Experimental

  • Takashi Ito – Grim (1985)

    Takashi Ito1981-1990ExperimentalJapanShort Film

    A sensuous ghost haunts a flat in this unusual ode to plain, generic areas.
    Takashi Ito wrote:
    With this work, I developed/fleshed out the idea I had when making Ghost of peeling only the skin from various objects in the room, floating the skins in midair and then sticking them on different objects. This film was also shot entirely frame-by-frame with long-exposures. Along with Grim, its meaning is “as if to do forever.”Read More »

  • Takashi Ito – Ghost (1984)

    Takashi Ito1981-1990ExperimentalJapanShort Film

    Takashi Ito wrote:
    I made this work because I wanted to try out the idea of floating images in midair that had come to me when making Thunder. The entire work was shot frame-by-frame with long exposures. I filmed this in the company dorm I was living in in the middle of the night after I had come home from work, and thought I might die from what had become my daily pattern of sleeping for two hours in the morning then going off to work.Read More »

  • Rei Hayama – Dormant Soil/Concrete Reflections (Online Version) (2021)

    Rei Hayama2021-2030ExperimentalJapanJapanese Female Directors

    A response to a poem about concrete and city, by way of fauna and nature.Read More »

  • Takashi Ito – Miira no yume AKA The Mummy’s Dream (1989)

    Takashi Ito1981-1990ExperimentalJapanShort Film

    Takashi Ito wrote:
    The filmic version of a city in which all surface beauty has rotted away. In order to find images of death like landscapes of the city from which people have vanished, and buildings from which the decorations have been stripped away and the inner organs exposed, I walked all over Tokyo taking photographs, then animated them.Read More »

  • Peter Watkins – Culloden (1964)

    Peter Watkins1961-1970ExperimentalUnited KingdomWar

    Quote:
    The 1746 Battle of Culloden, the last land battle fought in the British Isles and the battle that ensured that Scotland was controlled by England. Not only do we see the battle unfold but also the lead-up, the key people involved and the aftermath.Read More »

  • Douglass Crockwell – Glens Falls Sequence (1937)

    1931-1940Douglass CrockwellExperimentalShort FilmUSA

    An experimental animated short from Douglass Crockwell which derives its subject matter from his home Glens Falls.

    Just sit back and watch….

    This is just one of many strange films from the DVD collection “Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941” and it’s from Disc 3. In “Glen Falls Sequence”, Douglass Crockwell used non-drying paints to finger paint or sandwiched the paint between glass panes to create some very unusual kinetic art. Despite being made well into the sound age, there was no accompanying music. The result is very interesting to watch but many will most likely not enjoy it because there is no narrative–just cool artsy images. It’s not bad at all for what it is and must have taken a lot of work to create. However, due to the type of film that it is, you really can’t give it any sort of numerical rating–but instead just sit back and enjoy it.Read More »

  • Takashi Ito – Wall (1987)

    Takashi Ito1981-1990ExperimentalJapanShort Film

    Takashi Ito wrote:
    The further developed and completed version of a 15-second advertisement for an interior design firm on which I had worked. It repeats over and over again the violent back-and-forth, half-revolving motions of a giant brick storehouse inside the frame of a hand-held photograph. I wanted to emphasis the flat nature of the photograph while creating a dynamic feeling of depth inside the photograph’s frame.Read More »

  • Hong-joon Kim & Joo-ho Hwang – Seoul 7000 (1976)

    1971-1980ExperimentalHong-joon KimJoo-ho HwangShort FilmSouth Korea

    Quote:
    According to the information written in the credit roll of “Seoul 7000,” the film was filmed in Seoul in November 1976 with an ‘Elmo 108’ 8mm camera using Kodachrome 40 film. It was also stated that “it was filmed frame by frame, and the shooting speed was adjusted differently for each shot,” and “the number 7000 in the title of this film represents the total number of frames in all parts except for the title.”Read More »

  • José Luis Guerín & Jonas Mekas – Correspondencia Jonas Mekas – José Luis Guerín (2011)

    José Luis Guerín2011-2020DocumentaryExperimentalJonas MekasSpain

    IMDb User wrote:
    This correspondence, or exchange of letters and video diaries between acclaimed filmmakers Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerin is extremely potent, there’s sorcery at play in the mixture of the two. Together they’re light and dark. Mekas knows life’s joys, and is always a participant in what he films, Guerín is a detached observer, cold, present only as a black mote, reflected in the eye of one of his subjects. Guerín shoots in black and white and strives for formalism, Mekas loves hazard, loves his chaotic hand-held colour camera. Jonas Mekas felt that his images were inferior to those of Guerín, but a picture of his son Sebastian devouring a pickle, followed by Jonas on the deli sausage and wine, and then a cheeky close up of Goethe’s Faust; which of them Faust and which Mephistopheles? That one shot set me thinking about the nature of art and the privilege of artists, and could be interpreted in any one of several fruitful ways.Read More »

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