Poetic film about the struggle of man's will and muscles against nature, about the rock-climbers who prevent landslides and eliminate their consequences.
Anne Bean, John McKeon, Stuart Brisley, Rita Donagh, Jamie Reid and Jimmy Boyle are interviewed about their artistic practice and the legacy of Surrealism on their work.
A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage and set to an original symphonic score.
Film cameras cruise the Soviet Union's mighty Volga River, providing a view of the Russian people along its 2300-mile length, including looks at the fishing industry, a rural village, a manufacturing town and the wedding of two factory workers.
A manufactured memory.
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
Nature, gymnastic movements, a cat...
Glen Denny observed: "This film is not ocean, it is panther stalking jungle." Camera flows because it is free to move through space.
Fluidity of stone. Subatomic motion asserting a surface. Mind loop wandering. Visitation of sound matrix. Liquid solid. Nature transforms a planetary cycle. Relations of a timeless void.
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."
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.
A look at the various modes of transportation made for the Expo '86 World Fair in Vancouver, Canada.
This experimental nature documentary by Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts depicts climate change and the wave of extinction from the point of view of our near future. Actually, it depicts the age we live in now, or rather its fateful consequences.
Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.
The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.
Wes Hurley's autobiographical tale of growing up gay in Soviet Union Russia, only to escape with his mother, a mail order bride, to Seattle to face a whole new oppression in his new Christian fundamentalist American dad.
This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.
The Greek island of Syros is visited by a series of unexpected guests. Immutable forms, outside of time, aloof observants to human conditions.