Experimental

  • Bruce Baillie – Castro Street (1966)

    1961-1970ArchitectureBruce BaillieExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Inspired by a lesson from Erik Satie; a film in the form of a street – Castro Street running by the Standard Oil Refinery in Richmond, California … switch engines on one side and refinery tanks, stacks and buildings on the other – the street and film, ending at a red lumber company. All visual and sound elements from the street, progressing from the beginning to the end of the street, one side is black-and-white (secondary), and one side is colour – like male and female elements. The emergence of a long switch-engine shot (black-and-white solo) is to the filmmaker the essential of consciousness.Read More »

  • Michael Pilz – Himmel und Erde AKA Heaven and Earth (1983)

    1981-1990AustriaDocumentaryEthnographic CinemaExperimentalMichael Pilz

    Michael Pilz’s 285-minute Himmel and Erde is an essay film or an ethnographic documentary about life in the Styrian mountain village of St. Anna. It contemplates the finite lot of individuals as part of a continuum of human experience in the natural world. Himmel und Erde, which translates to Heaven and Earth, was recorded between 1979 and 1982. The documentary invites the viewer to contemplate the disruptive effects of technology on economic and social ties through circumscribed vignettes of village life which are oft repeated either as recycled footage or variations on a theme. The film is a meditation on time, nature, and the struggles of man, as well as a record of a lifestyle ceasing to exist. “If you let it happen, the film will pull you into its cosmos; it is one of those works that teaches you to see and listen again.”Read More »

  • Hollis Frampton – Manual of Arms (1966)

    1961-1970ExperimentalHollis FramptonShort FilmUSA

    Experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton shoots a series of portrait shots of each of his fourteen friends, each with half of their face in shadow and each with a different expression. After all fourteen introductions have been made, Frampton then presents a series of brief shots in which each friend shown previously performs an everyday activity for the camera, from smoking to drinking to sitting. The different angles and the varied lighting in each of these lightning-quick shots are used to create a mysterious and sinister atmosphere.Read More »

  • Ingo Petzke – Northern Lights (2015) (DVD)

    2011-2020ExperimentalGermanyIngo Petzke

    If we really strive for emancipation from visual maiming in the cinema, away from institutionalised viewing-schemata on TV, it is not sufficient to keep expanding the boundaries and to start breaking new visual grounds. In addition to the small avant-garde of filmmakers doing so, we need an army of others starting to sow and cultivate the ploughed-up grounds and who will bring in the harvest for the benefit of those still visually undernourished. Werner Nekes, the doyen of German Experimental Film once claimed that the first trains were more important than golden stage coaches. Well, alright then, let’s use these newly-developed means of visual trans-portation to advance into the new grounds into which the tracks have been laid down for years by the Avant-garde.Read More »

  • Hollis Frampton – Process Red (1966)

    1961-1970ExperimentalHollis FramptonShort FilmUSA

    An abstract short consisting of a series of quick shots, in which hands are shown doing a variety of things: peeling an egg, holding a cup, etc. Tinted pink, these shots are consistently interrupted by other black and white shots of other images.Read More »

  • Jairo Ferreira – O Vampiro da Cinemateca aka The Vampire of the Cinematheque (1977)

    1971-1980BrazilComedyExperimentalJairo Ferreira

    Quote:
    Technical mistakes? This is a Brazil’s specialty, this land without know-how. The documentary which, as Marcio Souza said in his modesty, should be to current Brazilian cinema as Aruanda was to Cinema Novo, will be shown in Brasília – we hope – and should fall like a thorn inside the throat of all idiots who are yet to discover Brazil – by the way, Oswald de Andrade, anthropophagous, language designer, revolutionary and whatever more that could exist in this section of the Third World: Brazil.
    – Jairo FerreiraRead More »

  • Storm De Hirsch – Peyote Queen (1965)

    1961-1970ExperimentalShort FilmStorm De HirschUSA

    Synopsis:
    Peyote Queen is the second and best known part of de Hirsch’s trilogy, The Color of Ritual, the Color of Thought. It is preceded by Divinations (1964) and Shaman (1966). The film’s imagery is abstract, consisting of both live action footage and animated sequences which de Hirsch created by painting and etching directly on the 16mm film stock. Split screens, kaleidoscopic lenses, and abstract animations are used to create a psychedelic effect. De Hirsch had a background in painting (she published an interview of the abstract expressionist painter, Willem de Kooning, in 1955), and her films of this period have been described as “painterly.” The soundtrack consists of African drumming and singing interspersed with American pop music.Read More »

  • Werner Nekes – Lagado (1977)

    1971-1980ExperimentalGermanyWerner Nekes

    Quote:
    “…What sounds rather bookish and intimidating, in fact unfolds an enormous sensual stimulus on screen. In more than 20 sequences, based in part on work by Stifter and Camus, Hamburg’s experimental film director and a number of students from Braunschweig and Göttingen demonstrate a higher school of hearing and seeing. With manipulations of sight and sound, which are at times highly complex and mathematically precise, he shows the tension between optical and acoustic elements, inventing ever new combinations from which an abstract poetry issues forth. Nekes works with single frame mechanism and multiple copying of the images, thus defamiliarizing the sound at the same time. The title of the film pertains to Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Lagado is the name of the academy in which scientists of the most diverse disciplines work at strange projects.” – Hans C. BlumenbergRead More »

  • Edgar Pêra – Movimentos Perpétuos: Cine-Tributo a Carlos Paredes AKA Perpetual Movements: A Cine Tribute to Carlos Paredes (2006)

    2001-2010DocumentaryEdgar PêraExperimentalPortugalVideo Art

    Quote:
    A documentary in 17 movements, in which testimonies and the guitar define the genius, the bravery and the modesty of Carlos Paredes. In PERPETUAL MOVEMENTS ‚ A TRIBUTE TO CARLOS PAREDES a dialog is established between a guitar and a SP8 camera, in an aesthetic which evocates the memory of old family pictures, full of intimacy, revealed in the sharing of simple stories of life. The Carlos Paredes’s concert in Auditório Carlos Alberto, in Oporto, 1984, is the starting point for the unfolding of prison stories, resistance, success and amateurism, stories marked by simplicity and passion.Read More »

Back to top button