Spiral Labyrinth (1982)

Dilution

Dilution is an experimental short film that explores the transit between resistance and (di)ssolution, between holding and releasing and a path towards obsessive repetition. They are layers, exposed pores, matter that oscillates between remaining or disappearing. The sound is not a background, but a puncture: friction, tearing, water that drags what still persists. A sensorial testimony of what refuses to vanish completely.

Angel

In this short film, a young man, a girl and a dog attempt to fly with wings more symbolic than practical.

Touch Air

An homage to the influential practice and philosophy of artist Nasreen Mohamedi. The film incorporates Mohamedi’s personal notes and her unique singular vision, drawing upon the aesthetics of the bare line, and its metaphysical journey eliminating physical borders/barriers.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Shot on 16mm film in New York and composed in Berlin, the work explores polarizing themes of the metropolis. Audibly and visually, the viewer is put in a flicker between serenity and intensity; harrowing ambience cut with sharp beeps, vulnerable steps mashed in high velocity.

reMemBer2.human

In an indeterminate future, forbidden memories challenge a database containing all human memories. An experimental cinematic search between past and future, fiction and fact, Prishtina and Tirana. The future, a glitch.

Flying Daddy

One morning, Papa transforms into a giant insect in the futon, emerges instantly in front of the astonished family, breaks through the window and flies into the sky. Short animation by Keita Kurosaka for MTV Japan.

Demi-Goddesses

The second essay about still dominant dark aspects of our modern society. It is conceived as a surreal anti-patriarchal thought experiment and raises important questions about gender, power, and social change, prompting us to reflect on how historical patterns of discrimination and oppression might be either repeated or overcome in a reversed gendered world. It challenges the viewer to confront their own assumptions and biases, and to consider the possibilities of a more equitable society.

Woman Is My Last Name

This visual poetry is a celebration of the full spectrum of womanhood, from the complex vulnerability to the hidden power.

Bunnyhood

What could possibly be more important than feeding your daughter?

Creation

The first 12 minutes would later be released as "Fountain of Dreams"

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.

Perfect Dark

A womans last moments before she is consumed by a darkness.

It Fell on Deaf Ears

Because Quebec Sign Language cannot be captured on paper, videography has revealed itself to be the best way to represent this visual language. The first ‘comic strip’ in sign language, the film depicts snatches of conversations between various deaf and hearing protagonists. A visit to a silent world, where the hearing impaired ask us to listen to them.

Sunstone

Experimental computer animation from pioneering artist Ed Emshwiller.

LAND

LAND is a fluid series of formal land animation experiments based upon the imprint of landscapes in various locations and intuitive interpretations of those movements. Shot in New York, Thimble Islands Bear Island, Connecticut, Armstrong Redwoods, Sonoma County, California, Hastings, England. note* (part of the EYE Filmmuseum Permanent Collection)

A Paw Over Dark

A washed up actor performs night after night in a grimy theater to a nearly empty audience. However, everything changes when a clueless dog jumps on stage.

Mothlight

Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like Matisse. Green objects occasionally appear. Most wings are translucent. The technique makes them appear to be stuck directly to the film.

Eye Myth

After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears twice, coming into focus, then disappearing behind the bursts and patterns of color, then reappearing; the second figure appears later, in the right foreground. This figure suggests someone older, someone of substance. The myth? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

Memory of a Displaced Body

A ritual in the form of a film essay that explores, through collage, the sense of exile experienced during early childhood migration. It examines the primal configuration of detachment from one’s homeland, family environment, and body, and the reclamation of origins as a symbolic center.

Answering the Sun

Rainer Kohlberger is prepared to go far when it comes to the physical experiences he evokes with his work. Answering the Sun demands the utmost from its audience. The invitation is to squint our eyes and allow the most amazing trips to unfold – just like when we were children letting the sun come in. However, the work is simultaneously a 60-minute bombardment of coloured fields and a wall of sound, followed by a hallucinatory, silent inky-black sequence.

Stellar

This is a hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to achieve various effects of brief fades and fluidity-of-motion, and makes partial use of painted frames in repetition (for "close-up" of textures). The tone of the film is primarily dark blue, and the paint is composed (and rephotographed microscopically) to suggest galactic forms in a space of stars.

The Long Walk

An animated short based on a scene from "The Long Walk" by Stephen King

A Visual Poem

Surreal environments take center stage in this visual odyssey.

Preludio de un destello

In an audiovisual collage of nostalgia and magnetism, “Prelude to a Flash” fuses images from early cinema with elements of contemporary animation. It explores the tension between past and present through the edges, the traces that emerge from the representation of bodies in a sensory and emotional journey.

Razors

A man with a razor in his head calls in a maintenance repair.

MATIERICA

One might think that beautiful pictures, a compelling story, and brilliant movement are the three essential elements of a good animated film. The word "anima" from which animation is derived, as we all know, means "to breathe life into". And "life" means "limited time" and that there could be an approach that does not include any of the aforementioned "three elements". The result of several years of exploring new methods was an "animated film" that eschews the so-called "animated" structure. This film aims to visualize "shifting consciousness" through a method of filming in which approximately 5,000 pencil drawings are constantly overlapped"

removed

Starting with a piece of vintage porn, filmmaker Naomi Uman painstakingly removed each female figure from the footage using nail polish remover, leaving a striking absence where there's usually a fleshy presence. Uman's celebrated film is a smart retort to pornography's obsessive gaze at the female body.

Sausage City

Sausage City illustrates Beckett's additive cycle process. Constantly evolving rectangular shapes provide a foundation for an environment inhabited by mutating blobs - or sausages. Sounds and shapes create a moving space that teeters on the edge between control and chaos. The ending is somewhat mystifying, pulling us out of the surreal environment and revealing its origins. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.

Atman

ĀTMAN is a visual tour-de-force based on the idea of the subject at the centre of the circle created by camera positions (480 such positions). Shooting frame-by-frame the filmmaker set up an increasingly rapid circular motion. ĀTMAN is an early Buddhist deity often connected with destruction; the Japanese aspect is stressed by the devil mask of Hangan, from the Noh, and by using both Noh music and the general principle of acceleration often associated with Noh drama.