Schwechater

In 1957, Peter Kubelka was hired to make a short commercial for Schwechater beer. The beer company undoubtedly thought they were commissioning a film that would help them sell their beers; Kubelka had other ideas. He shot his film with a camera that did not even have a viewer, simply pointing it in the general direction of the action. He then took many months to edit his footage, while the company fumed and demanded a finished product. Finally he submitted a film, 90 seconds long, that featured extremely rapid cutting (cutting at the limits of most viewers' perception) between images washed out almost to the point of abstraction — in black-and-white positive and negative and with red tint — of dimly visible people drinking beer and of the froth of beer seen in a fully abstract pattern.

Late Season

Inspired by the dominant motif of the novel by the great Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, "L’Arrière-saison" is a diptych about roses.

Moment

A static camera records, in one single continuous shot, a woman's face before, during and after orgasm. The act of looking and the limits of the film frame are highlighted in this intimate sexual episode with Tina Fraser. Artist Stephen Dwoskin presents a powerful, personal moment while maintaining a distance and resisting the viewer being subsumed into the action on screen.

Reflections on Black

A series of terrifying dramas of male-female relationships offset against the background of a New York tenement. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2012.

Persian Series #4

Elaborate petal-like and multicolored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly-swift mixtures of every conceivable previous shape from the Persian Series. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

ROJA

Levin lives in his memories and can't shake his first love. Caught in a spiral of constant changing memories he figures out what he really did. Meanwhile his boss forces him to join an elite group of brokers, who meet to fight each other on weekends. Those meetings are a counter balance to their stressful jobs. Levin decides that his big ego doesn't deserve to live. But instead of going through with this decision, he escapes again, risking the life of his boss during one of the fight weekends.

Spirals

A film made without a camera in which both image and sound are the result of the same chemical process. Raw film was spooled onto a spiral and partially submerged in developer, so that only half the film is developed, leaving the trace of a time spiral in the image and (optical) sound. The film can be projected in either direction. Outwards, from the centre of the spiral, we hear a decelerating sound like someone regaining their breath. G.S.

The Human Surge

Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town, where he too has a miserable job.

Matiz

Erna

A two-minute poetic micro-manifesto of ecological and social warning about the endangerment of people and the world's nature in the 1960s.

The Movement of People Working

A compilation of non-narrative films shot in the 1970s and 1980s by Phill Niblock concerned with the movement people make when they do menial tasks.

Water for Maya

Water for Maya is a hand-painted work which came into being during a film interview with Martina Kudlacek about Maya Deren. There was a sudden recognition of Maya’s intrinsic love of water and thus of all Mayan liquidity in magic conjunction, reflection, etc. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

Mario Banana I

Mario Montez in drag eats a banana.

Bridges-Go-Round 1

New York City's various bridges transform into an urban jungle (jazz version) or an alien landscape (electro-acoustic version).

Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung

Experimental short made by Olivier Assayas for Fondation of Contemporary Art and starring Maggie Cheung.

The Wonder Ring

An important early film by Stan Brakhage, which Joseph Cornell commissioned as a record of New York's Third Avenue elevated train before it was torn down. Curiously lacking in people, the film focuses on the rhythms of the ride and reflections in train windows, finding a real-world version of the superimpositions Brakhage would later create in the lab. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2005.

The Way to Shadow Garden

This way madness - or experimental filmmaking - lies. A solitary man in coat and tie enters an apartment. It's midnight. He appears agitated and distraught. He throws a glass of water in his face and laughs. He takes off the coat and tie. His moods swing. He stares at a light bulb. He removes his shirt. He lights a cigarette. He looks at a book. He does something drastic and self-destructive. He opens doors to a garden.

Book of Dreams: Welcome to Crateland

Mona relates her dream. Crawling through an apparently endless wooden crate, she encounters diverse characters while the crate itself is moving towards a fiery destruction.

Roman Numeral: I

An attempt to conjure pictorially, from the mind, an image that isn't referential: "...I'd like to give something back, not a picture of a flower, but some flower that couldn't exist except on film." - S.B. "I'm not sure if this work is titled I for Imagnostic, or "I" as designating first person singular or Roman Numeral One."

Window

"This is taking a Super 8mm camera around with me wherever I go and I'm very interested in windows at this time of travel, and I'm trying to make a variety of different statements about the concept of window." - S.B.