Rolling animated images of kaleidoscopic heads, skeletons and other absurdities. Abstact, surreal and darkly comic. This short was Run Wrake's (as J.M. Wrake) graduation film from The Royal College of Art, 1990
Social & External
An exploration of the relationship between sound and picture inspired by the two lights (twi-light) found inside film projectors.
This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.
A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.
Cuba programmed solid areas and volumes instead of the vector dots of the previous two films. It also in four "colors": black, white, light grey and dark grey. In five episodes, he alternates single events involving ribbon-like figures following intricate trajectories, with more complex episodes consisting of up to 40 individual events that appear and disappear at irregular intervals. Electronic sound scores accompany.
Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.
A visual and musical elaboration on the Crab Canon in which the theme of intersecting beams is played against itself going backwards.
Abstract Day is a semi-abstract animation film by Oerd van Cuijlenborg based on a story which is told in sound. We witness a day in the life of a couple, who fight, make love and escape the hot and crowded city. It is a simple story in which the visuals and sound are produced together to merge into a unique world.
Flash projection from dutch visual artist Han Hoggerbrugge
Lulu the dog gets a job at the local convenience store and stays up all night cleaning the back room. Short created for Adult Swim Smalls.
A space occupies it, awaiting to be unlocked by a freeing action or notion. What lies ahead is its determination.
An abstract animation with a motif of a dragonfly, and a complex multi-exposure landscape of a field and a woman's naked body overlap.
Adams Film is a visual collage combining live action footage with abstract images and textures drawn onto 16mm film stock. Footage of a casual Janiak family gathering is sandwiched between superimposed garden scenes and rebellious direct animation. The soundtrack consists of assorted tape loops.
Rhythm and repetition plays an important role in the animated film Allahu Akbar by Usama Alshaibi. With this film, Alshaibi questions the confrontation between tradition and modernity by drawing inspiration from geometric motives of Islamic art. The artist offers a re-interpretation of these motifs through computer animation. By turning the shapes in different direction, new images are generated, freeing them from their fixed state. Traditional spiritual values feed the present and open up to a modern perspective.
A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shoshtakovich, and replete with rapidly mutating geometries, Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. In the late 1940s, Lewis Jacobs observed that Bute’s films were “composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment.” Bute herself wrote that she sought to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music.”
"We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.” - R. Buckminster Fuller
Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) are subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.
Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.
To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their movements reflect the music's rhythm. Behind the barrier of the black lines, the triangle moves, jumps, and takes on multiple shapes. In contrast with the blue and the black, the triangles are warm: orange, red, yellow. The black lines bend, swirl into a vortex, then disappear. The triangle pulsates and a set of many of them rises.
She's here. She comes closer. Is she in front of me? Now she, by herself, becomes her.
In the final days of the year 1999, almost everyone in Taiwan has died from a strange plague that ravished the island. As rain pours down relentlessly, a single man is stuck with an unfinished plumbing job and a hole in his floor. This results in a very odd relationship with the woman who lives below him.
First-time father Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.
The story of an impossible love between a woman named Fred and a transgender woman named Laurence who reveals her inner desire to become her true self.
A vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.
George, host of a television show focusing on literature, receives videos shot on the sly that feature his family, along with disturbing drawings that are difficult to interpret. He has no idea who has made and sent him the videos. Progressively, the contents of the videos become more personal, indicating that the sender has known George for a long time.
A woman is suspected of her husband's murder, and their blind son faces a moral dilemma as the sole witness.
Erika Kohut, a sexually repressed piano teacher living with her domineering mother, meets a young man who starts romantically pursuing her.
When his longtime partner on the force is killed, reckless U.S. Secret Service agent Richard Chance vows revenge, setting out to nab dangerous counterfeit artist Eric Masters.
After a seven-year absence, Charlotte Andergast travels to Sweden to reunite with her daughter Eva. The pair have a troubled relationship: Charlotte sacrificed the responsibilities of motherhood for a career as a classical pianist. Over an emotional night, the pair reopen the wounds of the past. Charlotte gets another shock when she finds out that her mentally impaired daughter, Helena, is out of the asylum and living with Eva.
Husband and wife Gabe and Adelaide Wilson take their kids to their beach house expecting to unplug and unwind with friends. But as night descends, their serenity turns to tension and chaos when some shocking visitors arrive uninvited.
Tony Lip, a bouncer in 1962, is hired to drive pianist Don Shirley on a tour through the Deep South in the days when African Americans, forced to find alternate accommodations and services due to segregation laws below the Mason-Dixon Line, relied on a guide called The Negro Motorist Green Book.
A translator working for the police gets involved in the other side of drug dealing.
Humanity finds a mysterious object buried beneath the lunar surface and sets off to find its origins with the help of HAL 9000, the world's most advanced super computer.
A real estate agent leaves behind his beautiful wife to go to Transylvania to visit the mysterious Count Dracula and formalize the purchase of a property in Wismar.
A grieving couple retreats to their cabin 'Eden' in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.
In postwar Vienna, Austria, Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, arrives penniless as a guest of his childhood chum Harry Lime, only to learn he has died. Martins develops a conspiracy theory after learning of a "third man" present at the time of Harry's death, running into interference from British officer Major Calloway, and falling head-over-heels for Harry's grief-stricken lover, Anna.
Seven years after the death of his wife, widower Shigeharu seeks advice on how to find a new wife from a colleague. Taking advantage of their position as a film company, they stage an audition. Interviewing a series of women, Shigeharu is enchanted by the quiet Asami. But soon things take a twisted turn as Asami isn’t what she seems to be.
Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K, unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what's left of society into chaos. K's discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard, a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.
During the 1972 elections, two reporters' investigation sheds light on the controversial Watergate scandal that compels President Nixon to resign from his post.
Mia, an aspiring actress, serves lattes to movie stars in between auditions and Sebastian, a jazz musician, scrapes by playing cocktail party gigs in dingy bars, but as success mounts they are faced with decisions that begin to fray the fragile fabric of their love affair, and the dreams they worked so hard to maintain in each other threaten to rip them apart.