A bed of flowers.
Social & External
Thanks to his myriad film roles, Lon Chaney is known as “the man of a thousand faces,” and you could say that the early horror era never beheld a figure more intriguing. Yet because of his numerous transformations, his face never became as iconic as that of, say, Boris Karloff. Accompanied by a soundtrack from Bernhard Lang, this “re-imagination of shots” taken from Chaney´s forty-six surviving films offers a beguiling excursion into the history of film. The director reveals surprising associations, while highlighting the enduring magic of works which are now more or less forgotten.
An anthology of one-minute films created by 51 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema. Intended as an ode to 35mm, the film was screened one time only on a purpose-built 20x12 meter public cinema screen in the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, on 22 December 2011. A special projector was constructed for the event which allowed the actual filmstrip to be burnt at the same time as the film was shown.
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.
A compilation of interviews, rehearsals and backstage footage of Michael Jackson as he prepared for his series of sold-out shows in London.
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.
Made on a wind-up Bolex camera, The Sound of Seeing announced the arrival of 21-year-old filmmaker Tony Williams. Based around a painter and a composer wandering the city (and beyond), the film meshes music and imagery to show the duo taking inspiration from their surroundings.
An experimental ethnographic documentary that criticizes the colonizer view of anthropology.
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."
A small portrait of the volatility of intimacy and of breaking free from abusive cycles: made in response to a year of collapsing relationships and violent accidents that left me broken, dislocated and stuck in my apartment.
A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage and set to an original symphonic score.
Fifty years ago, Tim McDermit fell 40 feet from his college dorm roof. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and was diagnosed with aphasia, a language disorder which left him unable to speak. Though 2 million others in the U.S. suffer from aphasia, few have even heard of it. Over the past five decades, Tim has struggled with relearning how to communicate all over again, navigating the social stigmas that come with broken speech, and finally letting go of the life that was snatched away from him.
An experimental and poetic portrait of a woman.
David Attenborough takes us on a guided tour through the secret world of plants, to see things no unaided eye could witness. Each episode in this six-part series focuses on one of the critical stages through which every plant must pass if it is to survive:- travelling, growing, and flowering; struggling with one another; creating alliances with other organisms both plant and animal; and evolving complex ways of surviving in the earth's most ferociously hostile environments.
Anything that complies with standards is a wasted effort to Vlado Kristl: 'I believe in only doing those things that decompose and tear conventional systems apart.' Kristl's métier are borderlines. His paintings and animated films are interspersed with clear dividing lines, only for him to blur and mess them up. His graphics are scribbled over and over again until the whole surface becomes black. His oil paintings, unless someone buys them in time, are painted over and over again. He destroys any form that begins to grow. -Thomas Brandlmeier
"This installation or performance work puts my own earlier film of the Mona Lisa (1973) through another stage of transformation – my own irretrievable self of some 34 years ago is now also part of the subject I first saw the ‘actual’ ‘Mona Lisa’ when I was about thirteen. Of course I had seen dozens of reproductions in books and postcards by then and the popular mythology of the enigmatic smile was already well engrained in my mind. My strongest impression, as I recall, was how small and unsurprising it was – a heavily protected cultural icon – no longer really a picture – and I was much more excited by the painting of the distant landscape than by the face. My own ‘version’ of ‘la Giaconda’ was never an homage, nor like Marcel Duchamp’s ‘L.H.O.O.Q’, an attack on its cultural power. Instead it came from a fascination with change and transformation – maybe also with arbitrary appropriation." Malcolm Le Grice
Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.
ABLAZE premiered at the 27th Singapore Film Festival, November 24, 2016
Experimental 8mm film by Karpo Godina.
