Category: Experimental

February 17, 2023 / Experimental

Unconcerned with narrative constraints, the ‘plot’ of Hamlet X is both brief and almost incidental to James Clayden’s motives: a man is released from prison and moves into a deserted city building with a woman friend, where he reluctantly becomes involved with a production of Hamlet. Haunted by the uncertainty of his past, together with his guilt for exisiting, he becomes more and more like Shakespeare’s infamous Dane.

February 16, 2023 / Experimental

Wavelength is anything but simple, however, as Snow’s statement of intention suggests. He describes the film as “a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas.” The spine of the film is its famous zoom from a fixed camera position facing a wall with four tall sash windows. Over the course of the film, the angle of view narrows until the frame is filled with a black and white photograph of waves pinned up between the middle two windows. Other features of the room, in which four events involving people take place, are sloughed off. The spectator is led to concentrate on this central element, the photograph—it has been there all along—until the image is washed out and the film comes to an end.

February 16, 2023 / Animation

Robert Breer’s extraordinary autobiographical film combines personal and family photos with intense colors, textures and geometric abstractions. Originally presented as part of Karlheinz Sotckhausen’s 1964 premiere of Originale

January 31, 2023 / Experimental

Bump City is a colour film about the symbolic destruction of Los Angeles. It was never a very finished film, but it was about signs and advertising, redundant communications and manufacturing, waste and monotony.” —Pat O’Neill.

January 31, 2023 / Experimental

This inventive video renders poet Jessica Hagedorn’s views of “some of the harsh and beautiful realities of city living” for women in a man’s world. Hagedorn’s poetry is musical, pungent and gutsy. The visual artistry of Doris Chase emphasizes different aspects of Hagedorn’s lyrics. Images are dissected, quartered, washed with memory wipes that support and underscore the image and poetic meaning.

January 29, 2023 / Experimental

Described by Meredith Monk as a “memorial piece for a world at war” and an “opera in three movements,” Quarry is a typically difficult-to-classify multimedia piece by Monk, combining dance, song, film, and theatrical performance. Set during World War II, Quarry is told from the expressionistic perspective of a sickly child (played by Monk), whose idyllic domestic life becomes increasingly distorted and terrifying as news of the world enters her home and reshapes her imagination.

December 29, 2022 / Experimental

Ondine and Sally Dixon “star” as ecstatic 19th-century lovers in Roger Jacoby’s first home-processed film. Nickelodeon imagery, school children of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh Botanical Conservatory.

December 20, 2022 / Experimental

The Tin Woodman, framed by light bulbs, does a little dance, leaps and retrieves his axe from outside the frame, chops down a tree that turns into various objects, grabs a heart emblem from the corner, and goes to the Emerald City at night with Toto. He goes to the edge of a cliff, where he meats an Asian spirit who gives him a heart shape that becomes a kite that hooks to him with a cane. This is followed by approximately ten minutes of kaleidoscopic images, including a man’s hands, a dancing girl, and a cutout of Krishna.