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.
High Voltage is constructed from footage James Whitney contributed to Belson for use in one of his Vortex concerts.
Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create.
Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.
Abstract Day is a semi-abstract animation film by Oerd van Cuijlenborg based on a story which is told in sound. We witness a day in the life of a couple, who fight, make love and escape the hot and crowded city. It is a simple story in which the visuals and sound are produced together to merge into a unique world.
A space occupies it, awaiting to be unlocked by a freeing action or notion. What lies ahead is its determination.
An attempt to constitute a human / machine dialogue. It shows the filmmaker’s blood as seen / heard with the eyes / ears of the machine which is a film projector with optical sound. He affixed his blood onto clear film leader by cutting into the flesh and then pressing the film leader onto the wound. Additionally he had blood taken with a syringe and afterwards dripped it on the film leader. fresh and clotted blood was used.
"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.
In Scratch both the animation and the soundtrack are abstract. The movie is a conversation of sounds and images. Soundtrack and animation are scratched directly on 35 mm film.
Scroll paintings prepared like film strips with successive images.