

Crossings and Meetings(1974)
A lone man walking across the video screen is the starting point for this dynamic formal exercise. This image and its accompanying sound are subjected to increasingly complex and proliferating configurations to arrive at what Emshwiller calls a "visual fugue" in time and space, structured like musical or mathematical sequences. The walking figure and its de-synchronized footsteps are multiplied, slowed down, accelerated, reversed, syncopated, overlapped and otherwise altered in multifarious variations on a theme, building in a kinetic, almost narrative progression of compositional relationships. The screen is finally transformed into a dance of motion by male and female figures in an abstracted, colorized space. Rather than an analysis of movement a la Muybridge, Crossings and Meetings is a celebration of the potential for representing movement in time and space through video.
Movie: Crossings and Meetings

Crossings and Meetings
HomePage
Overview
A lone man walking across the video screen is the starting point for this dynamic formal exercise. This image and its accompanying sound are subjected to increasingly complex and proliferating configurations to arrive at what Emshwiller calls a "visual fugue" in time and space, structured like musical or mathematical sequences. The walking figure and its de-synchronized footsteps are multiplied, slowed down, accelerated, reversed, syncopated, overlapped and otherwise altered in multifarious variations on a theme, building in a kinetic, almost narrative progression of compositional relationships. The screen is finally transformed into a dance of motion by male and female figures in an abstracted, colorized space. Rather than an analysis of movement a la Muybridge, Crossings and Meetings is a celebration of the potential for representing movement in time and space through video.
Release Date
1974-12-26
Average
0
Rating:
0.0 startsTagline
Genres
Languages:
EnglishKeywords
Recommendations Movies
7.0Moonwalker(en)
This fantastical movie inspired by the music of Michael Jackson features imaginative interpretations of hit tracks from the iconic 1987 album “Bad”.
6.5Avatar: Creating the World of Pandora(en)
The Making-of James Cameron's Avatar. It shows interesting parts of the work on the set.
6.6The Grandmother(en)
To escape neglect and abuse from his parents, a young boy plants some strange seeds and they grow into a grandmother.
7.2Killer Bean Forever(en)
When things go bad in Beantown, top assassin Killer Bean is called to clean-up the mess. Detective Cromwell finds himself in the middle between Killer Bean and mob boss Cappuccino.
6.8Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five(en)
Ordered to teach a martial arts class of rambunctious bunny kittens, Po tells stories of each of the Furious Five's pasts.
6.0Dalíland(en)
In 1973, a young gallery assistant goes on a wild adventure behind the scenes as he helps aging genius Salvador Dali prepare for a big show in New York.
6.9Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story(en)
The maniacal baby of the Griffin family, Stewie, meets his future self. In doing this he discovers that his future image is not what he has anticipated because of a near death experience.
6.1Sturgill Simpson Presents Sound & Fury(en)
In this anime visual album, a mysterious driver heads deep into a postapocalyptic hellscape toward a ferocious showdown with two monstrous opponents.
6.8Project Almanac(en)
A group of teens discover secret plans of a time machine, and construct one. However, things start to get out of control.
6.0Crimes of the Future(en)
With his partner, a celebrity performance artist publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. An investigator from the National Organ Registry obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed... Their mission — to use the artist's notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.
6.9The Brave Little Toaster(en)
A group of dated appliances, finding themselves stranded in a summer home that their family had just sold, decide to seek out their eight year old 'master'.
6.2Border Hunters(en)
After his police officer brother is killed by a drug dealer who flees to the protection of his cartel-connected uncle in Mexico, an American man with a diverse law enforcement/military background goes south of the border to get revenge
7.3Inception: The Cobol Job(en)
Cobb, Arthur and Nash are enlisted by Cobol Engineering.
7.8World of Tomorrow(en)
A little girl is taken on a mind-bending tour of her distant future.
6.8Looking for Richard(en)
Al Pacino's deeply-felt rumination on Shakespeare's significance and relevance to the modern world through interviews and an in-depth analysis of "Richard III."
6.8Mad God(en)
A silent figure known as The Assassin travels through a nightmare underworld of tortured souls, ruined cities and wretched monstrosities forged from the primordial horrors of the unconscious mind of Phil Tippett, the world's preeminent stop-motion animator.
6.5Heavy Traffic(en)
A white dropout struggles to become a cartoonist and filmmaker, drawing inspiration from the harsh, gritty world around him. Still sharing his rundown apartment with his middle-aged parents, an oafish slob of an Italian father and a ditzy nutcase of a Jewish mother, he's ridiculed and looked down upon by his friends, hypocrites who run with violent gangs and the Italian Mafia, and a shallow Black girl who makes her living downtown with the pimps and pushers. The cartoonist gets a chance to pitch a film idea to a movie mogul, but the story proves too outrageous: a far-future Earth, depleted by war and pollution, where a mutant antihero challenges and kills God.
6.1When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth(en)
An ancient tribe attempts to sacrifice Sanna as an offering to the Sun god to save their tribe from dinosaurs. Tara, a young man from another tribe, saves Sanna and takes her along with him.
7.3Beyond(en)
While looking for her cat, a young woman and some kids find an abandoned building where strange things happen and the rules of physics don't always apply. Part of the Animatrix collection of animated shorts set in the Matrix universe.
6.9The Matrix Revisited(en)
The film goes behind the scenes of the 1999 sci-fi movie The Matrix.
Similar Movies
0.0Chance Encounters With Oxygen(en)
A psychedelic, avant-garde collage film designed to accompany PRPL PPL's experimental album of the same name.
7.0The Suicide Squeeze(en)
A fascinating case of narrative deconstruction, THE SUICIDE SQUEEZE is a '40s style whodunit pressed through the wringer of an optical printer.
0.0Assassination(ja)
"Assassination" - Adaptation of Hermann Hesse's novel "Demian". A young man's detachment from and revolt against the superficial ideals of the world of appearances and eventually awakens into a realization of self. Max Demian is his childhood friend and mentor.
7.3The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover(en)
When churlish mobster Albert Spica acquires an upscale French restaurant in London, he dines there nightly, effectively scaring off the clientele with his bad manners. His wife, Georgina, is especially disgusted by him, and soon begins an affair with regular guest Michael. Despite their best efforts to keep it secret, Spica learns about their trysts, and he plots a terrible revenge.
Theodore of the Absurd(en)
A surreal musical comedy set in a world where the avant-garde and the mainstream are reversed.
3.3Chinese Characters(en)
Best known for his work in video, Richard Fung has made the politics of gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation his central focus. Chinese Characters (1986) examines the ambiguous relationship of gay Asian men with white gay porn.
7.5The Holy Mountain(es)
The Alchemist assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept's intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before embarking on a trip to Lotus Island. There they ascend the Holy Mountain to displace the immortal gods who secretly rule the universe.
5.0Lonesome Cowboys(en)
Five lonesome cowboys get all hot and bothered at home on the range after confronting Ramona Alvarez and her nurse.
10.0White Homeland Commando(en)
White Homeland Commando takes the familiar terrain of network action drama and tilts the playing field. Reminiscent of today's popular reality-based cop shows, White Homeland Commando offers a straightforward story: four members of a special police unit investigate and infiltrate a New York-based white supremacist organization. But that is where the commonplace ends. The teleplay is shot and edited in a highly textured visual style, the colors are subdued yet somehow garish, and the sound is deliberately just out of sync with the speaker's lips. Occasional static combines with jumps in the plot — the editing is reminiscent of a television viewer flipping channels.
8.223rd Psalm Branch(en)
Made during the height of the Vietnam War, Stan Brakhage has said of this film that he was hoping to bring some clarity to the subject of war. Characteristically for Brakhage there is no direct reference to Vietnam.
5.9One Second in Montreal(en)
A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.
6.3White Hole(ja)
A mesmerizing trip through the psychedelic vastness of space.
7.5Berlin: Symphony of a Great City(de)
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.
7.1New York Portrait, Chapter II(en)
Chapter Two represents a continuation of daily observations from the environment of Manhattan compiled over a period from 1980-1981. This is the second part of an extended life's portrait of New York.
0.0Symphonie Fantastique(en)
A lone wind ensemble musician photographs an ongoing performance as she's suddenly joined by a past lover.
6.4Big Bang Love, Juvenile A(ja)
An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.
0.0Endless Day(et)
Among Tooming's filmic works, Endless Day provides perhaps the most eloquent material for investigating the radical renewal of visual and narrative form, as well as the shifting registers of spatio-social portrayals and critiques in Estonian cinema. It was banned in 1971 and ordered to be destroyed. However, the film was retained and restored in the 1990s.
0.0The Giverny Document (Single Channel)(en)
Filmed on location in Harlem and in Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, this multi-textured cinematic poem meditates on the bodily integrity and creative virtuosity of black women.
8.0Thread of Voice(en)
Arf Arf is a sound poetry (voice and gesticulation) group. They describe their first film together as 'songs nailed together in a film'. The film is not given over to simply recording a performance of sound poetry but is worked out as a filmic combination of images and sound, each member of the group having individually previously made experimental films.
10.0CACOPHONY(en)
Three adrift artists wander around a college campus and its local sites as they struggle to engage with art and its creation.