Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
1988-07-14
0
A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage and set to an original symphonic score.
Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip to the countryside to visit her aunt at their ancestral house. She invites her six friends, Prof, Melody, Mac, Fantasy, Kung Fu, and Sweet, to join her. The girls soon discover that there is more to the old house than meets the eye.
The Cavalcade of Perversion, a traveling freak show, acts as a front for Divine, who is out for blood after discovering her lover's affair.
A fly-on-the-wall display of lives changing and time passing told through an unanswered question.
"With characteristic wit and rigor, experimental filmmaker Larry Gottheim here applies his impressionistic editing style to footage collected during his travels in the Dominican Republic. Gottheim’s formal emphasis on repetition and fissures between sound and image resonates here as a mode of sociological reflection (with the fragmentary montage mirroring elements of ritual while also destabilizing the ethnographic gaze). A largely overlooked antecedent to the contemporary blending of avant-garde and ethnographic filmmaking, MACHETTE GILLETTE… MAMA still poses a potent challenge to documentary convention." - Max Goldberg
A young man roams the streets of Caracas.
A young girl’s fiery dance, accidentally caught on 16 mm film in the street. The viewer is confronted by the sacrificial and the passionate, the strong and the fragile, the fleeting and the eternal. These are the faces of femininity.
Part of a collection of restored early works by Nam June Paik, the haunting Beatles Electronique reveals Paik's engagement with manipulation of pop icons and electronic images. Snippets of footage from A Hard Day's Night are countered with Paik's early electronic processing.
An experimental short film about the depressive scenery of Eastern European winter
cloud film meditates on the calming effects of watching clouds, while also demanding action to combat our impact on the environment. It calls attention to a loss of control as the clouds turn into a storm, reflecting the momentum of climate change. As clouds float on screen, fluctuating between different frame rates, this film calls attention to its handmade form through the use of cameraless techniques such as ray-o-gramming, optical printing and hand processing.
An uptight English writer traveling to Crete on a matter of business finds his life changed forever when he meets the gregarious Alexis Zorba.
African-American Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs is arrested on suspicion of murder by Bill Gillespie, the racist police chief of tiny Sparta, Mississippi. After Tibbs proves not only his own innocence but that of another man, he joins forces with Gillespie to track down the real killer. Their investigation takes them through every social level of the town, with Tibbs making enemies as well as unlikely friends as he hunts for the truth.
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
A married farmer falls under the spell of a slatternly woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife.
A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.
The story of three women, of very different epochs, whose lives are strangely parallel. The first story, during colonial times, has a man brutalizing both his wife and a female black servant. Parallel with this story is that of a modern couple who perpetuate the stereotyped role of the woman as subservient.
When illegal card dealer and recovering heroin addict Frankie Machine gets out of prison, he decides to straighten up. Armed with nothing but an old drum set, Frankie tries to get honest work as a drummer. But when his former employer and his old drug dealer re-enter his life, Frankie finds it hard to stay clean and eventually finds himself succumbing to his old habits.
Brimming with action while incisively examining the nature of truth, "Rashomon" is perhaps the finest film ever to investigate the philosophy of justice. Through an ingenious use of camera and flashbacks, Kurosawa reveals the complexities of human nature as four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife.