The Unnamable

Late Night Talks with Mother(cs)

Taking a cue from Franz Kafka's "Letter to My Father," this highly personal film follows Czech director Jan Nemec as he attempts to engage in a dialogue with his deceased mother. While alive, Nemec's mother had a troubled relationship with her son; this rumination seems to be Nemec's public platform for coming to terms with unresolved familial issues. The director embellishes his film by linking personal events with 20th century history.

The Tin Woodman's Home Movie #2: California Poppy Reserve, Antelope Valley(en)

A three-dimensional narrative enacted at the California Poppy Reserve. It’s part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmakers, Naomi Uman and Lee Lynch).

Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box(en)

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

Untitled #1(xx)

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.

Anatomy of a moth(es)

3 versos para a morte(pt)

Men Boxing(xx)

Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.

Luz Marina(en)

A reality show star leaves her family's TV show fame and unknowingly joins a supernatural cult.

Minot, North Dakota(en)

The town Minot is home to a U.S. Air Force base that guards 150 nuclear missiles buried in northern North Dakota. The weapons of mass destruction placed there 50 years ago are still targeted at Russia. Minot, North Dakota portrays an American landscape where people live with nuclear bombs in their backyard.

Bullet in the Head(es)

Ion is a seemingly normal guy whose life goes by without a hitch. A phone call; a meeting with a friend; small, unimportant everyday situations. One day he gets into a car with two other people. They cross the border between Spain and France. The next morning, their lives will change forever.

HoLy Cycles(en)

Steadily reading while/becomes treading into murky waters.

Beatles Electroniques(en)

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.

Wind(en)

In 1983, yacht sailor Will Parker leads an American crew financed by millionaire Morgan Weld to defeat during the America's Cup race against an Australian crew. Determined to get the prize back, Will convinces Morgan to finance an experimental boat designed by his ex-girlfriend Kate's new beau, Joe Heisler. When the boat is completed, the Americans head to Australia to reclaim the cup.

Crash!(en)

Short film produced by the BBC about JG Ballard's Crash. “The film was a product of the most experimental, darkest phase of Ballard’s career. It was an era of psychological blowback from the sudden, shocking death of his wife in 1964, an era that had produced the cut-up ‘condensed novels’ of Atrocity plus a series of strange collages and ‘advertisers’ announcements. After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised. Later there were further literary experiments, concrete poems and ‘impressionistic’ film reviews, and an aborted multimedia theatrical play based around car crashes. After that came an actual gallery exhibition of crashed cars, replete with strippers and the drunken destruction of the ‘exhibits’ by an enraged audience.” (from: http://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.blogspot.de/2013/01/short-film-adaptation-of-jg-ballards.html)

Astronaut's Uniform(ru)

Mockumentary experimental film, which shows one day in the life of a young man. The action takes place on the Day of Soviet Cosmonautics, April 12, one of the last years of the USSR. Outside the window, it is gradually getting warmer, the onset of spring is felt, promising hope for the possibility of changes in the country. The hero of the film is fond of space. The young man, who idolizes Gagarin, is engaged in reconstruction, making the uniform in which the cosmonaut walked in the prime of his glory. Our hero is also a film enthusiast. He makes films with stories of space flights and shows them to his friends. The film is stylized as amateur films of the 1980s and was shot on a 16-mm color film made by the company" Svema", made in the Soviet Union. The quality of this film allows the viewer to fully immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the time of the film, which is dedicated to Soviet cosmonautics and Edward D. Wood Jr.

Dreams That Money Can Buy(en)

An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created by leading visual artists of their day, most of whom were emigres to the US during WWII.

Migrating Forms(en)

A man and woman embark on a sexual journey to detach mind from body. The relationship slowly grows into one of emotional domination, physical disease, abandonment and the creation of personal pornography.

Machete Gillette... Mama(en)

"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

Shape of a Surface(en)

The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh.

Photodiary(ja)

"The majority of my 8-mm works were made for the three-minute "Personal Focus" film special put on in Fukuoka. This film is an animation of photographs I had taken on a regular basis as a sort of diary, and was made to have a rough feel to it." - Takashi Ito