Cygnus A (2025)

Begotten

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.

On Generation and Corruption

Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.

The Abyss of shadows

Ayush suffers from sleep paralysis and dark hallucinations, haunted by shadowy figures that represent his repressed fears. Trapped between dream and reality, he confronts these manifestations of his inner turmoil.

Paprika

When a machine that allows therapists to enter their patient's dreams is stolen, all hell breaks loose. Only a young female therapist can stop it and recover it before damage is done: Paprika.

Woman in the Dunes

A vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.

Pi

A mathematical genius discovers a link between numbers and reality, and thus believes he can predict the future.

Angel's Egg

In a desolate and dark world full of shadows, lives one little girl who seems to do nothing but collect water in jars and protect a large egg she carries everywhere. A mysterious man enters her life... and they discuss the world around them.

Perfect Blue

Encouraged by her managers, rising pop star Mima takes on a recurring role on a popular TV show, when suddenly her handlers and collaborators begin turning up murdered.

Speaking of Abstraction: A Universal Language

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, abstraction - that most quintessentially modernist innovation - maintains a peculiarly contradictory position. Used, on one hand, by post-modernist artists as just one more quotable style amongst many, it is on the other hand still considered an elitist or hermetic language by audiences intimidated by its lack of recognizable subject matter. Yet ultimately, abstraction continues to be a viable creative path for contemporary artists of all generations, many of whom embrace it as the most inclusive and fundamentally resonant of artistic languages. Filmed at the artists' studios, the Dia Center for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Museum during their exhibition, "Abstraction in the Twentieth Century."

Son of the White Mare

A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.

Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted

After her boyfriend ends their relationship, the dreamself of a heartbroken woman floats through the air over an industrial wasteland singing ballads of love.

Rampo Noir

An anthology film consisting of four segments based on literary works by Edogawa Ranpo.

Tremble All You Want

Yoshika has had a crush on Ichimiya, whom she calls "the One" since she was in middle school. Now, a 24-year-old salarywoman, her all-consuming fixation has prevented her from even considering another candidate for boyfriend until an office colleague asks her out.

Sunfall

A girl sitting on an autumn leaf-filled sidewalk communicates with a mysterious figure across the street.

Drums West

This newly rediscovered short was created in Jim's home studio in Bethesda, MD around 1961. It is one of several experimental shorts inspired by the music of jazz great Chico Hamilton. At the end, in footage probably shot by Jerry Juhl, Jim demonstrates his working method.

You're Not Real Pretty but You're Mine...

"Mouris’s film, YOU’RE NOT REAL PRETTY BUT YOU’RE MINE…, built upon the strongest elements of QUICK DREAM, and added a pop music soundtrack. Mouris says, “I shot another 100 foot roll on classmate Jerry Strawbridge’s home animation stand, and edited that into the best sequences from QUICK DREAM. The whole film was a tongue-in-cheek series of odd couples/couplings, which the title suggested. The FRANK FILM photo collage animation evolved here.” - Yale

Shearing Animation

An abstract animated film inspired by the work of jazz musician Chico Hamilton.

Beyond the Black Rainbow

Deep within the mysterious Arboria Institute, a disturbed and beautiful girl is held captive by a doctor in search of inner peace. Her mind controlled by a sinister technology. Silently, she waits for her next session with deranged therapist Dr. Barry Nyle. If she hopes to escape, she must journey through the darkest reaches of The Institute, but Nyle wonʼt easily part with his most gifted and dangerous creation.

Mind Game

Nishi is a loser who has a crush on his childhood girlfriend. After an encounter with the Japanese mafia, he journeys to heaven and back, and ends up trapped in an even more unlikely place.

Head

In this surrealistic and free-form follow-up to the Monkees' television show, the band frolic their way through a series of musical set pieces and vignettes containing humor and anti-establishment social commentary.

A Day In LC

A person living in Liberty City goes to work, have some food & gets back home.

Seeing Through the Mists of Oblivion

After the end of civilization, an aged man undergoes a mysterious journey through space and time that takes him through memories, visions, and historical events, ultimately transcending the limitations of the senses and into a new cosmic rebirth.

Ornette: Made in America

Shirley Clarke's frenetic documentary about multi-talented musician Ornette Coleman.

The Angel Was Born

Santamaria and Urtigo are two bandits on the run, one is white, the other black. Santamaria is a mystical visionary and believes in the imminent coming of a purifying angel. Urtiga, his inseparable companion, is a simple-minded and ingenious man who follows Santamaria around and participates in the crimes he commits. The two bandits take over a house after kidnapping its owner and his girlfriend.

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.

M・Y・F・A・C・E

Abstract horror short about a girl's face.

Unconscious London Strata

This film, photographed in London, is an exploration into the depths of unconscious reactions.

Pyre

Exploring helplessness, Pyre is an experimental short film which personifies death as a ghoul in a dress, drawing closer and closer until striking.

Free Radicals

In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads. The first version of the film won a major award at the International Experimental Film Festival Held in Brussels in 1958 in association with the World's Fair. Stan Brakhage described the film as "an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece".

Fuji

A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-esque Japanese landscape of electrical power lines, passing trains, railroad tracks, and the gentle slope of obliquely peaked, uniform rooflines as Breer distills the essential geometry of Mount Fuji into a collage of acute angles and converging (and bifurcating) lines .

Copycat Killer

A visualizer for Phoebe Bridgers' Copycat Killer EP, featuring four songs originally released on the Grammy-nominated album Punisher, with new orchestral instrumentation and arrangements by Rob Moose.

Casa de Lava

The film tells a story of Mariana, a nurse who leaves Lisbon to accompany an immigrant worker in a comatose sleep on his trip home to Cape Verde. The devoted Portuguese nurse took a journey only to find herself lost in abstract drama.

Metamorphic

She's here. She comes closer. Is she in front of me? Now she, by herself, becomes her.

Face in Motion

Face in Motion depicts Chang Chao-Tang from the shoulders up, dressed in a light tank top, shaking his head and contorting his face. The background is pitch black, and he is lit with an almost otherworldly glow. The artist recorded at two frames per second, rather than the typical twenty-four, speeding up the erratic movement. He occasionally flips upside down or appears in blue and green colourised layers on top of the colourless original. A high-intensity electronic track, ‘Pulstar’, by the Greek musician Vangelis, accompanies the video and accentuates its volatile energy.

Dionisos

"I only say the sun goodbye." Dionisos captures the existential unease where insomnia echoes and shadows of past regrets linger. As days blend into unconsciousness, the night unveils a haunting struggle between personal demons and the unending flow of existence.

Diotima

"Dancing is sculpting in time." Diotima captures the fluid grace of two people sculpting time through dance, in a continuous one-take shot around Indy Simin's "Echt in Vorm." Their movements inside, around, and upon the sculpture reveal a simple unity, where shapes, dancers, and their environment are perpetually in motion, blending into an inseparable, seamless harmony of a never-ending dance.

Daedalus

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." Shot in just seven consecutive days during the summer of 2023, it concludes the first volume of Bliss, a playlist of sounds and shapes. Daedalus delves into the perilous dance between striving for something and the suffocating pull of stagnancy. This chaotic structure bridges the warnings and epiphanic thoughts of 20th-century thinkers with the lives of today's dreamers.

The Shining

Jack Torrance accepts a caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel, where he, along with his wife Wendy and their son Danny, must live isolated from the rest of the world for the winter. But they aren't prepared for the madness that lurks within.

Fire Music

Although the free jazz movement of the 1960s and '70s was much maligned in some jazz circles, its pioneers - brilliant talents like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane - are today acknowledged as central to the evolution of jazz as America's most innovative art form. FIRE MUSIC showcases the architects of a movement whose radical brand of improvisation pushed harmonic and rhythmic boundaries, and produced landmark albums like Coleman's Free Jazz: A Collective Inspiration and Coltrane's Ascension. A rich trove of archival footage conjures the 1960s jazz scene along with incisive reflections by critic Gary Giddins and a number of the movement's key players.