Where Empty Shells Hide

Vulcania(es)

Portrait of a catastrophe, these are times of fire.

Here and There(pl)

Propulsive Polish avant-garde animation following clouds of shapes that resemble nebulae or stellar surfaces.

Jak ulovit mamuta(cs)

bbrraattss(en)

motion capture choreography simulated against motion capture choreography

Cineforms(pl)

Abstract shapes morph in and out of focus.

Life's Musical Minute(en)

Life’s Musical Minute, recently re-discovered, is a short promotional film of this kind, based on Gene Krupa’s drum solo from “Golden Wedding” by the Woody Herman jazz band. It was Lye’s attempt to gain support from Life Magazine.

Maalbeek(fr)

Sabine is looking for a missing image: a day that has left its mark forever and that everyone remembers but her. But maybe this absence is what allows her to move on with her life?

Beyond Picasso(en)

Schwartz reordered and combined angular contours, broken planes, and distorted proportions in her own pictorial structures in an homage to Picasso's style.

A Love Letter to Cinema(en)

An experimental sampled film which shows the pleasurable art of movies about movies through scenes inside of theaters.

Ohver(et)

Estonian/Soviet animation short from 1980

Everybody Dies(en)

Utilizing super 8mm and an economical shooting method of quick, short shots building idiosyncratic rhythms via rapid editing techniques, time, nature, and even the body folds in on itself. Everybody Dies (2020) is a poetic journey into the desert. It’s a reflection on the nature of death as something not to be feared, but embraced as a part of a personal and universal human experience. Super 8mm.

Obmaru(en)

"Marx was born in Queensland, Australia, and was a landscape painter and model there before moving to San Francisco. However, when she arrived, she found herself in the midst of fascinating non-objective painting and filmmaking activity. She was greatly influenced by the work of Harry Smith and Jordan Belson, and changed her own style to non-objective, receiving graphic inspiration from Jungian brain drawings, symbols in the occult sciences, and the design used by Eastern cultures, all of which being important elements in the San Francisco school mystical school of non-objective art." -Robert Pike, A Critical Study of the West Coast Experimental Film Movement. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2000.

No. 11: Mirror Animations(en)

Cut up animation and collage technique by Harry Smith synchronized to the jazz of Thelonious Monk's Mysterioso.

Faust(cs)

A very free adaptation of Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus', Goethe's 'Faust' and various other treatments of the old legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil. A nondescript man is lured by a strange map into a sinister puppet theatre, where he finds himself immersed in an indescribably weird version of the play, blending live actors, clay animation and giant puppets.

Spheres(en)

This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.

Touch(en)

What happens when two hands touch? How close are they like? And how can proximity be measured, and even more so, in times of a pandemic and distancing? We think we touch things, that we can take other people by the hand, but physics tells us quite another story.

Thermogenesis(en)

"A film version of a videotape. In it my drawings are animated and colorized by using computers. Walter Wright and Richard Froeman were on the computers. John Godfrey helped with the video editing. I did the sound score. The original tape was done on 2" high-band color videotape, two computers, a Paik-Abe video-synthesizer, with studio chroma-keying and multi-generation video editing." A version of Computer Graphics #1, one of Emshwiller's very first video works.

Electronic Masks(en)

Short experimental video art by Barbara Sykes.

Street Musique(en)

Animator Ryan Larkin does a visual improvisation to music performed by a popular group presented as sidewalk entertainers. His take-off point is the music, but his own beat is more boisterous than that of the musicians. The illustrations range from convoluted abstractions to caricatures of familiar rituals. Without words.

High Voltage(en)

High Voltage is constructed from footage James Whitney contributed to Belson for use in one of his Vortex concerts.