Experimental

An experimental short film from Robert Breer with animated and live-action scenes cut together.Read More »

Personal photos are interspersed with fragmentary drawings and flashes of colour, observed and/or remembered everyday events – all of which add to a general sense of reminiscence. Sometimes a hand appears (Breer’s own) on top of a photo, reminding us that the photo is but an object in the film, not the film itself.Read More »

Form Phases IV is the last film in Form Phases, the first series made by Robert Breer to lend movement to the abstract forms in his paintings. Breer was a self-taught practitioner of animated film, focusing particularly on the demystification of the screen space. This was a theme already touched on in the 1920s by Hans Richter, one of the references for avant-garde European cinema. Richter’s work, specifically his film Rhythmus 21 (also in the Museo Reina Sofía collection), the starting point of abstraction in film, was a decisive influence on Breer’s cinematographic output.
Here, Breer applied, in a particularly sophisticated way, the principle by which a static screen is animated by the appearance of a moving shape which then changes as another shape appears, and then disappears, leaving the screen blank, to return once more to its static state.Read More »

Rob Breer blazing the trail.Read More »

An experimental film in which a photograph of an airplane turns into a wire diagram, then into an animated plane in flight, and then it explodes into words.Read More »

16mm, color, silent, 6 minutes, print from Anthology Film Archives Preserved by Anthology Film Archives

“Film is a fragile medium, and some artists push its fragility to the breaking point. Paul Sharits (1943–93) was a pusher.‘I think of [film] as a sort of a primitive, vulnerable medium,’ said Sharits. ‘I know it’s going to disappear, and I almost look upon it with a certain empathy.’ He moved his films out of the theater and into the gallery, creating multiscreen environments that exploited the qualities that made film different from the other visual arts. The projectors, with their clatter and flickering light, became protagonists, and the strips of celluloid, agents of ephemeral beauty.Read More »

The film recorded by Basinski on the roof of his apartment as the twin towers burned in the distance. Accompanied by part 1.1 of his four album set of disintegrating tape loops which he played with friends on the rooftop as the drama unfolded.Read More »

Elizabeth Price won the 2012 Turner Prize for this piece.

“The Woolworths Choir of 1979 is a three-part video that weaves together distinct bodies of material: photographs of church architecture, internet clips of pop performances and news footage of a deadly fire in a Woolworths furniture store in 1979.”Read More »

Except for a few brief evocations of Debord’s “art” during the first ten minutes or so, most of this “antitelevisual” video consists of television clips illustrating the extreme degradation and delirium of the present society. It’s a powerful denunciation, but not so deft and subtle as Debord’s films, perhaps because it was made during the worsening stages of his final illness. Presumably intended as a parting shot at the society he detested, it was completed shortly before his death in November 1994 and shown January 9, 1995, on a French cable channel along with La Société du Spectacle and Réfutation de tous les jugements (whence the video copies that have since circulated). Read More »