Trash Talking (2006)

Between Science and Garbage

A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.

Nocturna Artificialia

Enigmatic, stop-motion, animated story of a man's day.

The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer

In Prague, a professorial puppet, with metal pincers for hands and an open book for a hat, takes a boy as a pupil. First, the professor empties fluff and toys from the child's head, leaving him without the top of his head for most of the film. The professor then teaches the lad about illusions and perspectives, the pursuit of an object through exploring a bank of drawers, divining an object, and the migration of forms. The child then brings out a box with a tarantula in it: the professor puts his "hands" into the box and describes what he feels. The boy receives a final lesson about animation and film making; then the professor gives him a brain and his own open-book hat.

This Unnameable Little Broom

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet on a trike captures a puppet bird-man.

Street of Crocodiles

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies

Stop-motion animated short film in which, among other things, a man made of wire looks malevolent.

The Comb

A porcelain doll’s explorations of a dreamer’s imagination.

Anamorphosis

The Quays' interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed from different angles, mischievously revealed hidden symbols.

Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married?

Stop-motion animated short film with a white ball, a rabbit, and a girl, and a voice singing "Are We Still Married".

Stille Nacht III: Tales from Vienna Woods

Near an extraordinary chair with many legs, a hand is visible gripping an edge. The hand is weathered, the fingers cracked and scarred. The end of a rifle appears and a shot fires. The bullet is visible whirling through space; it caroms and then goes through a pine cone. A long spoon emerges from a drawer in the chair and stretches toward the hand. The bullet is on the spoon. Later, the hand holds the bullet between two fingers; another shot is fired.

In Absentia

A woman sits alone on a chair at a table in a room on one of the top floors of an asylum. Bright spot lights dot the night, sometimes shining on her window. She sharpens pencils and writes on a page in a copy book. The pencil point often breaks under her fingers' force. She places broken points outside the window on the sill. A satanic figure is somewhere nearby, animated but of straw or clay, not flesh. She finishes her writing, tears the paper from the pad, folds it, places it in an envelope, and slips it through a slot. Is she writing to her husband? "Sweetheart, come." Written by

Gloria Mundi

An actress of political torture movies made by her husband has to finish his latest film and arrange a screening for distributors while the husband, who is also secretly an anarchist revolutionary, is away for some resistance operation.

Selva. A Portrait of Parvaneh Navaï

Trance dances and out of body projection. In front of the camera, Parvaneh Navaï becomes a mediator who enters in contact with and immerses into the energies of Nature, while her own energy radiates and echos in the forest ("selva"). The camera amplifies and expands her presence, transforming the forest into an imaginary space. The camera becomes a painter's brush.

Mona Lisa

An experimental short film from Toshio Matsumoto featuring Mona Lisa.

Film Is. 7-12

The second half of Gustav Deutsch's experimental Film ist. series, constructing new narratives and moods out of existing footage, mostly from early silent era films.