Experimental

  • Jonas Mekas – The Brig (1964)

    Jonas Mekas1961-1970ExperimentalPerformanceUSA

    Quote:
    Jonas Mekas’ The Brig is a fake documentary about ten confined soldiers in a U.S. Navy ship and the three guards who beat and humiliate them. After the title of the film, “The Brig”, the next title is “March 7, 1957 – U.S. Marine Corps – Camp Fuji, Japan – 4:30” Then Mekas goes on showing the daily lives of the soldiers, which consists of beatings, degradations, unnecessary cleanings and senseless rituals. The audience is expected to constantly question the reality of what is on the screen while being moved by the illusion.Read More »

  • Ken Jacobs – A Tom, Tom Chaser (2002)

    Ken Jacobs2001-2010ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    A Tom Tom Chaser is Jacobs’ 2002 poetic riff on the transformation of his classic film Tom Tom the Piper’s Son from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process.Read More »

  • Ken Jacobs – Capitalism: Child Labor (2006)

    Ken Jacobs2001-2010ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    “Jolting in every sense of the word, this short masterwork flickers between stereographic cards depicting Victorian-era child laborers, creating a portrait of standardized horrors, endlessly reproduced.” —MoMARead More »

  • Ken Jacobs – Window (1964)

    Ken Jacobs1961-1970ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience’s sense of gravity. The camera’s movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice. –K. J.Read More »

  • James Edmonds – A Return (2018)

    2011-2020DocumentaryExperimentalJames EdmondsUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    To return again. To re-align is the object of these visits, perhaps. Geography of origin becoming catalyst for an inner re-alignment with the secret, private, unspoken work of one’s being. Peering into layers, sliding planes of windows and time, the fragmentary gesture of the dance.
    A series of rapid contrasts, a synthesis of elemental and everyday experience.
    Structures shift and intermingle, two worlds become one.Read More »

  • Stephen Dwoskin – Lost Dreams (2003)

    Stephen Dwoskin2001-2010ExperimentalUnited Kingdom

    Lost dreams is made out of those little remnants of images,from a single glance to a detailed moment, of those women from youth’s love and young dreams. They are woven together, like fragments of the mind, and from the ends of film to the corners of the frame, into a memory of them. They are once again embraced and, if only briefly, poetically honoured.Read More »

  • Stephen Dwoskin – Intoxicated By My Illness (2001)

    Stephen Dwoskin2001-2010DocumentaryExperimentalUnited Kingdom

    Intoxicated by My Illness (in which images photographed by several people are extensively superimposed) loosely and dreamily tracks a phase in Dwoskin’s recent life that took him from medical examination to intensive care.

    Mostly it is a reverie about erotic fantasy – especially the excruciating, poignant ambiguity of bodily sensation strung out between intense pain and exquisite pleasure, between the figures of the nurse, who might be imagined as a bondage mistress, and the bondage mistress, who touches the ‘dominated’ body in the most tender way imaginable. Dwoskin periodically overlays known ‘movie music’ in order to ironically foreground his own ‘self dramatisation’, all the while drawing us into a rare and precious intimacy in extremis.Read More »

  • Paul Sharits – Word Movie (1966)

    1961-1970ExperimentalPaul SharitsShort FilmUSA

    Synopsis
    Single frame exposures of words, color.(imdb)

    Cinema of the signifier
    When we watch films we see and hear representations of things, sights and sounds not present at the moment of viewing. However, we choose to take part in the illusion of cinema limited by its rules and technical deficiencies. Word Movie is just a little joke of a film that makes us aware of this.

    On the screen you see words, another type of signifier, flashing and on the soundtrack you hear those same words read out loud. The only point this film makes is that there really is no difference between the photographic signifier, or in other words the image on the screen, and words flashing.(imdb)Read More »

  • Larry Gottheim – Natural Selection (1984)

    Larry Gottheim1981-1990ExperimentalUSA

    Quote:
    Radiating from the Darwinian text-fragments outward through the material is much pictorial and spoken signifying text having to do with issues such as communication, translation, dynamics of perception, art, science, isolation and social interaction etc. In a certain sense a meaning does arise from all of this. At the same time the endless groupings and regroupings of material suggest yet another realm of meaning. Finally it is the experience of our own selection of a pattern among the myriad richness of combining materials, superimposed on my own composed pattern, that opens up the real film–L. G.Read More »

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