Short Film

  • Stelios Moraitidis – Dakar (2020)

    2011-2020GreeceShort FilmStelios Moraitidis

    1978, on his birthday, Stavros was set to get engaged to Matula. Instead, he was forced to embark on his first big journey. 2020, on his birthday, Stavros wanders around the city alone. It is the day that he doesn’t like to talk. It is the day that he reflects on his past considering how things would have been if he had made other decisions.Read More »

  • Claudine Eizykman – V.W. Vitesse Women (1974)

    1971-1980Claudine EizykmanExperimentalFranceShort Film

    One of the most important films of French avant-garde cinema, displaying Claudine Eizykman’s theory of “cinematographic energy” as well as creating kinetic movements capable of shaking up the world and revealing its heterogeneity.Read More »

  • Janusz Morgenstern – Ambulans AKA The Ambulance (1961)

    Janusz Morgenstern1961-1970DramaPolandShort Film

    Quote:
    “Ambulance” is a less than 10-minute etude with metaphorical overtones. The film opens with Hitler’s off-screen speech about the necessity of destroying the Jewish race. The appeal ends with the image of a group of children waiting in an empty square for their last journey. The title ambulance, which is normally used to save lives, becomes a tool of their extermination.Read More »

  • Jafar Panahi – Hidden (2020)

    Jafar Panahi2011-2020DocumentaryIranShort Film

    Jafar Panahi sets out to find a young woman with a golden voice that has been forbidden to sing by Iranian authorities.Read More »

  • Lynne Sachs – Figure and I (2021)

    Lynne Sachs2021-2030ExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    “Kristine Leschper wrote to me with a very intriguing proposition: create a short film in response to her song “Figure and I”. I knew that this deeply rhythmic two-minute song needed some kind of somatic imagery. I needed to move with my body and my camera as I was shooting it. A few days later, I went to “The New Woman Behind the Camera” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In this show, I saw two photos by two women photographers from the 1920s whose work I had never seen before. These images guided me to a way of interpreting the physicality and the intimacy of Kristine’s song. Soon afterward, I invited my friend Kim Wilberforce to be in my film and to interpret the song herself, through her vibrant wardrobe and her precise, ecstatic clapping gestures. “
    —Lynne SachsRead More »

  • Ashish Avikunthak – Ashish Avikunthak Short Films (1995 – 2010)

    Ashish AvikunthakExperimentalIndiaShort Film

    1. Et cetera
    1997, 16mm, Color, 33 mins

    ‘Et cetera’ is a tetralogy of four separate films that seek to examine the various levels at which the reality of human existence functions. Shown at Dhaka Short film festival, 1999, and Cinema Nova Brussels, 2005.

    Avikunthak’s foray into filmmaking was directly an attempt at playing with time — all the four films in Et cetera, are directly an attempt at engaging with real time, the fact that they are single shot, single take, unedited films. For him, as a temporal experience they are most linear cinematic narrative, most pure. These films, rather than sculpting in time, were slicing time. However video art has been more successful as an engagement with real time, he says, “I look at my films as an attempt at invoking ‘kaal’ as a metaphysical entity, rather than ‘kaal’ as a temporal category; Et cetera and Kalighat Fetish being articulation of such an invocation.”Read More »

  • Rei Hayama – The Pearl of Tailorbird (2018)

    2011-2020ExperimentalJapanJapanese Female DirectorsRei HayamaShort Film

    Quote:
    Working between text, sound, and moving-image, Hayama crafts profoundly beautiful short films whose obliquely mythopoetic narratives explore what might best be termed “ecological anomie.” Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as the Lumière brothers, medieval Japanese poetry, and proto-scientific treatises by Goethe and Aristotle, Hayama’s works probe the essential loneliness experienced by a human-kind which has been estranged from the unity of nature by our modern systems of perception and knowledge production. While many experimental filmmakers operating in a romantic mode have taken nature as a subject – often seeking to spectacularize her optical presence through the creation of “transcendent” imagery – Hayama’s films are characterized by an uncommon sense of aesthetic restraint, a conscious preservation of critical distance in the face of nature’s inscrutability and our own primordial entanglement within it.Read More »

  • Grayson Cooke – after – image (2012)

    2011-2020ExperimentalGrayson CookeNew ZealandShort Film

    Quote
    “after – image” is an art-science project by Grayson Cooke, exploring material memory and forgetting. It features time-lapse macro-photography of photographic negatives being chemically destroyed.

    This project was produced in consultation with scientist and artist Amanda Reichelt-Brushett and with sound by Matt Hill.Read More »

  • Harley Cokeliss – Crash! (1971)

    Harley Cokeliss1971-1980ExperimentalShort FilmUnited Kingdom

    A surreal, moody short about the fetishization of automobiles and auto accidents.

    Short film produced by the BBC about JG Ballard’s Crash. “The film was a product of the most experimental, darkest phase of Ballard’s career. It was an era of psychological blowback from the sudden, shocking death of his wife in 1964, an era that had produced the cut-up ‘condensed novels’ of Atrocity plus a series of strange collages and ‘advertisers’ announcements’. […] After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised.’ Later there were further literary experiments, concrete poems and ‘impressionistic’ film reviews, and an aborted multimedia theatrical play based around car crashes. After that came an actual gallery exhibition of crashed cars, replete with strippers and the drunken destruction of the ‘exhibits’ by an enraged audience.”Read More »

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