Playlist
In "Peace O' Mind" (1983, 8.5 minutes) the characters try to stay safe at home, but become isolated and entrapped there. Images of a domestic space are connected with images of poverty "in the backyard" of this space to suggest knowing of and hiding from this deprivation has entrapped the characters, physically and mentally, in their private, isolated, and disturbed spaces.
A young dancer re-choreographed through film editing. This film was originally made in standard 8mm from a home movie.
"A study in light based on persistence of vision and enhancement from eye fatigue." – M.M.
A nostalgic retread through the 4th plateau of New York City followed by a short polemic against ethnography and hipsters.
A cicatrix is a scar left by the formation of new connective tissue over a healing sore or wound.
Lili White's THE HOUSE OF WATER - #29 WATER ABYSS (red version) interprets I Ching Hexagram #29, "The Abysmal," through gestural performance, nature imagery, and digital manipulation. The work explores vulnerability, danger, adaptation, and the struggle between reason and emotion. A human figure appears against darkness, develops shadow-like forms, passes through a red zone, and struggles repeatedly before returning to the landscape, while water continues flowing through an exterior gorge. The film is part of White's larger House of Water cycle, which uses the eight changes of the I Ching's Water house as a framework for exploring transformation and bodily knowledge. Created synopsis — based on verified sources; not an official synopsis.
Thornton's first 16mm film, X-Tracts was made in collaboration with cinematographer Desmond Horsfield. The film consists of complex and rapid patterning of sound/image segments that are structured by a formal mathematical schema that determines duration, interaction, and progression. Moving beyond the critiques of the cinematic apparatus and its analogy to language that were central to that time (Hollis Frampton's Hapax Legomena or Paul Sharit's T:O:U:C:H:I:N:G, for example), Thornton expands into the territories of rhetoric, cognition, and linguistics. Composed of a cut-up reading of Thornton's high school diary paired with images of the filmmaker, fragments of the body in motion or at rest, and just-occupied spaces, X-Tracts seems both to defy and propose an autobiographical narrative. The film has been described by Chrissie Iles, curator at The Whitney Museum of American Art, as the "missing link" between the structuralists and the introduction of a more narratological tendency in experimental film practice.
This film is a short study of the relation between language and visual experience. Reversal and negative takes are edited together, emphasising the quality of black and white film. The entire film was shot in one room. We hear bits of whispered text dispersed within the film, creating a sense of intimacy.
A film in four parts. In "In the Room", a man and a woman in outlandish garb are sitting in a claw-foot bathtub smoking, while the man abuses a doll in various ways. In "They Stopped to Think", the filmmaker focuses on a woman trying to position a stool upon which to sit next to a wall. The filmmaker, in voice over, talks about filming the scene, and his current relationship with the people shown in the film, who were his friends at the time of filming and who are now largely out of his life. The scene shifts to a pier where a man and woman are filmed, they playing to the camera. In "It Began to Drizzle", a man and woman are lounging in a street side outdoor patio. They have to decide what to do. The scene then shifts to a man and some children doing chalk drawings on the sidewalk, and how other respond to what they are doing. In "The Spirit of Listlessness (Jack Smith)", a man lounging on an urban rooftop is playing with balloons while he plays to the camera with other items around him.
takes the second note from screenshotted notes app lists, sourced from friends and family, and assembles them into a language poem
Co-maker: Nam June Paik. Original soundtrack: "Four Loops" by Kenneth Werner. "BEATLES ELECTRONIQUES was shot in black-and-white from live broadcasts of the Beatles while Paik electromagnetically improvised distortions on the receiver, and also from videotaped material produced during a series of experiments with filming off the monitor of a Sony videotape recorder. The film is three minutes long and is accompanied by an electronic soundtrack by composer Ken Werner, called 'Four Loops,' derived from four electronically altered loops of Beatles sound material. The result is an eerie portrait of the Beatles not as pop stars but rather as entities that exist solely in the world of electronic media." – Gene Youngblood, "Expanded Cinema," 1970. Shown at the 3rd Tokyo Art Film Festival, "Vision and Television" at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and around the world.
A subversive short film which protests the Vietnam War and military establishment using a story of rats being imprisoned in the U.S. and making their way to Canada.
Wallpaper 7 is a 1970 experimental 16mm film by John Buchanan, an early work from his New York filmmaking practice. Buchanan began making films in earnest after moving to New York in 1969 and was a regular participant in Millennium Film Workshop's Open Screenings beginning in 1970. The film was recently scanned in 2K and presented by The Kitchen as part of its historical Open Screenings program.
The film is an experimental experience about the intergenerational family genetics and the onset of mania depressive bipolar illness.
Corpuscles dash about. Nerves twitch. Neurons fire. Anatomical illustrations, overlaid with the body's actions through scratching and handpainting directly onto the film. Screenings include: Seattle Underground Film Festival, 2000
A spectral reimagining of Peg Entwistle's fateful leap from the Hollywoodland sign in 1932. Bathed in grain and twilight melancholy, this speculative docudrama refracts the last moments of a forgotten starlet into a haunted meditation on fame, failure, and the myth-making machinery of American cinema. A celluloid séance in nine minutes.
An intimate portrait of songwriters, performance artists, and lovers Dan Martin and Michael Biello, "The Dance" explores the interconnectedness of their domestic life, artwork, and selfless devotion to a community of artists they have helped to create and support. The film uses hand-processed footage to convey the emotional intensity of their lives. The handmade quality of the film imparts a sense of poignancy and brotherly loving in the era of AIDS. Based on "The Dance," a song about living on in the face of loss, with music by Dan Martin and lyrics by Michael Biello.
"An abstract narrative shot from the point of view of a house-the woman is seen from an angle of the wall, the corner observes her. This is a film about the fleeting sensations in the midst of ordinary activites,the energy of heat, and the activity of the imagination. Sousa ""....Jean Sousa's films are struggles.They Grapple with the unseen, the inarticulate, and the mysterious- the heart's blood that boils beneath the surface. However, Sousa structures her anomalous worlds, her anger, her sense of disjointedness with coolness and precision."" Wendy Barbner, Spiral, 1984"
A two-minute small-file animation by Jayson James Sloan that turns the inability to afford new underwear into a humorous stream-of-consciousness monologue. The film moves through the absurd and intimate thoughts triggered by financial limitation, using the deliberately tiny digital-file format as part of its presentation. The Hmm describes the work specifically as a "stream of consciousness monologue" that humorously explores not being able to afford new underwear and the thoughts and feelings that emerge from that predicament.
One soft morning in West Philadelphia, the run-down streets are covered with snow ... Music performed live by Norman Fauntleroy.
The Male GaYze presents an individual's observation of sexuality and power relations between men, a young African American dancer's reminiscence of his encounter with a famous Dutch choreographer.
Smith appeared as his red-wigged, plastic-jawed, alter ego Rose Courtyard, seated in a wheelchair amid the detritus of the Plaster Foundation. The film was accompanied by two rounds of Kate Smith singing "God Bless America". Dressed in a red satin gown, clutching a bouquet of dead roses, Rose is finally moved to stand up and salute.
NYC Diary '72 is a personal/diary film by Howard Guttenplan documenting New York City through the filmmaker's subjective observation. The film belongs to Guttenplan's early-1970s diary-film practice, in which everyday experience and the filmmaker's perception of place become the principal material. MoMA preserves the work as a digital transfer of Super 8mm film and has programmed it within exhibitions and screenings devoted to personal cinema and New York's underground film culture. No authoritative film-specific synopsis describing the individual scenes has been located, so I am not adding undocumented imagery or narrative details.
Subway is Holly Fisher's first completed solo film, combining a rush-hour ride on Boston's Harvard/Ashmont subway line with images from her personal film diary. Her seven-year-old nephew Ben is directed through a series of simple actions on the train, while the film intercuts anti-war demonstrations, seagulls, dogs entering saltwater, crowds on escalators, surveillance-camera imagery, and a twilight construction site. Fisher describes the work as a subterranean fusion of fiction and diary, using layering and juxtaposition to explore passage, memory, perception, and the political atmosphere of the late 1960s. The Film-Makers' Cooperative confirms the film as a 1968 color/sound work.
An experimental film by Hollis Frampton documenting a man talking while a telephone rings, a tour of New York, and a goldfish.
This film shows draft card burning demonstrations that took place in New York City during the fall of 1965, relating these incidents to the protests against the draft system & the war in Vietnam.
A dance film, starring Pooh Kaye, Sally Silvers, Lee Katz, Harry Sheppard, Kumiko Kimoto, David Zambrano, Ginger Gillesbie, Mark Dendy and others, with music improvised by Tom Cora, Christian Marclay and Zeena Parkins. Filmed on the streets of the East Village and edited over three years.
360 degree videography of a tracking shots of the Santacon event in Times Square.
"Light is motion, motion is time, time is a bird. Repetitive, seasonally cyclical process of recording Icelandic webcam screenshots, this time focusing on the light monsters that through camera lenses and glass fibers travel great underwater intercontinental distances. Visually encoded in this film is the message, ""There is no valid reference frame in which light is at rest."""
Rituals is a four-minute digital experimental work by Syrian-Brazilian artist and researcher Francis de Assis Abdullah. The film is included by MoMA in Quotidian Pleasures, a program centered on intimate, lyrical works that find significance in everyday existence and rituals. The available authoritative sources do not provide a film-specific synopsis, so the film's precise imagery, narrative, or ritual subject cannot be reliably described without viewing the work.
A table is shown from various perspectives and through different color filters.
Filmed in Erica's NYC apartment, Providence is an experimental VHS film that takes us inside the diary of her mind as she reflects on reconnecting with a romantic partner not seen in over 20 years.
Hello…? is an experimental color animation created directly through a Xerox 6500 color copier, using Eduardo Darino's pioneering "Copymotion" process. The film was made for the centenary of the first telephone conversation and explores communication and human connection through images generated without a conventional camera. Verified/compiled from Film-Makers' Cooperative records and the supplied film description.
The splendor and pleasures of Autumn are the focus of this richly textured and brilliantly colored paper emulsion film. The sound is a recording of the filmmaker ripping, rustling and tearing various kinds of paper. These sounds have been synthesized and musically arranged to echo the imaging of the synthesis paper. A reel of paper and fallen leaves unwinds amid calls of birds and the laughter of delighted children.
A Sleepless Night is an experimental short film by Devon Narine-Singh. No film-specific official synopsis was located. The film is described in the context of Narine-Singh's experimental practice, which explores found materials, addiction and recovery, and mass media.
This is documentation of a workshop held at the Lillian Wald Recreation Rooms and Settlement. It shows two filmmaking projects by youth. This film was shown at a UNESCO conference in 1962 in Oslo, Norway and was commended for being the "most spontaneous" and "drawing the most applause" by Jonas Mekas in a review in the Village Voice.
A hypnotic collage of dance, archival images, and online videos forms a visceral portrait of Palestinian life, where resistance, youth, and everyday moments merge into a shared act of witnessing.
The filmmaker performs her solitary act of cleaning. A static camera tightly frames the studio sink, dirty with paint and other residue while the artist engages in a concerted ritual of scrubbing and scraping ... a treatise on the over-cleanliness of certain reductivist gestures in history of art making.
Interior Shot is composed of my own surgery footage and breathing exam audio, alongside poetry on grief, work, luck, and time.
Carolee Schneemann's Viet Flakes rapidly animates black-and-white photographs of the Vietnam War, juxtaposing images of violence, wounded bodies, prisoners, children, and destroyed villages with a layered soundtrack combining classical music, popular songs, and religious chants. The film connects the distant violence of war with everyday American life, turning political imagery into a personal and sensory confrontation with conflict. Verified from the provided museum text and corroborated by archival sources.
I made How to Disappear Completely at a time where I felt too seen, too watched, too vulnerable – the only way I knew to protect myself was to redact myself from view. It was an attempt to "opt out" of the The Empire's violent vernacular, removing myself from the burden of even having to work in resistance to it. A temporary one, but an attempt nonetheless.
Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin's Dreammachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenuousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.
Experimental film contrasting found footage and archival clips with quotes about nature, humanity, and evolution.
Intercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities.
In the first segment, 'Pregnancy Dreams', Barbara reads out descriptions of dreams she has had while pregnant. In the second, 'Priming a Wall', she paints a wall. She is pregnant and nude in both segments.
As the in-house photographer of the dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown, Babette Mangolte attended the rehearsals of Brown's Water Motor in 1978, where she became convinced that the intensity with which the dancer performed her movements could not be sustained forever and should be recorded. In time, this choreography has come to be regarded as a key piece in Brown's early repertoire. A pioneer of contemporary art, Brown draws from everyday gestures to create a continuous and fluid sequence of movements that, as the work's title suggests, recalls both the flow of water and the intensity of a motorised engine. Mangolte's recording of the piece explores the relationship between time and movement: the choreography is presented twice, once at normal speed and once in slow motion at less than 48 frames per second. The movement then takes another dimension, allowing us to perceive what remains imperceptible at normal speed.
Everyday AF is a short experimental film by Art Jones that explores everyday life and the experience of moving through New York City, presenting ordinary urban moments through an underground and personal cinematic perspective.
With the help of a portable 16mm camera I attempted to capture my body's growth and the way it has blossomed after a year of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), sharing some intimate moments of self-love, auto-eroticism and trans joy.
Landscapes are seen from car windows as raindrops, striking the glass, paint what is beyond in a variety of textures and moods. Three realities are represented: the landscape viewed through the window, rain patterns on the window surface, and the space inside the car. Each of the first two realities becomes visible depending on where the camera is focused, the third becomes present when parts of the vehicle, the mirrors and wipers, are revealed and when the rain quiets and sounds made inside are heard.
... has been used in women's studies classes on rape. Its energy is the energy of protest and of rock music. A woman is dragged and dragged through dirt with increasing violence. As the violence increases, ...
Cars, trucks pedestrians and the line they cross over, by and through.
Becoming Bimbo is a brief experimental film exploring identity, femininity, and the idea of becoming a "bimbo." Through a playful and provocative approach, the film reflects on self-expression, the body, and the ways femininity can be performed and reclaimed.
Through a catalogue of looks, movements, and gestures, Mayhem presents a social order run amok in a libidinous retracing of film noir conventions. Sexuality flows in an atmosphere of sexual tension, danger, violence, and glamour; antagonism between the sexes is symbolized in the costuming of women in polka dots and men in stripes. Censored in Tokyo for its use of Japanese lesbian erotica, this tape creates an image bank of what signifies the sexual and the seductive in the history of imagemaking, pointing to the way we learn about our bodies, and how to use them from images.
A short breather that smells of ocean salts and barbecued chicken. Friends gather for a celebration in the sun as the surf rolls in and the smoke heads skyward toward who knows what destiny? A tinge of sadness simmers in the music that weaves its way through these forgotten moments of California dreaming.
An unnamed narrator uses found footage from his childhood in an attempt to paint a portrait of his father and their painful relationship.
Exhumed 16mm film from my own "landfill" in Indiana, constitute the canvas of LANDFILL 16. After finishing my double-projection WHEN IT WAS BLUE I was horrified by the bulk of outtakes that would normally end up in a landfill. So I temporarily buried the footage to let enzymes in the soil begin to decompose the image, and later I hand-painted that film to give it new life. Within this pulsating, abstract moving painting I attempt to express my dread of man-made waste. This "recycling" is a meditation on nature's losing battle to decompose relics of our abandoned technologies and productions.
When Andy Warhol refused to appear in public to accept the 1964 Film Culture magazines annual Independent Film award, Jonas Mekas made this mock 'documentary' of Warhol and a group of his superstars at the Factory. They are presented a basket of fruit which they then consume in slow motion.
Jordan, an amateur adult performer, recalls the horror of his many former lives.
A bowl of blueberries in milk, changing light radiant on the berries and on the glazed bowl, the ever more radiant orb of milk transforming into glowing light itself, with a brief shadow coda answering the complex play of shadows. The regular pulses of light framing the looser rhythmus of the spoon, itself a frame. A charging of each of the frame's edges with its own particular energy. Within and without, whites and blues, lines and curves. The pulses of vision, the simple natural processes, lift the spirit.
A cinematic portrait that straddles a painting and a prose poem, it looks at a woman's daily routines and thoughts through an exploration of her as a "character." By interweaving threads of history and fiction, the film also pays homage to a real woman: Emma Goldman, 1986.
"Chop Off exposes the dark, fearful recesses of the human psyche by filming the body modification of performance artist R.K. Literally risking 'life and limb,' R.K.'S body is his medium and amputation is his art. The very act of filming him often stimulates a cascading range of emotions, from disgust to fear to dread." -Tribeca Film Festival 2009
"Please please show this film! It's unique, it's real, it's not like any other film. What one sees in it, can not be seen anywhere else. It will shock some, but the fact is that there are shocking things in this world and we should know it and see it, nothing human should be hidden from knowledge. You made a very REAL film about REAL people. One of the most difficult things to do in cinema. I congratulate you." -Jonas Mekas
A celestial choreography that tells us about the absolute liberation of references and narrative. Against a starry sky, figures (students at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School in New York) show us the inner universe one enters when one falls asleep.
Two little girls, vampire capes and a penchant for fun. This is how they play with the recurring and classic motifs of horror films, playing with gender identities and power dynamics.
Suspended in moments, re-connecting with one's immediate material surroundings (aka nature) through the unbridled flow of emotions. Swimming into the moments of being, merging the heart with mind and senses.
A meditation on the act of remembering, transference and maternity. Captured in the northeastern countryside of Jamaica, a mother returns to her native land seeking ancestral guidance for the arduous journey of pregnancy and delivery.
Fleeing political turmoil, a mother separates from her young daughter in search of asylum in America. Decades later, and many worlds lost, the daughter returns to her ancestral land, pregnant and seeking the wisdom of her mother's mothers to navigate her maternal journey. The final part of a series of films illustrating the broken fragments and unhealed wounds in mother-daughter dynamics, Genomic Memory, highlights the aftermath of African-Caribbean mothers leaving their daughters to immigrate to the United States. The project illuminates the plights of pregnancy and parenting faced by African Caribbean immigrant women and the struggle to bridge the generational divide created by bodies of water.
Notes of journey life of Stan Brakhage like a befits of a diary book in a very strong sense of experimentation, romantic, modernist and abstract.
A Japanese avant-garde film that is a poem-made-cinema for its use of surrealist imagery, presenting a sensual look at the human body.