Clouds

Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.

Variações sobre como cultivar uma cidade

Sprout. In the vacant lots against the hammering of buildings always under construction, between walls of granite, cement and sheet metal with rust, moss and cats; on the hillside between the train and the river, next to the traffic on the highway, facing the subway, vegetable gardens sprout. In this city, the choreography of ancient gestures of cultivating the land is repeated day after day, without fail. Sowing, digging, harvesting, watering, eating, talking, resting and returning the next day. The longest day of the year brings S. João and nobody goes to bed, but when the sun rises, the discreet gestures of resistance will restart.

Corridors

Latest installment from the on-going collaboration between filmmaker Paul Clipson & musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Paul's Super8 films, shot entirely in New York City, channel the blissed out states of color drenched psychadellia explored by Brakage as well as lovely black and white still life's that reminisce on Ozu's 'pillow shots' & Chantel Akermans monumental portrait of Pre-Giuliani New York 'Letters Home'. Jefre's music is culled from the same sessions that launched his 2007 release on Students Of Decay 'Shinning Skull Breath', (the two share a track in common). Billowy clouds of distorted guitar expand out into long passages of muffled static and fuzzed out melody.

The Road Forward

The Road Forward is an electrifying musical documentary that connects a pivotal moment in Canada’s civil rights history—the beginnings of Indian Nationalism in the 1930s—with the powerful momentum of First Nations activism today. Interviews and musical sequences describe how a tiny movement, the Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood, grew to become a successful voice for change across the country. Visually stunning, The Road Forward seamlessly connects past and present through superbly produced story-songs with soaring vocals, blues, rock, and traditional beats.

Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

South

What kind of power is accessible through the discovery of a voice? Morgan Quaintance interlinks two anti-racist and anti-authoritarian liberation movements in South London and Chicago’s South Side with his own biography to explore what happens when speech is ignored, and the voice fades.

Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait

Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, the film weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium.

Snah Morfar: Over Før Det Begynte

A "beneath the surface" look at the story of the band Snah Morfar, how it came to be, and how it all fell apart before it even began. Through one-on-one interviews with each member of the band, and statements made by people from the same circle, this is the real story of Snah Morfar.

Guisado on Sunset

Missed connection regret at that one late-night spot—the kind you keep playing back in your head but not quite ever remembering right, until it starts to look like something else.

写真記

"The majority of my 8-mm works were made for the three-minute "Personal Focus" film special put on in Fukuoka. This film is an animation of photographs I had taken on a regular basis as a sort of diary, and was made to have a rough feel to it." - Takashi Ito

山瀬

Film by Kenji Onishi. With friends. Mr. Yamase as main character, Sasakubo and Shinojima. And the girls having a good time. The camera is all you need. Looking still at the Mt. Buko which is disappearing.

6-18-67

6-18-67 is a short quasi-documentary film by George Lucas regarding the making of the Columbia film “Mackenna's Gold”. This non-story, non-character visual tone poem is made up of nature imagery, time-lapse photography, and the subtle sounds of the Arizona desert.

A Little Love

Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters.

á-B-C-D-é-F-G-H-CH-í-JONESTOWN

A children's film about the largest mass suicide of the 20th century reconstructs the 1978 event. The Reverend Jim Jones forced nearly a thousand followers of his People's Temple sect to drink poison in the settlement of Jonestown, Guyana, South America. A third of them were children. Jan Bušta gives sadists, voyeurs, and necrophiliacs one minute to leave the cinema. His self-reflective documentary, which is the result of ten years of time-lapse filming, does not depict dramatic scenes. To the sound of an audio recording from that fateful day, we see a collage of child ghosts preaching about escaping the corruption of the world.

Adios amigo mío, sin gestos, sin palabras

The title comes from Sergei Yesenin's last poem before comiting suicide. Using Virginia Woolf's last letters as a base, this film is meditation on the power of the word and its undertsanding and the the last moments before saying "goodbye".

Pico Sacro

In a leafy forest, a Galician sovereign who longs to attain wisdom meets a sorcerer, who tells him: “Go back to your country and study the Earth and the Stars in the sky; anywhere in the world reflects an image of it. You will ride on this arrow, which you must keep for a hundred years and a day. After this time, stick it in the widest valley of all those you possess, with the tip facing the sky. Then the Moon will come and, just as it exerts its action on the waters of the sea, it will act on the arrow, turning it into a holy mountain." - Legend about the Pico Sacro Inspired by Hokusai's views of Mount Fuji and Cézanne's paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, "Pico Sacro [The Holy Mountain]" aims to reveal the mystery and the magic that underlie reality.

A Messenger from the Shadows (Notes on Film 06 A/Monologue 01)

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.

Heliorama

A collage of newsreels, trailers, clips and other visionary and unseen fragments of sight and sound regarding the late plastic artist Helio Oititica.

Radical Harmonies

Interviews and performance footage are used to provide an overview of the women's music scene.

Crisálida