Combining the mambo and Tibetan sound-effects with cut-out animation and assorted clips of silent film stars, starring (in order of appearance) Eric von Stroheim, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Conrad Nagel, Lon Chaney, Alice Terry, Joan Crawford, Lilian Gish, Renée Adorée, May Murray,...

Ship feared lost in wild Atlantic sea. A portrait, of sorts, photographed from filmmaker Toney Merritt's former studio apartment on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.

Animation of a new order within the series of short works of that period. Mostly on black space, the figures in blue perform a very compact and jewel-like opera in surreal form, once again to the piano music of Erik Satie. Ideally, the film should be projected on a 30"-wide white card sitting on ...

Bruce Baillie transforms a walk down a street in Richmond, California, into a voyage of discovery. "Entirely handmade, sans optical printers or computers," everyday events are shifted into something fantastic. The viewer is awakened to a universe of swirling sights and sounds, marvelous moments u...

becoming cataract, a hot steam mingles and churns cool fog
swelling gray film frames, the burning and fade

[inspired by the prose poems of Russell Edson and "This Solitude of Cataracts" by Wallace Stevens]

A young woman moves between light and dark, life and death; a latter day Persephone. The natural world responds accordingly. Neglected negatives, abandoned envelopes, botanical and anatomical illustrations along with found home-made recordings re-order themselves, collapsing and re-emerging in he...

Abstract animation inspired by the daily commutes by the filmmaker through Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The film explores the sensory experience of moving through public spaces and the curiosity and anxiety that comes from being in the middle of a city. Rowe uses loops and cycles t...

An apparition of images—real or imagined—gradually surface within the solitude of a hotel room.

The scene is set in front of a French chateau. The camera chases improbable incidents across the screen. Many are constructed out of one of Lawrence Jordan's favorite engravings-illustrators: Louis Poyet. Duels occur on a tight rope. Heavier-then-air machines fly by (and sometimes crash). Below, ...

Iterations of COPPER PERFORATION LOOP, an original piece of direct animation created by scraping emulsion off of 16mm black leader against a 5” diameter circular disc of perforated copper. The Triptych includes the original loop and hand processed contact prints of it, one of which was printed on...

In 1965, Lawrence Jordan worked as an assistant to Joseph Cornell on his boxes and films. Jordan filmed his work extensively and as much as he could of the artist (and it is the only film-footage that exists of Cornell). Jordan edited the film in 1978 when he determined that it would be a kind of...

On ancient star maps of magnificent color quality, Lawrence Jordan takes the viewer out of this world into the realm of cosmic imagination. COSMIC ALCHEMY is thematically and visually consistent with his earlier shorts and yet, set to an evocative score by John Davis, Jordan has crossed into an u...

A doctor in a small town leaves his ill daughter to attend to another patient. His wife seeks his return before the health of the condition of their daughter deteriorates.

"The subject is one of impressive realism and sure to strike deep into the hearts of the spectators." — Biograph Films adver...

One of the liveliest of Mary Ellen Bute's abstract films. DADA was intended to be part of a Universal Newsreel segment, showing Bute and her partner Ted Nemeth at work in their tiny New York studio. No copies of the newsreel itself are known to exist at this time. — Cecile Starr

We are faking, lying, performing, stretching, translating, doctoring, manipulating, mistaking, working, earning, trying, reporting, deceiving, interpreting, demonstrating, sinking.

"We're surrounded by images. Most art is in a frame, you know it isn't real, it's in a frame. But in addition to ju...

There is a hint of an underwater circus since many of the performers are acrobats. The sea water—if that is what it is—is yellowish brown. A full-faced sun rises from the Sun King's cradle while a moon of Saturn circles the planet. The cut-out animation moves airily through a time-distorted world...

Anti-war demonstration, New York City march to Sheep Meadow. Veterans against the war, Yippies, arrests and flags of a half-forgotten revolution. Photographed in 1968; completed in 1974.

A dance of eclectic objects. A play of demented dolls, wheels and geriatric clocks. Cut-out and stop-motion animation at its formative stage, Jordan-wise.

Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super-8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness create the sensation of a painter's chiaroscuro. Wov...

A "found-footage" film with the original materials too shrunk to print on 16mm. The film was one of four made for the GRAVITY SPELLS project, an album of film and new music by John Davis. The title derives from text in the footage—"These Driving Demons Start Young"—and proceeds to show soap box d...

DROP CITY is a portrait of a computer desktop community. It takes its name from the first rural hippy commune in America, a settlement in southern Colorado that formed in 1965 constructed of discarded junk, salavaged car tops and other detritus fashioned into inventive living structures. A decade...

An established classic. Steel engravings form a surrealistic dream-world. It can be shown to any adventurous audience, young or old, and has never disappointed. The theme (resurrection, rebirth, flight into higher spheres) was thought to be outmoded in the art of this century. Evidently not, judg...

Objects and sounds collected on an early morning walk through Brooklyn, New York, billow against a sun-struck floor. The smallest parts of the city are up for grabs.

The Villa d'Este sculpture gardens frame the nocturnal exploits of a Baroquely-dressed masked figure darting about a waterworks of gushing fountains. Jets of water form a mesmerizing erotic fantasy paying homage to abstract visual music, early silent cinema and Sergei Eisenstein's spectacular "cr...