L'Ange/Patrick Bokanowski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."