This film-performance, edited live during the screening, serves as an atmospheric and experiential investigation into the very essence of electrical flux, inviting viewers to embark on a transformative cinematic ride.
When forest animals invade our cities, the world is in disarray. Office vixen Fiona struggles with her banana phone addiction. Will she succumb to it? Temperamental bunny Barbara only gives her stag sugar daddy Nestor his special massage, after he dines her and plays the big spender. This obscure short film pinpoints postmodern tropes of consumerism, eroticism, and art with an homage to the theater stage and references to literature. This work uses a fantasy language and needs no subtitles.
Regrettably, the labour of projectionists is usually only considered by the audience when they ‘screw up’. This film offers an alternative opportunity. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.
"Three Women, is an ambitious work designed to be shown on multiple screens in a movie theater. Moving a step forward from the use of multiple screens as an expansion of cinema as exemplified by Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), it presents what is literally a conceptual expansion of cinema in the form of a filmic work experienced in a theater in which the 15-channel, surround-sound audio constructed by Araki Masamitsu and Ito’s visuals organically intertwine."
A man, alone in a room, experiences a nightmare of his own
An experimental re-edit of Jack Frost, starring Michael Keaton.
Body and Landscape is the exploration of the world of a dancer, who finds in her body the best way to experience the world. Above all, the short film alludes to the cycle of life, where there is a beginning, a middle and an indication of the end. The construction of the film's visual and sound landscape is developed from two narratives, which communicate simultaneously. One that starts with the dancer, who uses dance as the main means of expression and that follows a chronologically organized direction in the narrative and another that starts from visual plans based on nature, without obeying a temporal logic, and that refer to the story by Hans Christian Anderson.
Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.
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.
Nevermore Eleanor (2024) | 2160p
A roll and a half made to delight in color and the presence of friends. Steps toward learning to read in the dark.
A photographer girl enters a street to take street photographs as usual and takes a few photos that she thinks are normal. When she washes the photos and hangs them, she sees that she is actually in one of the photos and goes in search of that person.
A bleak, cryptic vision of life in contemporary Iran that eschews overt social commentary in favour of a very personal vision of stifled lives. Directed remotely by Rashidi from Ireland over Skype, the making of this unique film reflects the alienation it so compellingly portrays.
Surreal and mysterious, in equal parts absurd and intense, Mutual Admiration Society is part of the noted multi-film collaboration between actor James Devereaux and experimental filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi. Based entirely around a silent, tour-de-force one-man performance by Devereaux as a man who appears to be haunting and threatening himself, Mutual Admiration Society uses startling visual techniques and editing rhythms to create a claustrophobic hall of mirrors with Devereaux’s tormented protagonist at its centre.
“Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days”, is a four hour feature film by Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi. Structured in two sections or ‘takes’ of two hours each, this dream-like, experimental project offers two complementary explorations of cinematic form that skirt around possible narratives, ducking through a series of fluctuating audio-visual categories and intensities.
Homo Sapiens Project (200) was completed in 2020 as part of the 20th anniversary of Experimental Film Society. This eight-hour experimental feature is constituted from short film experiments made between 2000 to 2010. These films have already undergone many metamorphoses over the years. They were always restless wandering spirits seeking a permanent place of rest but so far without success. Each section of Homo Sapiens Project (200) was made under the unique condition of living out a form of subtle therapeutic practice. Collectively they reflect major life-changing events, formalistic mutations and thematic shifts within Rouzbeh Rashidi’s filmography. In spite of this, they could not find the peace of a satisfactory final shape. Indeed, they are about peace, something that rarely (if ever) exists within Rashidi’s work. But now, after twenty years of roaming the subconscious, they have come to rest in a permanent retirement in one world, one very personal floating planet.