Quiet reflections at the end of the season.
Social & External
The people behind it
Flowers dance and transform in water, using strobe effects and superimposition. A meditation on life cycles through botanical animation, continuing Jodie Mack's material exploration.
For this film, Takashi Makino allowed himself to be inspired by the earth. In a never-ending stream of images, we recognize elements from the forest that he then reduces to an abstraction. The film came about as a classical composition in which the picture and the musical contribution of Jim O’Rourke link up seamlessly and lead the mood in turn. A sense of freedom is what predominates.
Considerations on collage as a cognitive act in artists’ cinema. A pedagogical film adrift: 35mm photographs and other materials collected over the last fifteen years by artist Stefano Miraglia meet a text written by Baptiste Jopeck and the voice of Margaux Guillemard.
experimental short film by lilith loveless
Made out of Found Footage 16 mm Material “Broken time” follows the tradition of Hand Made Film and layering of Film and Material. It is a cinematic process of a Collage, a layering of Picture elements to generate a cinematic complex.
Two filmmakers juxtapose field recordings and documented moving images as an attempt to reconcile with their place in their desensitized semi-urban hometown in India.
A television is going to fit itself in a house.
A young couple wanders through different corners of a polluted city while struggling with the contradictions of love, desire, and loneliness. Through sarcasm, memories, and emotional tension, they confront each other only to reveal that the real conflict lies not in the other, but in what they cannot accept within themselves.
Amoré (1min, 16mm film loop, experimental installation) In 2005, Amoré won the Best Canadian Film award at Toronto’s International One-minute Film Festival and in 2011, it won the Jury Prize for Experimental Film at the Toronto Underground Film Festival.
The animation, music, and optical printing of Kitsch in Synch was produced by Beckett and the students in two classes he was teaching at CalArts. Although a group project, it is clear that Beckett was the director. The playful, catchy soundtrack is used to create a cycle of building tension and release. The brightly colored shapes create approximate symmetrical formations and become more densely layered, with glimpses of iconographic objects and even live footage near the end. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in partnership with the iotaCenter, in 2007.
A sequence of 10 images presented in 10 groups of 400 alternating frames. The primary image of a bird is gradually disfigured by the successive introduction of competing imagery, yet the overall field seems to have its own life.
Using century old technology, PXXXL creates digital glitch from analog process. It was animated directly on the celluloid without a camera, in a darkroom, using lights, objects, and handmade lenses. There is no digital manipulation involved-- just light, celluloid, and processing.
Something is staring at me from the corners of my house.
Bang Bang Stefi! is an experimental film in Super 8 format that invites us on a dreamlike journey where reality and fiction dissolve. Barcelona and the desert become interchangeable landscapes; figures such as a lion, a child, and a group of wrestlers traverse a world of passion, intuitive gestures, and visual symbols pulsing between dream and memory.
Experimental short film
Leaf textures and scanning glitches.
By Traum a Dream (2002) the unintelligent memories have become distinctly more sinister. Samples of found footage suggesting memory and repression vie chaotically for attention with Dirk’s voice reciting repeated words and phrases, punctuated by splutters and coughs, as though attempting to wrest some meaning. This meaning comes at last with the final sentence dragged out phrase by phrase in the third person: “he began to remember what he didn’t want to remember, what had been taken from when before he knew a secret of before he knew himself”. Steven Ball
You go to hell, and it's Jacksonville.
Lost in inertia and apathy, a young man wanders through his own emotions — or what’s left of them.
Joey works as a waiter for a hedonistic community of summer holiday makers in a small Mediterranean paradise. It is unclear if their exaggerated behaviors are due to the fact that the summer is coming to an end or if its just the last of their summers.
Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.
In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?
The government gets wind of a plot to destroy America involving a trio of nuclear weapons for which the whereabouts are unknown. It's up to a seasoned interrogator and an FBI agent to find out exactly where the nukes are.
Capturing Avatar is a feature length behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Avatar. It uses footage from the film's development, as well as stock footage from as far back as the production of Titanic in 1995. Also included are numerous interviews with cast, artists, and other crew members. The documentary was released as a bonus feature on the extended collector's edition of Avatar.
Feeling awkward and isolated, an imaginative and strong-willed teenage girl runs away from home with an older punk rock drifter.
A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by globalized technology and violence.
The Amazon rain forest, 1979. The crew of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film directed by German director Werner Herzog, soon finds itself with problems related to casting, tribal struggles and accidents, among many other setbacks; but nothing compared to dragging a huge steamboat up a mountain, while Herzog embraces the path of a certain madness to make his vision come true.
This special explores the return of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker to the screen, as well as Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen to their classic roles. Director Deborah Chow leads the cast and crew as they create new heroes and villains that live alongside new incarnations of beloved Star Wars characters, and an epic story that dramatically bridges the saga films.
Carefully picked scenes of nature and civilization are viewed at high speed using time-lapse cinematography in an effort to demonstrate the history of various regions.
Clinging to a smooth, curved surface high above a sentient abyss, a woman tries to cover the few feet back to safety without losing purchase and falling to her death.
Filmed over nearly five years in twenty-five countries on five continents, and shot on seventy-millimetre film, Samsara transports us to the varied worlds of sacred grounds, disaster zones, industrial complexes, and natural wonders.
In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.
After inheriting a remote Montana house, Jackson moves there from New York with his partner Grace, and the couple soon welcome a child. As Jackson becomes increasingly absent and rural isolation sets in, Grace struggles with loneliness, creative frustration, and unresolved emotional wounds. What begins as an attempt at renewal gradually turns into an intense psychological descent, placing strain on their relationship and exposing the fragile balance between love, identity, and motherhood.
A hypochondriac vacations in the tropics for the fresh air - and finds himself in the middle of a revolution instead.
Nothing is as it seems when a woman experiencing misgivings about her new boyfriend joins him on a road trip to meet his parents at their remote farm.
An English-German filmmaking couple retreat to Fårö for the summer to each write screenplays for their upcoming films in an act of pilgrimage to the place that inspired Ingmar Bergman. As the summer and their screenplays advance, the lines between reality and fiction start to blur against the backdrop of the Island's wild landscape.
When Marie St. Clair believes she has been jilted by her artist fiance Jean, she decides to leave for Paris on her own. After spending a year in the city as a mistress of the wealthy Pierre Revel, she is reunited with Jean by chance. This leaves her with the choice between a glamorous life in Paris, and the true love she left behind.
On a weekend backpacking trip in the Catskills, 17-year-old Sam contends with the competing egos of her father and his oldest friend.
A nameless drifter navigates a barren landscape punctuated by satellite dishes, radio towers and droning airplanes. Stopping periodically in anonymous hotel rooms, she makes attempts to connect to an unidentified second party.
A shy but ambitious film student falls into an intense, emotionally fraught relationship with a charismatic but untrustworthy older man.