
Produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Arts at CERN, the arts program of the European Laboratory of Particle Physics, Geneva, with the support of the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations, Geneva; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, with the support of Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung; and New Museum, New York

Produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Arts at CERN, the arts program of the European Laboratory of Particle Physics, Geneva, with the support of the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations, Geneva; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, with the support of Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung; and New Museum, New York
2019-11-17
0
0.0Letters from a Window is clearly structured. On the visual level it consists solely of paused film frames, hard cuts of different lengths. The stunning, rapidly changing images appear like brief impressions of a world that has been brought to its knees by a faceless power. The views of people, places, and objects constantly change. On the sound level, in counterpoint to the staccato of the dystopian flood of images, we hear a warm, calm woman’s voice, lovingly and wistfully addressing one “N.”, who might be a man or a woman, in a continuous flow of words. She refers directly to the images, as if she could see them at the cinematic window as she speaks.
5.8A girl gets in a car accident and wanders through the woods, encountering all kinds of nightmarish things.
0.0First, I wanted to make a kind of reflexively impoverished Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Second, I was interested in juxtaposing two cultural artifacts–which could be schematized as East/West, socialism/capitalism, propaganda/entertainment, as well as image/sound–and see how they reverberated. In other words, I wanted to make an essay out of things, as well as a communist musical. But the question arose–what was the ideology of such film play? Is MISSION TO MONGO aestheticized politics or political art? –J. H.
5.4In the fictional city of Santa Teresa, located on the border between Mexico and USA, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line between journalism and detective work. Based on an unfinished book by Roberto Bolaño, his character investigates a handful of crimes and abuses perpetrated on women and workers of the zone.
0.0The dynamic performance of drummer Jörg Mikula serves as the trigger for a new work by Siegfried Fruhauf that explores the reciprocal relationship between the two time-based media of film and music in a wild way. WHERE DO WE GO reveals itself to be a synesthetic experiment rendering sight as rhythmical and the visual edit as musical. The filmmaker painstakingly animates brief phases of movement recorded with a Lomography Supersampler* to create a visual series of trains, tracks, bridges and nature that are re-constellated and brought together in a multiple split-screen projection.
6.0Animated shapes dance to Cuban music. This was one of the first animations to be painted directly onto the film.
0.0The Vietnam War during the JFK years and beyond. Made in 1972 in the filmmaker's apartment, without documentary footage of the war, metaphors are created through the animation of images and objects, and through guerrilla skits. By rejecting the authority of traditional documentary footage, the anarchist spirit of individual responsibility is established. This is history from one person's point of view, rather than a definitive proclamation.
6.9In this extraordinary short animation, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colours, shapes, and transformations directly onto their filmstrip. The result is a vivid interpretation, in fluid lines and colour, of jazz music played by the Oscar Peterson Trio.
10.0A man wakes up one day to find things are not as they should be.
6.5Two ballet dancers perform a dance enhanced with surreal after-image visuals.
From Angry Bible Thumpers to Infamous Hall H Lines, This is an Appropriated Video Essay Covering the Negative Changes that San Diego Comic Con Has Gone Through This Passed Decade Alone.
5.5An experimental film from Arthur Lipsett, Free Fall is an assortment of film trimmings assembled to make a wry comment on humankind in today’s world. It evokes a surrealist dream of our fall from grace into banality. (NFB.ca)
6.2A stranger arrives in Sarajevo and barges into Damir's reclusive world. Little by little she takes over his life. She absorbs his dreams, until finally she threaten his very existence.
6.1Sexual intimacy. Three kinds of images race past, superimposed on each other sometimes: two bodies, a man and a woman's, close up, nude - patches of skin, wisps of hair, glimpses of a face and genitalia; strips of celluloid with lines and squiggles scratched on them; and, close-up shots of what appear to be the insides of living bodies - a heart beating, muscle and sinew and tissue wet with fluids. The exterior and interior of desire.
6.1A man is supine on a mountain side. Images rush past of nature and a stained glass saint. An infant is born. We see a lactating nipple. Images include a mountain peak, farm buildings, a tree stump, a fire, a crawling baby, and the sun. The man falls and rolls. Then, later, he swings his ax.
7.1Working at the limits of what can easily be expressed, filmmaker Peter Mettler takes on the elusive subject of time, and once again turns his camera to filming the unfilmable. From the particle accelerator in Switzerland, where scientists seek to probe regions of time we cannot see, to lava flows in Hawaii which have overwhelmed all but one home on the south side of Big Island; from the disintegration of inner-city Detroit, to a Hindu funeral rite near the place of Buddha's enlightenment, Mettler explores our perception of time. He dares to dream the movie of the future while also immersing us in the wonder of the everyday. THE END OF TIME, at once personal, rigorous and visionary, Peter Mettler has crafted a film as compelling and magnificent as its subject.
5.9Arthur Lipsett's first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice." The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.
5.5A man who is paranoid and deluded by his own conspiracies that someone out there is after him must come to terms with the root of his suffering.
0.0A dark and visceral journey. A language that tears apart the morbid nature of the dead-old primal human eyes. No warning was given. No mercy was shown.