
www.claudeperes.com
imdb

Manqué (Missed)

Wavelength/Michael Snow

2009-06-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Wavelength is a short, forty-five minute film that made the reputation of Canadian and artist Michael Snow. Considered a landmark of avant-garde cinema, it was filmed over one week in December 1966 and edited in 1967"

The House/Šarūnas Bartas

2009-06-17T05:47:00.000-07:00

Šarūnas Bartas is a Lithuanian film director. One of the most prominent Lithuanian film directors internationally from the late 20th century.

ABOUT: "A dreamy, silken parable of the fate of late twentieth-century Europe, The House is an almost entirely wordless exploration of a single space: an imposing country manor by a lake that may possibly be the fantasy of one of the many diverse and melancholic inhabitants we encounter there..."

L'enfer/Henri-Georges Clouzot

2009-06-12T06:51:00.000-07:00

From the unfinished film "L'ENFER" by Henri-Georges CLOUZOT (1977) - Actress : Romy Schneider

I will die/Yang Zhenzhong

2009-06-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

REVIEW: "Yang Zhenzhong’s I Will Die, 2000-2005, is a remarkably simple and effective work of art. It consists of two rows of five large screens in which we see a variety of people from different nations say the words ‘I will die’ in their own language. Zhenzhong filmed people in their own environment in moments that seem snatched from the flow of everyday life. Some are serious, some amused, some indifferent. The constant flux of people and different languages together with the simple profundity of the statement makes Zhenzhong’s I Will Die one of the most powerful works on exhibition in this years Venice Biennale."

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song/Melvin Van Peebles

2009-05-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a 1971 American independent film, written, produced, scored, directed by, and starring Melvin Van Peebles. It tells the picaresque story of a deprived African American man on his flight from the white authority."

The Embryo Hunts in Secret/Kōji Wakamatsu

2009-05-20T05:31:00.000-07:00

WIKI: "The Embryo Hunts In Secret (胎児が密猟する時 taiji ga mitsuryō suru toki), released in July 1966, is the first film made by Japanese director Kōji Wakamatsu independently of any movie studio. "

PLOT: "A man keeps his girlfriend tied up in his small apartment and tortures her. She is undressed, subjected to various types of bondage, whipped, and tortured with a razor blade. He also brushes her hair, applies make-up on her, and breaks down and cries in the fetal position. In the end the girl gets free and has her revenge.

At the time of its release Wakamatsu was quoted as saying "For me, violence, the body and sex are an integral part of life."

Fireworks/Kenneth Anger

2009-05-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

REVIEW: "Completed at the tender age of 17, Fireworks – an audacious pre-Stonewall exploration of homosexuality, violence, and American youth – was the breakthrough film for avant-garde film legend Kenneth Anger."

The Encounter/Alain Cavalier

2009-05-03T06:01:00.000-07:00

REVIEW: "Arty and steeped with metaphysical insights, this French film contains a running stream of director Alain Cavalier's thoughts as he and an unseen lover reflect upon the world's innate beauty while passing their first year together. Episodes from this filmic diary are illustrated with shots of various objects, body parts, wildlife and views from a window."