Category: Experimental

November 19, 2020 / Experimental

Clepsydra is an ancient Greek water clock (literally, “to steal water”). This film envisions the strip of celluloid going vertically through a projector as a sprocketed waterfall (random events measured in discreet units of time), through which the silent dreams of a young girl can barely be heard under the din of an irresistible torrent, an irreversible torment.

November 14, 2020 / Experimental

Images from an aerial tram leaving Manhattan are followed by images of a nearly static bird, of bugs fighting, and of light bending as it passes through glass. Near the film’s end the tram lands in Manhattan, as if it had reversed direction; as in all of Julie Murray’s films, the images and the editing can pull several ways at once. There are no absolutes, and even the light by which we see is altered by the material it passes through.

November 14, 2020 / Experimental

Lacrima Christi, third part of the tetralogy Le Corps de la Passion (The Body of the Passion, 1977-1980), is inspired by Christian mythology, from which it draws a creative transformation force, in a search for identity that questions the two cultures to which the filmmaker belonged.

November 13, 2020 / Experimental
August 24, 2020 / Experimental

From the Medieval period through the Renaissance, Antoinetta Angelidi’s experimental work of allegories and aesthetic compositions contemplates the treatment and representation of women in Western art, moving through several historical stages and intertwining them with abstract sequences of perceptions, memoirs and varied perspectives, all of this executed with a very theatrical presentation.

August 19, 2020 / Animation

Isaac Ink drags a corpse through the bowels of a city of confusing geometry and labyrinthine architecture. Along the way he comes across sinister incarnations of science and technology, presented as oppressors of the contemporary man. A glimmer of humanity survives in music, dance, and sex, in the figure of a colorful jester who briefly lights up Mr. Ink’s shadowy path.

May 16, 2020 / Experimental

S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED signifies a fairly abrupt shift and departure from Sharits’ previous mandala films; this was his first work in many years that did not employ the flicker technique and used moving images. Paul Sharits’ epic and groundbreaking work is composed of three repeated, fourteen-minute sections of a river current. Each repetition consists of six dissolving layers of a river flowing in a myriad of directions, broken up by horizontal tape splices acting as dams. Deep and precisely executed emulsion scratches—created by custom tools Sharits made—eventually appear in continuous sets of threes throughout the film until the entire screen is nearly covered. The resulting effects represent, in the words of P. Adams Sitney, a “powerful and beautiful act of vandalism.”

May 12, 2020 / Documentary

A very surreal video shot behind the scenes during the production of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in Wilmington North Carolina in 1985 by Peter Braatz.