The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a silent film directed by Robert Wiene from a screenplay written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. They met each other in Berlin following World War I. The two saw the then-new film medium as a revolutionary form of artistic expression because visual storytelling that necessitated collaboration between writers and painters, cameramen, actors, directors. They felt that film was the ideal medium through which to both call attention to the emerging pacifism in postwar Germany and exhibit the radical anti-bourgeois art.
One evening, they saw a sideshow titled "Man and Machine", in which a man did feats of strength and forecast the future while supposedly in a hypnotic trance. Inspired by this, Janowitz and Mayer devised their story that night and wrote it in the following six weeks. The name "Caligari" came from a book Mayer read, in which an officer named Caligari was mentioned.



The arrival of the traveling magician Dr Caligari and Cesare in a town coincides with savage killings. Secretly Caligari was an asylum director who hypnotizes Cesare to re enact murders. But the final reel contains something which will leave an audience shattered. It blows away all your moral certainties and beliefs.
The film has been read as an allegory for German social attitudes in the period preceding World War II. The character of Caligari should represent a tyrannical figure, to whom the only alternative is social chaos.
You can buy The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Special Collector's Edition).

How to be a succesfull serial killer

By Jim Blanchard.

The Factory (2001)

Yann Jouette communicates his stories using pictures instead of telling stories. He works on lights and backgrounds than on character design because it gives them a lot more freedom. Usually filmakers tells you what each character will look like, but Jouette tells you how the background should look like.



A Human Being's factory is managed by a dollar bill, until a faulty part turns the system around. In La fabrik, Jouette shows his messages and his opinions of what society is becoming.
People are treated like machines. They are built to consume and to mass-produce. Money is becoming more important than life, whereas at the beginning money was invented to help people.

Salaryman Project 2009

by Bruno Quinquet.

Birdcalls (2007)

Malcolm Sutherland is one of Canada’s most talented and imaginative young animation filmmakers. Birdcalls won the prestigious debut prize at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival. Sutherland also works as an illustrator and comic book artist. His drawings and prints have been exhibited across Canada. His comic book Oola Dug won the 2008 Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best Comic.
He was a student of both astronomy and classical printmaking before he discovered animation at the Quickdraw Animation Society in Calgary, Alberta.



Have you never tried to talk with your dog, your cat or a bird? What if can they be trying to tell us something?
Sutherland, with Birdcalls, has an answer of sorts: the written languages of birds come to life.

The Gay Utopia

By Lilli Carre. She's the author of comics books "Tales Of Woodsman Pete" and "The Lagoon". She also makes animated shorts.

Muto (2008)

Blu is a Italian graffiti/street artist . Blu' stuff is simply amazing.



Muto is a film combining both animation and wall-painting.

By Jeffrey Gray Brandsted.

La Jetée (1962)

La jetée is one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made.
In the movie, the survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send someone back before the devastating war to recover food, medicine, or energy for the present, to summon the past and future to the aid of the present.



It has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German; the story is told by a voice-over narrator. It is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera.
The reason the film works without becoming a cold, lifeless lecture is because it anchors the images of nuclear holocaust and scientific exploration within humanistic characters and a sense of unashamed romanticism.
La Jettée is the way in which Chris Marker manages to relate his story of travel and movement through the use of still images.
You can buy La Jetee.

Walk it out

By Kali Ciesemier.

An Andalusian Dog (1928)

Cinema was a new art form still to be experimented with: Buñuel and Dalí knew they would produce something different, with the purpose of attracting attention. Simply following the logical sequence that words can be poetic and an image is worth a thousand words, and that poetry can be abstract, thus so can images, and if they move, then better still.
Un Chien andalou was Buñuel's first film and was initially released in 1929 for a limited showing in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.
The film has no narrative, in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.



Historically the film represents a violent reaction against what in those days was called 'avant-garde,' which was aimed exclusively at artistic sensibility and the audience's reason.
The idea for the film actually began when Buñuel was working as an assistant director for Jean Epstein in France. Buñuel told Dalí at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half "like a razor blade slicing through an eye". Dalí responded that he'd dreamed about a hand crawling with ants. They were fascinated by what the psyche could create, and decided to write a script based on the concept of suppressed human emotions.

Robin

by Noah Van Sciver.

Codex (1987)

Codex for seven dancers, a series of tableaux inspired by Luigi Serafini's illustrated encyclopaedia depicting imaginary plants and insects as well as numerous strange fantasy creatures. It was then filmed the following year by Philippe Decouffè. Decodex, conceived almost ten years later for 12 dancers, was a logical continuation of the idea created with his children in mind.



Codex was heavily reliant on costumes that at times swamped the dancers and turned them into pret a porteurs for the fabrics.

By Julie West.

American Falls (2008)

American Falls, is a looped 30-minute preview version of a larger, epic "cine-mural" that Phil Solomon is creating as an installation for the rotunda at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it will be shown in autumn 2009.



The mesmerizing American Falls employs Solomon's astonishing cinematic techniques to create an expressive, poetic vision of American history in constant motion. Solomon's project American Falls is ultimately one of great hope, stemming from a life-long love for this American experiment that seemed so vivid to him during his television-infused childhood; but it is also necessitated by his deepest concern for its present and future directions,

By Andrew Pope.

Girl from Moush (1994)

Girl From Moush look at the after-effects of genocide in Armenia and large-scale expulsion and murder in Asia Minor in the years after the First World War. It focuses on identity and how it is constructed in our global society. On camera, images move rapidly, often looking as though a strip of film is being pulled quickly through the projector. Multiple images appear as well.
This short marks the beginning of Gariné Torossian's investigation into visual approaches to an imaginary home country, offering a performative approach to memory, that requires the viewer to actively participate in the assimilation of the material presented, as fleeting and disparate as it is.



An English-speaking woman, who's off camera, talks about what it means to be an Armenian, even though she's never been in Armenia. Beginning with her own journey as a diasporanl Armenian born in Lebanon and raised in Canada, Torossian culls images from books, shot and recorded her own voice in an attempt to capture the schism between self and place in a world where the concept of native and migrant is always in flux.

Wonbyanose

By Julia Sonmi Heglund.

Call and Response (2007)

Call and Response is a short by visul artist Aaron Valdez.
This short define the fine line between catchy commercial jingles and mental paralysis.

1985 Garland, Texas

Esther Pearl Watson's pieces are often overtly narrative, clear but mysterious scenes of houses or figures ornamented with snippets of prose telling just enough to get the viewer's own imagination engaged, wanting to know more.

Body of War (2007)

Body of War is an intimate and transformational feature documentary about the true face of war today and Tomas' coming-home story as he evolves into a new person, coming to terms with his disability and finding his own unique, passionate voice against the war. He's only 25 years old, when he's paralyzed from a bullet to his spine, wounded after serving in Iraq for less than a week.
As he lay in his hospital bed, unable to move, Tomas learned of the countless injuries and deaths afflicting hundreds of thousands in Iraq. In the process, he became one of the nation's most ardent opponents of the Iraq invasion.



Body of War is a naked, honest portrayal of what it's like inside the body, heart, and soul of this extraordinary and heroic young man.
Unapologetically political, this intimate and heart wrenching profile of an Iraq veteran may be rough around the edges but takes a potent stance with determination and compassion.
The editing is sharp and potent. The music, especially the two new songs by Eddie Vedder, works in profound harmony with the powerful images on the screen.

Untitled

By Jenn Porreca.

Treevil (2002)

A weird short movie done in stop motion by three finnish authors: Christer Lindström, Aino Ovaskainen and Aiju Salminen, all students of the Arts Academy of Turku Polytechnic since the year 2000.



A woodsman goes to cut down some trees, but strange things start to happen, involving walking trees and giant were-rabbits.

1979 Semifinalist 5

By Kelly Aka.

La Chambre (1972)

Chantal Akerman reject classical conventions regarding space, time and place, preferring a narrative that is not stamped with a beginning or an end and using a rhythm created by long, fixed shots which denies edited cinematic language, to arrive at a cadence resembling real time, reflecting the real rhythm of the flow of things, of events and people
Like other avant-garde filmmakers of the period, Akerman foregrounds space and time to an unusual degree in her films of the ’70s. In La chambre, Akerman maps out a literal movement of encirclement completed once the pan reverses, as if the camera had demarcated the minimally essential space for the performance.



La Chambre 1 reveal structural filmmaking's influence through their usage of extended duration takes. These protracted shots serve to oscillate the films' images between abstraction and figuration.
The films eschew close-ups and shot/reverse-shot sequences in favor of long-shot framing and deep focus, in which most if not all of a person’s body is visible along with much of the surrounding environment; this forces the viewer to scan the space of the shot for relevant details of behavior and setting: fixed and extended shots combine with aleatory, unique events, setting structure against play, and bringing out a performance aspect that is basic to '70s aesthetics.
Symmetrical frame composition, with the camera placed at the same height perpendicular to the setting, creates a noticeable rectilinear patterning from shot to shot as well as a high degree of uniformity, sensitizing one to subtle changes over time.

1979 Semifinalist 4

By Kelly Aka.

Le Sang des bêtes (1949)

Blood of the Beasts is considered to be one of cinema’s purest achievements: an unflinching portrait of the bloody routine of butchery in a Paris slaughterhouse.
The documentary presents the gory, bloodstained reality of the slaughter of animals at the Abattoirs de La Villette in Paris. George Franju's film contrasts peaceful scenes of Parisian suburbia with scenes from a slaughterhouse. The film documents the slaughtering of a horse, sheep, and calves; once the horse is stunned by a pistol, it is bled and butchered. Disturbing in its honesty, it challenges a number of banal conceptions seemingly integral to everyday life.
There is not a single shot that does not move us, almost for no cause, through the sole beauty of the style, the great visual calligraphy.



Franju states that he wasn't interested on the subject of slaughterhouses when he decided to make the film, but the location around the building was the Ourcq Canal allowing him to make a documentary film. Franju stated by using a documentary film format, he was able to use both locations as lyical counterpoints and "to explain it as a realist while remaining a surrealist by displacing the object in another context. In this new setting, the object rediscovers it's quality as an object".

1979 Semifinalist 3

By Kelly Aka.

Scwechater (1958)

In 1957, Peter Kubelka was hired to make a short commercial for Scwechater beer. He shot his film with a camera that did not even have a viewer, simply pointing it in the general direction of the action. He then took many months to edit his footage, and finally he submitted a film, 90 seconds long, that featured extremely rapid cutting between images washed out almost to the point of abstraction of dimly visible people drinking beer and of the froth of beer seen in a fully abstract pattern.



Kubelka has taken Soviet montage one step further. While Eisenstein used shots as the basic units and edited them together in a pattern to make meanings, Kubelka has gone back to the individual still frame as the essence of cinema. The fact that a projected film consists of 24 still images per second serves as the basis of his art.
His films move with the rhapsody of precision. Nowhere else in cinema have I been so stuck to a sense of everything being just right. There are at present a multiplying number of films which use techniques similar to Kubelka's, and which attempt similar effects; but for all the experiment rampant now, his visions of absolute time transcend and show up all that is merely modern.

1979 Semifinalist 2

By Kelly Aka.