George Abitbol, the classiest man in the world, dies tragically during a cruise. The director of an American newspaper, wondering about the meaning of these intriguing final words, asks his three best investigators, Dave, Peter and Steven, to solve the mystery. (Sixteen French actors dub scenes from various Warner Bros. films to create a parody of Citizen Kane, 1941.)
Bits of found film and different types of animation illustrate a classic chase scene scenario: A woman is abducted and a man comes to her rescue, but during their escape they find themselves in the enemy's secret headquarters.
Rejecting the billions of alphabetic diktats to liberate the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a necessary and true language by re-turning to the locations of past film shoots, while keeping track of modern times.
Cornell employs clips from 1931's jungle melodrama East of Borneo – more specifically, clips of its lead actress, Rose Hobart – to disquieting effect. Through Cornell's collage editing, Hobart becomes a singular object of desire and dread, trapped in an exotic paradise.
Clips from assorted television programs, B-movies, commercials, music performances, newsreels, bloopers, satirical short films and promotional and government films of the 1950s and 1960s are intercut together to tell a single story of various creatures and societal ills attacking American cities.
In 1958 Angelo, a rich and spoiled boy, enters a religious school, where students are tired of its vice-rector, and the strict rules and old-fashioned teaching methods of priests. Soon, Angelo exerts strong leadership among his peers and incites turmoil among them, helped by intellectual Franco and shy Camma. They expel the prefect from the school, organize a Grand Guignol show, and disappear the corpse of an old professor.
How do German couples communicate in private? What are they arguing about? Is the way to a man’s heart really through his stomach? This docu-fictional hybrid production discusses such questions with the help of authentic interview snippets that were edited under the staged plot. We get an insight into the life of an animal couple, who experience typical everyday situations on behalf of us humans. At first, our fox is emotionally contained, while the penguin lady may get wild as hell. With a wink, the filmmakers hold up a mirror to the audience in the cinema.
The second essay about still dominant dark aspects of our modern society. It is conceived as a surreal anti-patriarchal thought experiment and raises important questions about gender, power, and social change, prompting us to reflect on how historical patterns of discrimination and oppression might be either repeated or overcome in a reversed gendered world. It challenges the viewer to confront their own assumptions and biases, and to consider the possibilities of a more equitable society.
Inspired in part by a dream he had of murdering his mother, Brakhage here gives us one of his profoundest meditations on human aggression.
The sarcastic account of the assassination of five Spanish politicians between 1870 and 1973 is mixed with the narration of five short stories by Edgar Allan Poe illustrated by five skillful pencil artists. A documentary, a video essay, a collage, a provocative experiment where various pop culture figures and icons perform unexpected cameos. The macabre joke of a jester. Never more.
Loose Ends is a collage film about the process of internalizing the information that bombards us through a combination of personal experience and media in all forms. Speeding through our senses in ever-increasing numbers and complicated mixtures of fantasy, dream and reality from both outside and in, these fragmented images of life, sometimes shared by all, sometimes isolated and obscure, but with common threads, lead us to a state of psychological entropy tending toward a uniform inertness… an insensitive un-involvement in the human condition and our own humanity. —Chick Strand
Arthur Lipsett's first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice." The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.
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.
After the end of civilization, an aged man undergoes a mysterious journey through space and time that takes him through memories, visions, and historical events, ultimately transcending the limitations of the senses and into a new cosmic rebirth.
An audiovisual investigation into the way Spanish cinema has represented its audience throughout history, and a tribute to those who, for over a hundred years, have inhabited the theaters, mutually nurturing their deepest dreams and aspirations.
An homage to the weird and wonderful world of B-movies, this short fauxdocumentary by film artist Chris Gerrard splices together classic clips with some new footage to tell the ludicrously fake story of the mysterious people (and things) lurking beneath us in the eerie River Tay. Feast your eyes on this unique archaeology of aquatic-themed film.
In her recent films, Geiser has been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a kind of deep, ambiguous space, a suggestion of “the floating world”. In ULTIMA THULE, gravity fails, land and sky lose their historical meaning. A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over barely-glimpsed hills, an unlikely ferry to ”Ultima Thule”: the farthest point north, the limit of any journey. The seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, and time loses its line.
Set in Berlin and New York's Lower East Side, The Great Yiddish Love stars the self-exiled Marlene Dietrich and her Nazi-endorsed replacement, Zarah Leander. It is a melodrama of love, emigration, and betrayal reassembled from Hollywood, German Ufa and Yiddish films from the 1930s and 40s.
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.
A haunting and brutal depiction of animal cruelty. Fast paced cut up art brut collage film.