Vineyard III

Crashing waves, the cry of a gull, silence.

Starlight

A Tibetan Lama. His disciple. The disciple's wife, young boy and terrier. An old tugboat crossing the Mississippi River. A man in his seventh month of solitude. His hermitage built by his own hands. The man's bloodhound; his cat. Clouds crossing the Continental Divide. A mountain stream. A girl. The sun.

Ganga

The second entry in Velu Viswanadhan's series of experimental documentaries. This film traces the Ganges river upstream.

To Teach a Bird to Fly

This experimental nature documentary by Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts depicts climate change and the wave of extinction from the point of view of our near future. Actually, it depicts the age we live in now, or rather its fateful consequences.

The Five Obstructions

In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.

Roda Viva Roda Brasil

Thot-Fal'N

This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."

City Streaming

This is a film made in Toronto, in memoriam, so to speak - a memory piece, a "piecing-together" of the experience of living there. The consciousness of the maker comes to sharply focused visual music - not to arrive at snapshots, as such, but rather to "sing" the city as remembered from daily living...complementary, then, to an earlier film, "Unconscious London Strata." Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2015.

Marilyn's Window

This stream-of-consciousness could be nothing less than pathway of the soul, as images of Marilyn's window are remembered from inside-out, its "view" interwoven with all of other windowing and the Elements of the known world.

Confession

"Firstly, I revealed in salutary confession the secret filth of my misdeed, which had long been festering in stagnant silence; and I made it my custom to confess often, and thus to display the wounds of my blinded soul..." (Petrarch, 1352, in a letter to his brother). I wish to avoid any "classical" misunderstandings of the above quote by stating clearly here that any sacrifice of love is, yes, "filth" or at the very least "misdeed." An academic reading of Petrarch tends to bias thought that there are kinds of love which might be wrong: I do not believe this. (SB)

Flight

Pun on "light" intended - that short preceding expulsion of breath perhaps the "subject matter" of this film which centers in consideration of death. It is the third tone poem film and did much surprise me by thus completing a trilogy of the "4 classical Elements." (SB)

Babylon Series #3

This is an architectural garden of the variably brash rock-solid liquid-encompassing, but always imitative, human mind as it processes the given light thoughtfully. This film is about that.

Baa Baa Land

An eight-hour contemplative epic, entirely starring sheep.

Covid, le secret des origines

Leftovers

A manufactured memory.

Almost Nothing: So Continues the Night

For us, a thought always presupposes a society, a culture and above all the consciousness of time. We are haunted by immortality, human notion par excellence. As if the world was here to fascinate us. And to disappoint us. The film travels around the bulb like the Earth around the Sun. Light makes the film visible. A fragile film, like our existence. In the orbit of the film tragedy and our reality, the image resists the cruelty of the experiment.

Coronavirus

Struggling with fear, tension, and anxiety amid the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a high school student reflects upon what really matters.

Age 12: Love with a Little L

This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.

Lampedusa

Combining high definition and Super 8 footage, Lampedusa is composed of interwoven narratives based on a series of real events. In 1831, a volcanic island suddenly erupted from the sea a few kilometers off the southern coast of Sicily. An international dispute ensued, as a number of European powers laid claim to this newfound “land”. The island receded below sea level six months later, leaving only a rocky ledge under the sea…

Congo

An experimental ethnographic documentary that criticizes the colonizer view of anthropology.