Social & External
A docudrama about art and creativity; based on modern art gallery in Tehran and its founder Jazeh Tabatabai.
A film about the mysterious lady of the castle, Countess Mitsuko Maria Thekla Coudenhove-Kalergi, who was the first Japanese woman to come to Europe at the turn of the 19th century. She lived mainly in the border region near the Bavarian border and managed the castle in Poběžovice, the property of her late husband, Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi. She was a strong and educated woman, but she never lost her longing for her native country.
The mute documentary-experimental film "Ten Minutes of Silence" is a film expression of the trends embodied in the painting "Black Square" by Malevich and J. Cage in music.
In his first film, Peter Nestler gives voice to an old floodgate. A nearby village, its inhabitants, wooden posts and twisted willow rods are presented from this unusual perspective. The floodgate ponders the fisher boats coming home from the sea along the shipping channel which is fed at low tide by a small river.
Marcel Duchamp alternates between scrutinizing the camera, and smiling and nodding in response to what seems to be a large crowd of off-screen admirers trying to get his attention. Occasionally he puts his fingers to his lips, indicating that he is not supposed to talk.
The film juxtaposes/compares two museums: The Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel, which Samuel Bickels (1909-1975) built there in 1948, and The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, built by Renzo Piano (b. 1937) 1986 . The method of natural lighting in Bickels‘s construction was the direct model for Piano, who adopted for his construction at the request of its patroness Dominique de Menil.
Concerned with processes of assembly, CHOIR brings together disparate bodies of material and archival technologies into dissonant concert. It is a work of several parts. Part one constructs an auditorium in which an action will be staged. Part two assembles the chorus to narrate the action. Part three supplies the action.
This is one of those abstract animated films in which colored, richly textured light moves in a black, three-dimensional space. The pictures and the electronic score are unified in a strict structure made of three main sections which progressively develop three subsections. This film may look like it was made using computers or video to the uninitiated, but only animation and much optical printing are to be seen herein. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.
A meditation on time and its effect on memory. About the rocks the sea tries to drag away from the shore, towards the ocean, with every wave.
A monumental homage to Glenn Miller, a one shot film - Glenn Miller 2000. This 26- minute long piece, shot on a circular road in Novi Zagreb in many ways corresponded to the previously discussed attributes that linked Tom's homages and "uses" of Glenn Miller with Miller's music and personality.
During WWII, the Japanese army developed experimental balloons able to cross the Pacific Ocean and reach the West Coast of North America in 3-6 days. Armed with explosives, they were given the code name fu-go, or fusen bakudan (“fire balloons,” or balloon bombs) in an attempt to instill a culture of fear like that caused by the far more deadly American firebombing of Japanese cities. The U.S. responded by enacting a censorship campaign, requesting newspapers avoid reports of fu-go landings or sightings. Living near the remains of a fu-go launch site in Fukushima Prefecture, Takeuchi mimics their flight take-off using a drone camera, and, traveling to North America, follows their arrival across the shoreline and rural landscapes, using a bat’s echolocation as narrative device to place fu-go and Fukushima as echos across history.
Avant-garde short by Lawrence Jordan.
In the fictional city of Santa Teresa, located on the border between Mexico and USA, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line between journalism and detective work. Based on an unfinished book by Roberto Bolaño, his character investigates a handful of crimes and abuses perpetrated on women and workers of the zone.
Drawing inspiration from a poem penned by Castro Alves, this film vividly captures the political, cultural, and intellectual climate of Brazil during the late 1970s. At its core, the story revolves around four distinctive embodiments of Christ's image: a black man, a soldier, an Indian, and a guerrilla fighter. These courageous individuals, hailed as the harbingers of doom in the tupiniquim lands, valiantly combat the insatiable avarice and oppressive "civilizing" brutality propagated by the formidable John Brahms—a foreign exploiter devoid of morals.
In a series of juxtaposed images and sounds, Jaromil Jireš comments on the tragic premature death of thousands as well as their posterity due to the atomic bomb.
Andy Warhol's experimental reconstruction of the assassination of the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, which serves as his critical commentary on the way the media presented the tragic event.
Fragments 83 rediscovers—and repurposes—Richard Millen 1983 experimental film If You Can’t Be with the One You Love, shot in Brooklyn and the West Village in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. The resulting documentary explores the hunt for sex/love, the joy of making cinema, and the inexorable passage of time.
"How much do you know about this place ? You need to be ready to leave your mirror shape behind and become a dark crystal. There's nothing like the rush of having a new body"
“While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.“ (Kōbō Abe) Liminal zones. Floating particles. Fire, water, earth, air. Voices of fictional characters: sometimes suggestive, sometimes strict, leading the viewer away from the here and now. Who's talking? The relationship between the hypnotized subject and the hypnotist is mirrored in the spectator's relationship to the screen.
Sepia toning lends a romantic (even wistful) quality to Larry Jordan's film Visions of a City, which he shot in San Francisco in 1957 and edited in 1978. The pace is un-irritating, in contrast to the San Francisco of today; but unlike the equal weight Helen Levill gives to all her subjects, there is an internal evolutionary development in the Jordan film that ultimately delivers a story. Until the introduction of the human protagonist, poet Michael McClure, we are treated to an extravagant display of visual delights.