Movies: Abstract

Yoshika has had a crush on Ichimiya, whom she calls "the One" since she was in middle school. Now, a 24-year-old salarywoman, her all-consuming fixation has prevented her from even considering another candidate for boyfriend until an office colleague...

This short film from Arthur Lipsett is an abstract collage of snippets from discarded footage found by Lipsett in the editing room of the National Film Board (where he worked as an animator), combined with his own black and white 16mm footage shot on...

In this surrealistic and free-form follow-up to the Monkees' television show, the band frolic their way through a series of musical set pieces and vignettes containing humor and anti-establishment social commentary....

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Imag...

A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom....

The Goal Is To Live is an infinitely-looping assemblage constructed out of repurposed content from the popular show How It’s Made, which chronicles the factories that create everyday objects. The film takes Dina Kelberman’s practice of accumulation ...

A girl sitting on an autumn leaf-filled sidewalk communicates with a mysterious figure across the street....

The film tells a story of Mariana, a nurse who leaves Lisbon to accompany an immigrant worker in a comatose sleep on his trip home to Cape Verde. The devoted Portuguese nurse took a journey only to find herself lost in abstract drama....

This newly rediscovered short was created in Jim's home studio in Bethesda, MD around 1961. It is one of several experimental shorts inspired by the music of jazz great Chico Hamilton. At the end, in footage probably shot by Jerry Juhl, Jim demonstra...

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, abstraction - that most quintessentially modernist innovation - maintains a peculiarly contradictory position. Used, on one hand, by post-modernist artists as just one more quotable style amongst many, it...

In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads. The first version of the film won a major award at...

First personal experience with a Super-8 camera manually exposing film out of any light source....

What happens when two hands touch? How close are they like? And how can proximity be measured, and even more so, in times of a pandemic and distancing? We think we touch things, that we can take other people by the hand, but physics tells us quite an...

A study of water and fire....

Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create...

Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle....

A space occupies it, awaiting to be unlocked by a freeing action or notion. What lies ahead is its determination....

This film, photographed in London, is an exploration into the depths of unconscious reactions....

An Art and a Short Film in which the director records his childhood experiences and memories through the mischievous activities of a boy named Mohammad Saadh....

The fan's self-sacrificing blades dance in the air, generating a refreshing breeze that wipes away the sweat of others and brings solace on a scorching day....