Movies: Avant garde

“Peter Kubelka…was teaching at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule (Städel) at the time. His classes, filmmaking and cooking, were very unique, and this film was made around the time I was studying with him at Städel… This is a s...

"Thornton's magnum opus, this ongoing and open-ended serial follows its two improvisatory protagonists, children “raised by technology,” through a surreal landscape where pop culture and history, science and science fiction blur." - BAM...

FUDDY DUDDY uses the motif of the grid to blow it to pieces. Being occupied with structural film, I repeatedly draw 'frame plans', using grid structures to precisely record the succession of individual images. To me, this sometimes seems like a searc...

Vast horizons and hollow landscapes. Figures in funeral gowns swaying from reality. Withering within without wunnienuther, we wandered windswept as heartswept....

The scene is set in front of a French chateau. The camera chases improbable incidents across the screen. Many are constructed out of one of Jordan's favorite engravings illustrators: Poyet. Duels occur on a tight rope. Heavier-than- air machines fly ...

“The Glass System, made from images shot in New York and Calcutta, looks at life as it is played out in the streets. Every corner turned reveals activities both simple and unfamiliar: a knife sharpener on a bicycle; a tiny tightrope walker; a man sel...

A portrait of North Kolkata (Calcutta), this film searches the streets for the ebb and flow of humanity and reflects the changing landscape of a city at once medieval and modern. -Mark Toscano. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014....

"A sequence shot explores from attic to celler a large residence that, for the time being, is emptied out of its inhabitants. Their habits are betrayed by a multitude of details, as so many clues left for us to find, scrutinize, interpret or mark wit...

Influenced by abstract expressionism, a series of black and white high-contrast positive episodes characterized by intense bursts of light and deep shades of black....

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Seeing, Hearing, Saying Nothing. Ben stands with ears, eyes, mouth bandaged....

Subtitled “Eros in Psyche” and set to a composition by Tomaso Albinoni, Lawrence Jordan’s rapturous live action short contemplates two nude figures in California idyll. They remain physically separated but Jordan’s spellbinding cutting and tactile ca...

Playing with the recording of a water polo match, Galeta creates a kind of Copernicus twist in the structure and perception of this sports game. The ball still motivates the movements of players, but it is no more a dynamic element, but the fixed cen...

"In Re-entry he successfully synthesizes the Yogic and the cosmological elements in his art for the first time by forcefully abstracting and playing down both of them..." P. Adams Sitney...

A monkey paces inside a cage: visually, the short film confines itself to this stark simplicity, yet its message resonates deeply. It draws on whispered excerpts from Goffman’s seminal Asylums on total institutions, paired with a poignant citation fr...

Features four distinct, bizarre, existential tales about people whose lives are in transition, who are each asking questions about themselves, their environments, and about God(s)....

Hutton's most impressive work ... the filmmaker's style takes on an assertive edge that marks his maturity. The landscape has a majesty that serves to reflect the meditative interiority of the artist independent of any human presence. ... New York is...

Five years in the making, Lawrence Jordan's feature-length "alchemical autobiography" Sophie's Place takes as its inspiration the story of the Greek goddess of wisdom, Sophia. Writes Jordan, "I must emphasize that I do not know the exact significance...

A careful observation of changes in the life cycles of flora and fauna that occur in the garden near his house in Vynnyky. The structure of the film is based on the change of seasons. Accordingly, filming and work lasted all year round. Originally si...

Abstract horror short by Scarlett J. Stribley. A mysterious entity called The Towel Woman is trapped in a time loop....