
01 Jan 1934

Rhythm
A comfortable rhythm composed of light and shadow. Director Ogino-style absolute movie which freely manipulates geometric figures.
01 Jan 1934
A comfortable rhythm composed of light and shadow. Director Ogino-style absolute movie which freely manipulates geometric figures.
11 Jun 2024
Teenager Riley's mind headquarters is undergoing a sudden demolition to make room for something entirely unexpected: new Emotions! Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, who’ve long been running a successful operation by all accounts, aren’t sure how to feel when Anxiety shows up. And it looks like she’s not alone.
02 Oct 2024
Sarah and her two cats go about their separate lives. The cats have strange dreams about their desires, and Sarah develops an unshakable paranoia that something is wrong with them. Sarah's paranoia bleeds into her social life, and her two cats have their dreams come true.
31 Dec 1961
This newly rediscovered short was created in Jim's home studio in Bethesda, MD around 1961. It is one of several experimental shorts inspired by the music of jazz great Chico Hamilton. At the end, in footage probably shot by Jerry Juhl, Jim demonstrates his working method.
19 Nov 2022
Fragments of a collective post-human dream construct a world that straddles hyper-technological, ecological, and mythological dimensions.
05 Dec 2023
Seraphim Cloud and his life size doppelgänger enter the netherworld of Calico Ghost Town deep within the Mojave Desert.
01 Jan 1959
High Voltage is constructed from footage James Whitney contributed to Belson for use in one of his Vortex concerts.
22 Feb 2024
What could possibly be more important than feeding your daughter?
02 Dec 1963
Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like Matisse. Green objects occasionally appear. Most wings are translucent. The technique makes them appear to be stuck directly to the film.
28 Aug 1967
After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears twice, coming into focus, then disappearing behind the bursts and patterns of color, then reappearing; the second figure appears later, in the right foreground. This figure suggests someone older, someone of substance. The myth? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
06 Jun 2024
Amanda's stoner slumber party is put to a halt when one of her guests is nowhere to be found.
02 Jan 2003
A personal experimental exploration of the book of Psalms in the Holy Bible
13 Mar 2024
X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
01 Jan 2015
The nine virtual sculptures underlying vitreous resulted from experimental setups by Robert Seidel for generating three-dimensional clusters of fibrous refractions, as well as the gravitational lensing of different volumetric and chromatic densities. Singular elements gravitate towards each other, accumulating in a gigantic sculptural system, where each entity exists with its own visual axis and vanishing point. The impalpable luminous formations create prismatic interactions between the ridges and plateaux of the main colours floating in front of the infinite violet background.
01 Jul 1952
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.”
01 Sep 1937
Trade Tattoo went even further than Rainbow Dance in its manipulation of the Gasparcolor process. The original black and white footage consisted of outtakes from GPO Film Unit documentaries such as Night Mail. Lye transformed this footage in what has been described as the most intricate job of film printing and color grading ever attempted. Animated words and patterns combine with the live-action footage to create images as complex and multi-layered as a Cubist painting. Music was provided by the Cuban Lecuona Band. With its dynamic rhythms, the film seeks (in Lye’s words) to convey “a romanticism about the work of the everyday in all walks of life."
17 Dec 1999
Starting with a piece of vintage porn, filmmaker Naomi Uman painstakingly removed each female figure from the footage using nail polish remover, leaving a striking absence where there's usually a fleshy presence. Uman's celebrated film is a smart retort to pornography's obsessive gaze at the female body.
31 Dec 1979
Experimental computer animation from pioneering artist Ed Emshwiller.
09 Jun 2013
A true story behind the notorious Miami face-eating cannibal and how the Miami Heat won the NBA title in 2012 despite one of their star players being an interstellar prince who was called away to do battle with evil foes bent on finally making the Internet completely useless.
06 Oct 2023
The second essay about still dominant dark aspects of our modern society. It is conceived as a surreal anti-patriarchal thought experiment and raises important questions about gender, power, and social change, prompting us to reflect on how historical patterns of discrimination and oppression might be either repeated or overcome in a reversed gendered world. It challenges the viewer to confront their own assumptions and biases, and to consider the possibilities of a more equitable society.