Genres: experimental

  • Letter to a Long Lost Friend

    The processes of memory bringing forth, after. American Retreat. “An image I can live with.” The arc and shadow of time. We are presented with an image of trees which slowly fades to black. As it fades, quick luminous close-ups of branches with, and then without, leaves emanates from the darkness. We travel from the midst of a situation (not seeing the trees for the forest) to memory’s preoccupation with condensed luminous details. Finally it is only the details which we keep with us; the original situation fades into the past. On the soundtrack we hear a man reading from…

  • Letters from Home

    Begun with a speech by Vito Russo, “Letters” enjoins a chorus of speakers to sound off on AIDS, love and death. Impelled with a variety of formal procedures, this series of mini-portraits are generously furbished with found footage extracts, hand-processed dilemmas, home movies, super-8 psychodramas, pixilated phantasms, intergalactic warfare and a hot kiss in a cool shower. “Mike Hoolboom has produced an absolutely sensational work, not only by the extreme density and intelligence of the witnesses who appear in the film, but also by the visual quality and inventiveness of his cinematographic language. Each shot, each edit has a message…

  • Ley Lines

    “Taking her own last name as her primary organizing principle in approaching the past, Patricia Gruben has constructed one of the most inventive personal archeologies and family histories ever filmed. Over six years in the making, ‘Ley Lines’ eschews conventional narrative storytelling in favour of associative and cumulative revelation… “Gruben criss-crosses the globe as she traces the Gruben family back to Texas and then to Germany, only to end up in the present in Tuktoyaktuk. Her magical and unpredictable exploration makes innumerable stops along the way to consider such matter as satellites, DNA, geomancy, dowsing, Jimmy Dean, Hitler, the Thule…

  • Lifelines

    Animated line drawings combined with photos of a nude model; an interplay of line, form and symbol.

  • Light Study

    As the name implies, this film presents the evocative potential of colour and purely visual (non-verbal) film. It is a sketchbook of various collage techniques and ideas. Autobiographical references – journal entries in a purely visual sense – combine with the use of sound and altered music to elicit different types of emotions and memories. A natural stepping-stone to Bendahan’s later works.

  • Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 7

    This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems…

  • Linear Dreams

    “The sound of a heartbeat pumps life into ‘Linear Dreams’, a scratch animation film that moves from the simple lines of the unconscious to representational realism.” – Toronto International Film Festival, 1997 The word “Linear” is composed of two words: “line,” as in drawing and “ear,” as in hearing. The film was produced by drawing both sound and picture directly onto 35mm motion picture film.

  • Little Stabs at Happiness

    Jacobs completed “Little Stabs at Happiness” (1959-63) as a by-product of or as “a true breather” from his long film, “Star Spangled to Death.” Except for the addition of titles which identify the four sections of the film, the use of 78 rpm records, and a short monologue on the soundrack, the film is exactly as it came out of the camera. Jonas Mekas hailed “Blonde Cobra,” “Little Stabs at Happiness” and “Scotch Tape” as opening a vital new direction in the American cinema. On May 2, 1963 he wrote in The Village Voice: “Ron Rice’s ‘The Queen of Sheba…

  • Lives of Performers

    “Lives of Performers” unfolds in roughly fourteen episodes, each characterized by a different cinematic treatment of the real and fictional aspects of Rainer’s role of director and choreographer and of the performers’ roles during the making of previous work and the film itself. The first section is edited footage of an actual rehearsal of “Walk, She Said” for a live performance at the Whitney Museum. The second section shows photographic documentation of a theatrical work from 1971 called “Grand Union Dreams,” while the voice over narration describes the content of the photos and the changing intimacies of the performers, fictional…

  • Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 8

    This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems…