Picture Particles

Between Science and Garbage(en)

A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.

Trash Talking(en)

A showcase of Paper Rad's individual and group creations in the form of Trash Talking, a show for kids with bizarre characters trying to find their place in the world.

Stille Nacht III: Tales from Vienna Woods(en)

Near an extraordinary chair with many legs, a hand is visible gripping an edge. The hand is weathered, the fingers cracked and scarred. The end of a rifle appears and a shot fires. The bullet is visible whirling through space; it caroms and then goes through a pine cone. A long spoon emerges from a drawer in the chair and stretches toward the hand. The bullet is on the spoon. Later, the hand holds the bullet between two fingers; another shot is fired.

Stille Nacht IV: Can't Go Wrong Without You(en)

Short animated film featuring the song "Can't Go Wrong Without You" by His Name Is Alive.

Nocturna Artificialia(en)

Enigmatic, stop-motion, animated story of a man's day.

The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer(en)

In Prague, a professorial puppet, with metal pincers for hands and an open book for a hat, takes a boy as a pupil. First, the professor empties fluff and toys from the child's head, leaving him without the top of his head for most of the film. The professor then teaches the lad about illusions and perspectives, the pursuit of an object through exploring a bank of drawers, divining an object, and the migration of forms. The child then brings out a box with a tarantula in it: the professor puts his "hands" into the box and describes what he feels. The boy receives a final lesson about animation and film making; then the professor gives him a brain and his own open-book hat.

This Unnameable Little Broom(en)

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet on a trike captures a puppet bird-man.

Street of Crocodiles(en)

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies(en)

Stop-motion animated short film in which, among other things, a man made of wire looks malevolent.

The Comb(en)

A porcelain doll’s explorations of a dreamer’s imagination.

Anamorphosis(en)

The Quays' interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed from different angles, mischievously revealed hidden symbols.

Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married?(en)

Stop-motion animated short film with a white ball, a rabbit, and a girl, and a voice singing "Are We Still Married".

In Absentia(en)

A woman sits alone on a chair at a table in a room on one of the top floors of an asylum. Bright spot lights dot the night, sometimes shining on her window. She sharpens pencils and writes on a page in a copy book. The pencil point often breaks under her fingers' force. She places broken points outside the window on the sill. A satanic figure is somewhere nearby, animated but of straw or clay, not flesh. She finishes her writing, tears the paper from the pad, folds it, places it in an envelope, and slips it through a slot. Is she writing to her husband? "Sweetheart, come." Written by

1 Seconde(en)

“When he shot Une seconde (4 min., 20 sec.), a video animation without computer graphics, Richard Angers tried to adapt Norman McLaren’s animation techniques to video shooting and editing. A long-term solitary task, in which images are moved by hand, centimetre by centimetre, in which one plays with the number of images per second, and in which the ± pure quest for effects is more important than the message”. BLANCHARD, Louise. “Les vidéastes sont au ‘rendez-vous’”, Le Journal de Montréal, Montreal (9 February 1992), p. 38.

The Calligrapher(en)

With harpsichord music in the background, a dandy, seated at a table, plucks a quill pen from a ceiling full of them above him, dips it in ink, thinks, then draws a straight line down the page in front of him, out of which sprout six more quill pens, each held by a hand. The calligrapher moves all the hands and pens in unison, drawing an elaborate feathered wing, which comes to live, peeling off the page, and, now a quill pen, slips in to his hand. He tucks it behind his left ear.

The Phantom Museum: Random Forays Into the Vaults of Sir Henry Wellcome's Medical Collection(en)

A display at the strange and wonderful artifacts in a collection of medical curiosities.

The Summit(en)

Two men seek to negotiate an agreement of international significance.

Cassis(en)

"I was visiting Jerome Hill. Jerome loved France, especially Provence. He spent all his summers in Cassis. My window overlooked the sea. I sat in my little room, reading or writing, and looked at the sea. I decided to place my Bolex exactly at the angle of light as what Signac saw from his studio which was just behind where I was staying, and film the view from morning till after sunset, frame by frame. One day of the Cassis port filmed in one shot." -JM

Animal Charm: Golden Digest(en)

Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature" and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.

Negativland: No Other Possibility(en)

In an effort to cure her smoking habit a middle-aged woman discovers that she can communicate with her long lost son while watching a Halloween safety program on TV. After suffering a nervous breakdown, her husband, a used car salesman, is revitalized when he travels back in time to drive the first car he ever sold. Seventeen years later a powerful canned food manufacturer crashes the same car into a toaster truck while endorsing a brand of yams on live TV. At the funeral his clergyman experiences a crisis of faith when he and a lifelike Mexican continue their search for a married couple who have befriended an insect who enjoys drinking lime soda. They later meet a young man whose bizarre murder scheme involves four innocent members of an experimental rock band who have all given up smoking.

Fantozzi to the Rescue(it)

Fantozzi is now retired but continues to go to the office where it is held up as a fine example of employees intending to do career.

Anaconda 3: Offspring(en)

Cancer-terminal tycoon Peter Murdoch's secret Wexel Hall Pharmaceuticals lab has developed a blood orchid extract cure. To examine why it works optimally in snakes, they also bread a super-anaconda strain. But the original pair escapes, leaving a bloody trail of human corpses. Murdoch runs, instructing his staff to clean up. They keep failing and being eaten like unsuspecting locals, some alive, even after enlisting ruthless big game hunter Hammett. The fast-growing pregnant monster sheds its skin, thus disabling the only tracking device they have.

Gurren Lagann the Movie: The Lights in the Sky Are Stars(ja)

Seven years after the defeat of the spiral king, Simon and the Dai-Gurren brigade must set out to the vastness of space to defeat a new threat and save the universe.

Pet Sematary II(en)

The "sematary" is up to its old zombie-raising tricks again. This time, the protagonists are Jeff Matthews, whose mother died in a Hollywood stage accident, and Drew Gilbert, a boy coping with an abusive stepfather.

Return(es)

Saw II(en)

The chilling and relentless Jigsaw killer returns to terrorize the city once again. When a gruesome murder victim emerges with unmistakable traces of Jigsaw's sinister methods, Detective Eric Matthews is thrust into a high-stakes investigation. To his surprise, apprehending Jigsaw seems almost too easy, but what he doesn't realize is that being caught is merely another piece of Jigsaw's intricate puzzle.

The Life of David Gale(en)

A man against capital punishment is accused of murdering a fellow activist and is sent to death row.

Ikiru(ja)

Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.

Fantozzi Against the Wind(it)

The third film in the saga of the unlucky clerk Ugo Fantozzi, played by its creator, Paolo Villaggio.

Green Book(en)

Tony Lip, a bouncer in 1962, is hired to drive pianist Don Shirley on a tour through the Deep South in the days when African Americans, forced to find alternate accommodations and services due to segregation laws below the Mason-Dixon Line, relied on a guide called The Negro Motorist Green Book.

Radius(en)

Liam wakes from a car crash with no memory of who he is. As he makes his way into town to look for help, he finds only dead bodies, all with strange pale eyes. Liam's first assessment is that a virus is present in the air, but he soon discovers the horrible truth: anyone who comes within a 50-foot radius of him dies instantly.

Fantozzi Still Suffers(it)

After a hard day at work and a condominium-board meeting, accountant Ugo Fantozzi goes on a trip with his family. Unfortunately, he will face a nasty surprise upon his return.

Fantozzi 2000 - The Cloning(it)

Ugo Fantozzi was resurrected from the company where he worked because of a crisis, how it will end?Tenth and final chapter of the film series of Fantozzi character.

Rise(fr)

Elise thought she had the perfect life: an ideal boyfriend and a promising career as a ballet dancer. It all falls apart the day she catches him cheating on her with her stage backup; and after she suffers an injury on stage, it seems like she might not be able to dance ever again.

Beach Rats(en)

On the outskirts of Brooklyn, Frankie, an aimless teenager, suffocates under the oppressive glare cast by his family and a toxic group of delinquent friends. Struggling with his own identity, Frankie begins to scour hookup sites for older men.

Only the Animals(fr)

Following the disappearance of the glamorous and secretive Evelyne Ducat during a blizzard in the highlands of southern France, the lives of five people inextricably linked to Evelyne are brought together to devastating effect as the local police investigate the case.

21 Grams(en)

Paul Rivers, an ailing mathematician lovelessly married to an English émigré; Christina Peck, an upper-middle-class suburban housewife and mother of two girls; and Jack Jordan, a born-again ex-con, are brought together by a terrible accident that changes their lives.

Adam Sandler: 100% Fresh(en)

Adam Sandler takes his comical musical musings back out on the road, from comedy clubs to concert halls to one very unsuspecting subway station.

Chloe(en)

A doctor hires an escort to seduce her husband, whom she suspects of cheating, though unforeseen events put the family in danger.

Judas and the Black Messiah(en)

Bill O'Neal infiltrates the Black Panthers on the orders of FBI Agent Mitchell and J. Edgar Hoover. As Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton ascends—falling for a fellow revolutionary en route—a battle wages for O’Neal’s soul.