
01 Sep 1966

Chelsea Girls
Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.
SELF SONG documents a body besieged by cancer. The amber glow of flesh suggests both victory and submission to death. Blackness surrounds the image and takes it over altogether. Furthermore, the complex grooves and patterns of the flesh struggle to maintain their focus, suggesting the obscuring and dissolving effects of cancer. In DEATH SONG the film begins with blue hues which suggest the permanent aspect of death to contrast a sequence of overexposed yellow. Within these images are microscopic organisms constantly being 'washed out' by whiteness, which seeks to dissolve the image. In this respect, we might view the purity of whiteness as being 'soiled'. By the end of the film, the image has shifted to the blue screen suggesting a comfortable aspect of death. Yet, this vision is too idyllic in Brakhage's mind, and thus he allows the blueness to bleed from the side of the frame, opening the 'blinds' to the cancerous light. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
01 Sep 1966
Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.
16 Oct 2020
Europe, 2028. A humanlike creature washes ashore, carrying with him a motionless body he calls his mother. He is on a mission of some kind, reporting on the dwindling human activity in an increasingly automated world.
01 Jan 1961
Moonlight reflected in water: the forms and lines are continually rearranged by the currents.
01 Jan 1968
A free transposition of a Kafka novel: the peace of an imaginary insect is disturbed by three little balls.
01 Jan 1959
Piotr Kamler meets Luc Ferrari & Iannis Xenakis. A play of opposites: space, colour, forms, movements
02 Aug 1970
A countryman kills his father and heads for the big city. On his way, he meets the most bizarre and allegorical types: a robber, a drag queen who thinks he's Carmen Miranda, a black king, a fallen black angel, a priest, two whores, a pregnant cowboy, among others.
01 Jan 1979
Protective Coloration shows Fisher seated at a mottled table. He wears short-sleeved hospital garb, surgical green ‘scrubs’. Nose-clips block his nostrils while a mouth-guard that looks like fake lips covers his mouth. Over the course of 11 minutes he masks his face and covers his hands with bright gear in colours that accumulate to resemble those of the standard reference chart: he puts on orange eye-caps, then a yellow bathing cap; covering his nose and mouth and the gear already there, he dons a black gas mask; a silky black sleeping mask voids his already covered eyes, a cyan blue bathing cap caps the yellow; yellow rubber gloves snap on his hands and forearms; puts on cyan eye goggles, then struggles with yet another bathing cap, hazmat orange, over the other two. A silvery transparent shower cap tops the caps, itself topped by a plastic green helmet. Finally heavy-duty magenta gloves hide most of the yellow rubber. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2008.
14 Mar 2012
This metaphorical surrealist tale is an allusion. NIGHTINGALES IN DECEMBER is a trip into the memories, and the fields of the current realities. What if the Nightingales were working, instead of singing and going south? Is the innocence the only savior of birdsongs? There are no Nightingales in December... What is left, is only the history of our beginning, and our end.
26 Aug 1955
Impoverished priest Harihar Ray leaves his rural Bengal village in search of work. His wife, Sarbojaya, looks after their rebellious daughter, Durga, and young son, Apu. The children enjoy the small pleasures of their difficult life.
12 Dec 1963
A young Catholic priest from Boston confronts bigotry, Nazism, and his own personal conflicts as he rises to the office of cardinal.
10 Jul 1969
Bambi is nibbling the grass, unaware of the upcoming encounter with Godzilla. Who will win when they finally meet? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2009.
15 Jul 1987
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
05 Jun 1991
Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.
26 Jun 2014
You want a story ? Put two girls on a train and imagine that one of them is a redhead.
10 Dec 1972
A man who loves games and theater invites his wife's lover to meet him, setting up a battle of wits with potentially deadly results.
01 Jan 1968
An early experiment in employing computers to animate film. The result is a dazzling vibration of geometric forms in vivid color, an effect achieved by varying the speed at which alternate colors change, so producing optical illusions. In between these screen pyrotechnics appears a simple line form gyrating in smooth rhythm. Sound effects are created by registering sound shapes directly on the soundtrack of the film.
13 May 1949
What goes in to the phrase, "Let's go to the movies"? An off-screen narrator takes us back to the earliest days of film: clips remind us of early stars and blockbusters. He explains how sound came to motion pictures: we see Jolson singing "Mammy" and John Barrymore playing Richard III. Next is a salute to the 30,000 people working in Hollywood at 272 different crafts. A montage shows us some of those jobs. It ends with a look at the physical production of celluloid (cotton and silver) and the many aspects of movie making. The narrator promises more short films about each step in production. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
05 Dec 2017
Film is made out of gelatin that comes from horses. They’re waiting to be slaughtered, so that pictures can be made. Many years ago we learned the language of our masters. Though we couldn’t help wondering why so few of you bothered to learn ours. Three scenes featuring horses, remembering Jacinto. The first is a daytime forest haunting that winds up at a carousel, the second a rainy street in Portugal, the finale a nighttime vigil of fire and water.
01 Jan 1957
Documentary about the Watts Towers. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2009.
13 Jun 2017
A bed of flowers.