31 Dec 1956
No. 11: Mirror Animations
Cut up animation and collage technique by Harry Smith synchronized to the jazz of Thelonious Monk's Mysterioso.
Drux Flux
Partly figurative, partly abstract, Drux Flux is an animation film of fast-flowing images showing modern people crushed by industry. Inspired by One-Dimensional Man by the philosopher Herbert Marcus…
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No. 11: Mirror Animations No. 11: Mirror Animations Sketch Film #3 
Sketch Film #3 01 Jan 2006
Sketch Film #3
Sketch Film #3 (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2006, 3 min., super 8, silent, 18/24fps, b&w, USA/Japan) The third film in the series, which starts with a sequence of paired images: a focused image and a blurred image of the same subject, which was caused by a diagonal camera movement. Later, it shows an experiment to produce an apparent depth by rotating an apparent shape. It was edited in camera and hand-processed afterwards.
Third Page from the Sun 
Third Page from the Sun 01 Jan 2014
Third Page from the Sun
Three books: a film festival catalogue, a dictionary, the Bible. Three works whose materiality has become obsolete by the digital dematerialization. A commentary on the fragility of culture.
Shearing Animation 
Shearing Animation 01 Jan 1961
Shearing Animation
An abstract animated film inspired by the work of jazz musician Chico Hamilton.
Son of the White Mare 
Son of the White Mare 22 Oct 1981
Son of the White Mare
A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.
The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics 
The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics 15 Dec 1965
The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics
Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.
Rhythm 23 Rhythm 23 09 Jun 1923
Rhythm 23
We watch white shapes dancing on black background, which changes when the white shape fills up the screen completely, and black lines and figures bounce around on the now white background.
Keyhole Conversation 
Keyhole Conversation 31 Jan 2025
Keyhole Conversation
Peter Larsson’s Keyhole Conversation draws the eye down to the small gate of the camera. From there, through quivering and percussive forms of direct and stop-motion animation, the eye begins to experience the scale of an image anew. At times segueing into a flicker, but maintaining a charmed form of attention to the marks of pencils and the channels dredged in emulsion by a paintbrush, all to a curious soundtrack of pulses and bleeps.
-Oh 
-Oh 28 Sep 2024
-Oh
A hand moves gently, its presence shifts continuously.
Free Radicals 
Free Radicals 23 Apr 1958
Free Radicals
In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads. The first version of the film won a major award at the International Experimental Film Festival Held in Brussels in 1958 in association with the World's Fair. Stan Brakhage described the film as "an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece".
Early Abstractions 
Early Abstractions 09 Jul 1965
Early Abstractions
Early Abstractions is a collection of seven short animated films created by Harry Everett Smith between 1939 and 1956. Each film is between two and six minutes long, and is named according to the chronological order in which it was made. The collection includes Numbers 1–5, 7, and 10.
Tarantella 
Tarantella 31 Dec 1940
Tarantella
Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) are subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.
Our Lady of the Sphere 
Our Lady of the Sphere 15 Mar 1969
Our Lady of the Sphere
Animation using cutout animation to craft a bizarre science fiction experiment. Moving spheres, such as balloons and bubbles, are superimposed on static backgrounds to suggest travel and discovery.
Abstronic 
Abstronic 01 Jul 1952
Abstronic
A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shoshtakovich, and replete with rapidly mutating geometries, Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. In the late 1940s, Lewis Jacobs observed that Bute’s films were “composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment.” Bute herself wrote that she sought to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music.”
Fuji Fuji 31 Dec 1974
Fuji
A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-esque Japanese landscape of electrical power lines, passing trains, railroad tracks, and the gentle slope of obliquely peaked, uniform rooflines as Breer distills the essential geometry of Mount Fuji into a collage of acute angles and converging (and bifurcating) lines .
Blazes 
Blazes 31 Dec 1961
Blazes
100 basic images switching positions for 4000 frames.
Everything Is a Number Everything Is a Number 31 Dec 1967
Everything Is a Number
Man's rebellion against the world of the digits.
Serlasanha 
Serlasanha 27 Feb 2025
Serlasanha
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Color Cry Color Cry 07 Nov 1952
Color Cry
In 1944 Lye moved to New York City, initially to direct for the documentary newsreel The March of Time. He settled in the West Village, where he mixed with artists who later became the Abstract Expressionists, encouraged New York’s emerging filmmakers such as Francis Lee, taught with Hans Richter, and assisted Ian Hugo on Bells of Atlantis. Color Cry was based on a development of the “rayogram” or “shadow cast” process, using fabrics as stencils, with the images synchronized to a haunting blues song by Sonny Terry, which Lye imagined to be the anguished cry of a runaway slave. —Harvard Film Archive
Escape (Synchronomy No. 4) 
Escape (Synchronomy No. 4) 05 Sep 1937
Escape (Synchronomy No. 4)
To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their movements reflect the music's rhythm. Behind the barrier of the black lines, the triangle moves, jumps, and takes on multiple shapes. In contrast with the blue and the black, the triangles are warm: orange, red, yellow. The black lines bend, swirl into a vortex, then disappear. The triangle pulsates and a set of many of them rises.