Spectrum(2019)

Forenoon of a Faun(sh)

The film consists of three sequences shot by a fixed camera: the first shows the balcony of a hospital with patients (soundtrack from the film "Vivre sa vie" by Jean-Luc Godard), the second is a scraped wall and the third is a crossroad with pedestrians and cars (sound taken from the film "The Time-Machine " by George Pal).

The Magic Sun(en)

Multi-faceted artist Phil Niblock captures a brief moment of an interstellar communication by the Arkestra in their prime. Black turns white in a so-called negative post-process, while Niblock's camera focuses on microscopic details of hands, bodies and instruments. A brilliant tribute to the Sun King by another brilliant supra-planetary sovereign. (Eye of Sound)

Arquivos Kino-Pop(en)

Cine-diaries about rock bands and personalities from the eighties from the archives of Edgar Pêra.

I, Apostate(en)

A fantasia of post-indoctrination, immigration, and iconography. A pageant of wanderers and searchers: Mormon missionaries, a pioneer, polygamists, scouts, hunters, church-goers, and an aspiring prophet walk and walk and walk. A pilgrimage of memory, history, ancestry, and place.

Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head(fr)

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.

Dilema I: Burundanga Boricua(es)

Combines animation, documentary footage, and hand-painted film as well as slide projections, a painted 12" x 24" backdrop, and sculptural palm tree to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Puerto Rican psyche.

The Seeker(en)

A lyrical portrait of an excommunicated Amish woodworker struggling with spirituality, poverty, and life as an outcast from his strict, insular community.

Notes on the Circus(en)

The short film is a montage of sped up clips of The Ringling Brothers Circus in action set to a musical track. The film is separated into four segments, each segment which focuses on different acts within the circus. The later segments often incorporate clips from earlier segments, mostly as background to the featured acts. The speed of the clips match the tempo of the soundtrack music.

Untitled (Pink Dot)(ja)

In Untitled (Pink Dot), Murata transforms footage from the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood (1982) into a morass of seething electronic abstraction. Subjected to Murata's meticulous digital reprocessing, the action scenes decompose and are subsumed into an almost palpable, cascading digital sludge, presided over by a hypnotically pulsating pink dot.

Maniac Summer(fr)

Maniac Summer consists of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer of 2009. It is a sprawling triptych without a beginning or end and with no specific subject or topic. The camera is positioned in front of a window and left running. It observes movements, registers noises coming from the street or nearby park, captures Chantal Akerman going about her business in her apartment: smoking, working, talking on the telephone. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are featured in the installation’s central video, while the adjoining panels are more symbolically charged; in them, various images from the former have been isolated, modified and repeated. These abstract afterimages act as a kind of memory, looking back to the images in the installation’s centrepiece as so many shadows of its reality.

Genova Genova(fr)

A song of love to the city of Genoa. The film wanders the streets of the city center and explore the beautiful cemetery and then climb the hills which offer an amazing view over the old town crossed by a highway and port.

Shoot Me(en)

The Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor, daughter of a former advisor of Ahmadinejad's, has been living in exile in Germany for four years. When she hears that the fellow Iranian rapper Shahin Najafi, who is also living in exile in Germany, faces death threats and has to hide because of one of his songs, she doesn't hesitate and has to find him. On her search she encounters fear everywhere. Narges Kalhor has to face her inconvenient memories of suppression, hatred and anger for her past in Iran.

The Day When...(fr)

Chantal Akerman reads a script detailing the woes that befell her on the day she thought about "The Future of Cinema". The camera continuously rotates 360 degrees around her apartment as she rereads the script at an exponentially increasing speed. At its heart, an homage to Godard.

She Had Her Gun All Ready(en)

Two women – one passive and resigned, the other aggressive and domineering – interact in various locations in New York city. The film explores the dynamic between them before ending with a showdown at the roller-coaster on Coney Island.

Animals Under Anaesthesia: Speculations on the Dreamlife of Beasts(en)

Part lyrical document, part farce, Animals Under Anaesthesia: Speculations On the Dreamlife of Beasts explores the imaginary unconscious minds of animals. Images of sex, death and the natural world are made manifest in the murky and disquieting dreams of a dog, a cat, a pig and a rabbit.

Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung(xx)

Experimental short made by Olivier Assayas for Fondation of Contemporary Art and starring Maggie Cheung.

Feeler(en)

16mm film by Paul Clipson, and music by Sarah Davachi. Filmed in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Brisbane, Krakow, Sidney, Portland, Napa, Oakland and San Francisco.

Let Us Persevere in What We Have Resolved Before We Forget(en)

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

Pelle vegetale. Un'intervista(it)

Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre(fr)

Jean-Claude Rousseau's Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre is not only his first medium-length film, but a chance to discover this filmmaker whom Jean-Marie Straub has called, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler, the greatest working in Europe. With this newly restored print there is also a possibility to discover the relationship between Rousseau's art of filming and Jan Vermeer's famous painting. As Prosper Hillairet wrote in 1988, four years after Rousseau had finished Jeune femme ... (for the first time as we know today): «Without adopting the usual systematic spirit and form of cinéma structurel, Rousseau presents us with simple images and leaves it at that. Keeps the image in hand. A minimalist and ascetic expression of cinema: a shot that lasts.»