Words Are Limited, Feelings Are Not

Impressions from the Upper Atmosphere

Sistiaga painted directly on 70mm film a circular (planetary?) form, around which dance shifting colours in a psychedelic acceleration matched by the soundtrack’s deep-space roar and howl. - Cinema Scope

Once Faithful

Days slip away in a former baptist church haunted by its past

The Five Obstructions

In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.

Artémis et la mort

During the Feria of Nîmes, a bullfight is filmed from the perspective of the animal, relegating the matador and public to off-screen spectators. A ritual at the frontiers of mysticism, carried by the sacrificial figure of the bull, revealer of our humanity.

The Displaced View

The Displaced View traces a personal search for identity and pride, within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in Canada. Through an examination of the emotional and cultural links between the women of one family, the processes of the construction of memory and the re-construction of history, are revealed. Utilizing an innovative combination of experimental, dramatic and documentary forms, the film emerges as a deeply moving and compassionate love letter. Just as the official history of the Japanese Canadians has been thrown into question, so does the film’s fictionalized narrative, question documentary as truth.

Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

The Fish

"A fisherman, dark-skinned and shirtless, sits in a boat on a quiet river and, before long, catches a fish. The fish gasps for air and the fisherman holds it to his chest until it dies. This sequence—performed by a series of fishermen, of various ages and using various styles of capture—is the spine of the work, interrupted by passages of quiet natural beauty; one shot is a steady, stately pan through scores of trees and empty air behind." - Vinson Cunningham

Die grüne Hölle

Expedition into the Amazon river and its rain forests

Achtung Staatsgrenze

Short film about the GDR state border

The Incredible Bread Machine Film

A discussion of the economic and political ideas presented in the book "The Incredible Bread Machine".

Playgirl Models

An overview of the best methods and techniques for taking nude photographs.

Thot-Fal'N

This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."

Reservisten

A report on the work of a reservist collective from a factory of the Guben chemical fiber combine.

Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and upload them to this site. Software developed specifically for this project archives, sequences and streams the submissions as a film. Anyone can upload footage. When the work streams your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage, in Vertov’s terms the “decoding of life as it is”.

Bread

Life on the breadline in the 1930s was hard enough, but times were desperate when you fell beneath it. Hunger marches organised by the National Unemployed Workers' Movement drew attention to the cause, but this left-wing collective picked up a cine-camera. The fictional story at the heart of the film is somewhat melodramatic, but the authentic surroundings give its message realism and weight.

Leftovers

A manufactured memory.

Ein Fenster in die Welt

Students from nine nations unite on August 7, 1950 at the Franco-German border near Germanshof, tear down the barriers and remove the border posts and barriers, which they burn in a ceremony. This act is a commitment to Europe and a protest against the arbitrariness of borders between nations.

Landscape dynamics

An investigation about human intervention in nature, from the subjective point of view of the camera, the environment and its transformation are observed.

Presos del silencio

Cautivos en la arena