Produced in an era before 24-hour programming cycles, Video 50 was initially used as a late night filler on TV stations in Germany, France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Random, surreal, and unexpected, Video 50 resembles the dream cycle of a dormant TV station after it conscious programming has ceased. Its structure and form anticipate the dissociated sequence of moving images we are now accustomed to encountering on YouTube and social media.
Two teenage girls embark on a series of destructive pranks in which they consume and destroy the world around them.
A cinematic time capsule with over 1,400 hours of submitted material from all regions of Switzerland gives unknown insights about the life of Swiss people in the politically and socially turbulent summer of 2019.
This short, animated piece of agitprop fiercely expresses the hopes of the Chilean people.
Animation. The theme is Weightlessness. Objects and characters are cut loose from habitual meanings, also from tensions and gravitational limitations. A lyric Eric Satie track accompanies the film. Such a portrait seems necessary from time to time to remind us that equilibrium and harmony are possible, and that we will not dissolve into a jelly if we allow ourselves to relax into them: A horseman rides through the landscape, through the town, but never arrives anywhere in particular. An acrobat swings on a rope above a canal in Venice, and is content just to swing there. Nothing threatens to disturb them. This film is a total contrast to the Kafka-like oddities of Eastern European animation. —Canyon Cinema
A pre-internet mash-up that mixes “Peanuts” and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.”
"The strangeness of this film is laced with carefully moulded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death – the Elysian fields of Homer, Dante’s Purgatorio, de Chirico’s stitched plain. A moving single picture. Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby I sat quietly without moving, looking at the background until the pieces began to move without my inventing things for them to do. I found that, given the chance, they really did have important business to attend to, and my job was to furnish them with the power of motion. I never deviated from this plan." —Canyon Cinema
"After GYMNOPEDIES, I had long wanted to animate a film specifically for a pre-selected piano piece by [Erik] Satie. MOONLIGHT SONATA is that film. It was totally designed for the 'Gnossienne V' and the movements of the animation are timed to the overall rhythms as well as the specific beats of the music." - Lawrence Jordan
Performed live on September 15th, 1985 on the SONY JumboTRON at Tsukuba Expo, Tukuba, Japan
Life for a struggling college student changes in an instant when he meets the owner of a male strip club who convinces him to give amateur night a whirl.
A series of horrifying murders, the victims, always couples, staged in bizarre collage dioramas with cardboard cutouts and scribbled, childlike messages about the corrupting power of love. The killer's on the loose, and the FBI is looking for a truck driver. Emery Reed is a long haul trucker disillusioned with the American Dream after an accident left his wife paralyzed and took the life of their son. Newlyweds Jeff and Krissy are having the time of their lives until their car breaks down on a rural road in the middle of nowhere. When the love birds collide with the forlorn truck driver, a wild ride leaves everyone questioning the true value of love and American Romance.
One of Lawrence Jordan's earliest animated films, PINK SWINE is an energetic and playful mix of various animation styles. Described as "an anti-art dada collage film," this free-form short presents cut-out images animated across old photos (a style picked up by Terry Gilliam a few years later) and found objects that dance to the beat of the rock-and-roll soundtrack. He produced this short during a summer spent with Joseph Cornell and Jordan edited the film entirely in camera, making the upbeat visual rhythm of this delightful lark even more impressive. –Sean Axmaker
For the first time I am animating hand-painted engraved cut-outs on a full-color background. The film is mood-filled: A duel scene in a snowy forest, obviously the morning after a masquerade ball. Harlequin lies dying, while Red Indian walks away with the wings of victory. The woman between them appears, cat-masked. The mask dissolves away. Her spirit passes into the face of the sun upon the sun upon the sun flower. But Harlequin cannot escape death. The blue world engulfs him.
The author's erotic imagination is mixed between desire and magazine clippings, and the trade of collage becomes a ship that travels from outer space to the city itself.
Baldwin’s “pseudo-pseudo-documentary” presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.
A girl haunted by traumatic events takes us on a mesmerising journey through 100 years of horror cinema to explore how filmmakers scare us – and why we let them.
Considerations on collage as a cognitive act in artists’ cinema. A pedagogical film adrift: 35mm photographs and other materials collected over the last fifteen years by artist Stefano Miraglia meet a text written by Baptiste Jopeck and the voice of Margaux Guillemard.
Ancestors is a film about spiritual forefathers and mothers in a purely fanciful sense. These are classical figures, anatomical figures, fairy tale figures and romantic figures all thrown in together - all my creative root-sources, in a kind of playful tribute. Like part 2 of Duo Concertantes, it's a moving single picture, now doubled.
Jordan’s imagery is exquisite and eloquent, concentrating on simple, repeated use of particularly poetic symbols and figures, a conglomerative effect of old Gustave Dore drawings, 19th century whatnot memorabilia, all fused to a totally aware perception. —Lita Eliseu, East Village Other
Do-hyun, the captain of the basketball team, is preparing for the championship. Hye-in, the team manager, brings Dong-wook, Do-hyun's first love, to fill in for an injured teammate.
