A young woman awakens in a hospital bed, as she staggers to her feet the world around takes on an otherworldly ambience. Her circular, unending life revolves into a nightmarish loop as she confronts herself and her dead end existence.
Category: Experimental
An early example of computer generated animation; several hundred dots move about the screen according to a set of instructions in a graphics program which were input into a IBM digital computer and coloured by an optical printer.
Strapped for time due to her busy schedule of personal appearances, Laurie Anderson creates a rather clumsy looking clone to take over and keep up her artistic production. Anderson plays both parts, pitting the chain-smoking, productive male half against the laid-back female half. In the end, one highly successful clone begets another clone, a situation spoofing the rise and fall of the ’80s art star.
This animated short film adapted from a short story by Quebec writer Roch Carrier takes us to the beach, in the middle of summer, when the existence of various characters mysteriously intertwine for a moment. What elusive links unwittingly unite the three men on the bank and the drowning woman in the distance? A poetic tale bathed in the sea, the sun and a drifting sailboat.
Over an eight-year period in the 1970s, Leo Hurwitz made this film tribute to his deceased wife and colleague, the film editor and director Peggy Lawson. His most personal work and his last major production, Hurwitz’s film is at once epic and lyrical; a portrait of an individual and chronicle of the times; an ode to the spirit of artistic collaboration and a testament to political idealism. The film contains beautiful original material plus documentary footage and reconstructions — excerpts from a number of Hurwitz’s films; the voices of Paul Robeson, Kaiulani Lee and Alfred Drake; and music that ranges from Bach to Marc Blitzstein.
An old man meditates by the sea. A little girl is building a sandcastle. A young couple is frolicking on the beach. The day fades into the evening, as do the memories of youth. Pika päeva ehavalgus (The Light of a Long Day) is a poetic short film about the course of life, shot on 16mm. It won medals at amateur film festivals in Yugoslavia, Austria, Finland, Lithuania and the Baltic Union Republics for the humanistic treatment of the subject and the best directorial and acting work.
Former music-video director Michael H. Shamberg debut film is an experimental drama about a woman who comes to terms with painful childhood memories. Orlando is an expatriate American sports journalist living in Paris. She is also slowly recovering from childhood sexual abuse from her father and an incestuous relationship with her late brother. As she wanders the streets on a rainy evening, she sullenly ruminates over her memories. Both Kristin Scott Thomas and Christina Ricci play small parts in this film, while legendary filmmaker Chris Marker provides computer graphics.
Four people at the breakfast table, an American family, are locked in the beat of the editing table. The short, pulsating sequence at the family table shows, in its original state, a classic, deceptive harmony. Matin Arnold deconstructs this scenario of normality by destroying its original continuity. It catches on the tinny sounds and bizarre body movements of the subjects, which, in reaction, become snagged on the continuity. The message that lies deep under the surface of the family idyll, suppressed or lost, is exposed–that message is war.