C'est toujours la même histoire (2007)

It’s Always the Same Story is a slight but charming teenaged anecdote, directed by Joris Clerté and Anne Morin, in which a Frenchman recalls sneaking off to see the steamy X-rated film Emmanuelle with a friend ... only to have his father take him to see the exact same film the very next day to teach him about “the facts of life.”
It made them both change one towards the other.

Oktapodi (2007)

Oktapodi is a computer-animated short film that originated as a Graduate Student Project from Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image. It was directed by Julien Bocabeille, François-Xavier Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier, and Emud Mokhberi.




Two octopuses fight for their lives with a stubborn restaurant cook in a comical escape through the streets of a small Greek village.

Lavatory Lovestory (2007)

Lavatory Lovestory is a delightful short film by Konstantin Eduardovich Bronzit. The film is a minimalist short about a lonely middle-aged public toilet attendant who sits in her little booth day after day, collecting coins from the lavatory users while she reads the newspaper and yearns for another man in her life, someone to love and hold her, fantasizing about the romantic lives that other people enjoy.



The story follows her angst and sadness, and her transformation into a happy and joyful human being. The unusual setting of a public toilet turns out to be surprisingly fitting, and make it slightly longer than conventional short films.

Panspermia (1990)

Panspermia is the name for the theory that life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores. This piece places the viewer in the middle of a virtual world of an aggressively reproducing inter-galactic life form, and depicts a single life cycle of this unusual self propagating system.

Karl Sims used an original software to create and animate forests of 3D plant structures. Artificial evolution techniques were used to interactively select from random mutations of plant shapes until a variety of interesting structures emerged. The subject matter of the piece suggests the underlying biological methods that were used to efficiently create an unusual level of complexity. Dynamic simulations and particle systems were also employed to achieve motions that are calculated automatically.

Dumbland (2002)

Dumbland details the daily routines of Ryan, a violent and foul-mouthed three-toothed man with a bulbous head, angry expression, and perpetually open mouth. The man lives in a house along with his hyperkinetic and high-stressed wife and squeaky voiced alien-like child, both of whom are nameless as is the man in the shows.
In this episode, Randy develops an interest in a neighbor's shed and proceeds to become verbally abusive towards the neighbor, which, meanwhile, reveals that he is a one-armed duck-fucker.



Dumbland is a series of eight crudely animated shorts written and directed by David Lynch.The style of the series is intentionally crude both in terms of presentation and content, with limited animation. The filmmaker describes it as "a crude, stupid, violent, absurd series."
You can download the first two episodes of Dumbland from Atom Films here.
More episodes are online at DavidLynch.com. To view them, you need to be a member of the site, or else you can buy Dumbland.

Arabesque (1975)

James Whitney' shorts are visually based on modernist composition theory with carefully varied permutation of forms manipulated with cut-out masks. He pursue technological, theoretical, mathematical, architectonic and musical ideas which eventually led him to his masterful pioneer work in computer graphics. Meanwhile, Whitney became increasingly involved in contemplative, spiritual interests.



With Arabesque, Whitney demonstrated the principle of harmonic progression, experimenting with the eccentricities of Islamic architecture, which, though ultimately harmonic, contain many characteristic reverse curves in its embellishments.

Biogenesis (1995)

William Latham is best known for his pioneering work in evolutionary art which he collaboratively produced with IBM UK between 1987 and 1993. Subsequently he worked in the computer games industry, exploring the use of artificial intelligence techniques. Now Latham has re-emerged into the public conscience with a return to his earlier evolutionary art
Biogenesis shows the evolution of artificial life forms in a synthetic universe where ‘survival of the fittest’ is replaced by ‘survival of the most aesthetic‘. We see cellular evolution and the replication of mutations forming chain-like structures resembling coral.



Survival of the most aesthetic in a synthetic digital universe of constantly evolving coral forms. From cell to psychedelic, this is DNA with attitude, and a reply to all those who did not think there could be life in the machine.
long synopsis
It can be viewed as a psychedelic experience or a more subtle parody of a man’s relationship with the natural world through modern technology.

Felix in Exile (1994)

Felix in Exile is the fifth of eight films that complete the Drawings for Projection series, on which William Kentridge worked from 1989 to 1999. All the films consist of 30 to 40 charcoal drawings, and they transport poetic and political stories. As a South African, Kentridge is very conscious of his country’s history and its colonial past.
This short tells the stories of Felix, a man living in exile in Paris, and of Nandi, a woman working as a land surveyor. The woman is Felix’s alter ego. She stands for the longing for one’s homeland, and how for his sake someone bears witness to the incidents in the new, democratic South Africa.



Fundamental is the concepts of time and change. Kentridge conveys it through his erasure technique, which contrasts with conventional cel-shaded animation, whose seamlessness de-emphasizes the fact that it is actually a succession of hand-drawn images. This he implements by drawing a key frame, erasing certain areas of it, re-drawing them and thus creating the next frame. He is able in this way to create as many frames as he wants based on the original key frame simply by erasing small sections. Traces of what has been erased are still visible to the viewer: as the films unfold, a sense of fading memory or the passing of time and the traces it leaves behind are portrayed.
In the same way that there is a human act of dismembering the past there is a natural process in the terrain through erosion, growth, dilapidation that also seeks to blot out events. In South Africa this process has other dimensions. The term New South Africa has within it the idea of a painting over the old, the natural process of dismembering, the naturalization of things new.

Felix in Exile (1994)

Felix in Exile is the fifth of eight films that complete the Drawings for Projection series, on which William Kentridge worked from 1989 to 1999. All the films consist of 30 to 40 charcoal drawings, and they transport poetic and political stories. As a South African, Kentridge is very conscious of his country’s history and its colonial past.
This short tells the stories of Felix, a man living in exile in Paris, and of Nandi, a woman working as a land surveyor. The woman is Felix’s alter ego. She stands for the longing for one’s homeland, and how for his sake someone bears witness to the incidents in the new, democratic South Africa.



Fundamental is the concepts of time and change. Kentridge conveys it through his erasure technique, which contrasts with conventional cel-shaded animation, whose seamlessness de-emphasizes the fact that it is actually a succession of hand-drawn images. This he implements by drawing a key frame, erasing certain areas of it, re-drawing them and thus creating the next frame. He is able in this way to create as many frames as he wants based on the original key frame simply by erasing small sections. Traces of what has been erased are still visible to the viewer: as the films unfold, a sense of fading memory or the passing of time and the traces it leaves behind are portrayed.
In the same way that there is a human act of dismembering the past there is a natural process in the terrain through erosion, growth, dilapidation that also seeks to blot out events. In South Africa this process has other dimensions. The very term 'new South Africa' has within it the idea of a painting over the old, the natural process of dismembering, the naturalization of things new.

Pixillation (1970)

Lillian Schwartz is an artist, filmmaker, art historian, researcher and theorist. She was involved with the seminal Experiments in Art and Technology group in 1968, which led to her computer-based sculpture Proxima Centauri being selected for the Museum of Modern Art.




With computer-produced images and Moog-synthesized sound Pixillation is in a sense an introduction to the electronics lab. But its forms are always handsome, its colors bright and appealing, its rhythms complex and inventive.

I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986)

In I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much, Pipilotti Rist dances before a camera in a black dress with uncovered breasts. The images are often monochromatic and fuzzy. Rists repeatedly sings I'm not the girl who misses much, a reference to the first line of the song Happiness Is a Warm Gun by the Beatles. As the video approaches its end, the image becomes increasingly blue and fuzzy and the sound stops.



Rist's classic video takes on rock music with its own tools, pushing pop's repetitive strategies and representations of women to absurd lengths. Rist's manipulation renders her voice into a parody of female hysteria and her body into a grotesquely dancing doll. Through obsessive mimesis Rist exhausts any possible legibility of the words, only to finally deliver John Lennon singing the real song.

Measures of Distance (1998)

Measures of Distances


In this video, letters from her mother in Beirut, written in Arabic, move across the screen. They are read aloud, in English, by the artist. Hatoum's mother is also heard, speaking openly about her feelings and sexuality, accompanied by images of her in the shower.



The video could be seen as a continuation of Mona Hatoum's earlier performance work: it represented a contrast between youth and age, between closeness and separation, homeland and exile.
Measuring a multitude of distances/oppositions or differences between home and exile, writing and reading, reading and translating, mother and daughter, autobiography and artistic invention, she creates a visual montage reflecting her feelings of separation and isolation from her Palestinian family. Emotional distance is measured by the separation of loved ones as surrounding space, emotional and physical, is overtaken by advancing war with its fissures, ruptures and violent breaks between family members.



The personal and political are inextricably bound in a narrative that explores personal and family identity against a backdrop of traumatic social rupture

Cornered (1988)

Adrian Piper produces disturbingly intimate psychological theater aimed at the racial anxieties of an art-world audience more or less tacitly taken to be white and liberal.
Combining Minimalism, Conceptualism and Performance Art, she has worked since about 1970 to force viewers into an unbearable awareness of their personal complicity in what she views as a pervasively racist, xenophobic and unjust system.



In Cornered consists of a video located in the corner of a room. In front of the monitor is a long table resting on its side. With its legs pointing out from the corner, it functions as a barrier.
Piper herself sits demurely at a desk backed into a corner and explains with unflappable, schoolmarmish composure that most Americans are, like her, genetically black, even if their physical appearance seems to say otherwise. The artist’s monologue, delivered in an intimate, personal style presents the viewer with a master lesson in logic.



She also provocatively suggests that such attitudes and behavior actually create race as a perceptual category and that that category, however illusory, reinforces hierarchies of socioeconomic power and exclusion.

Non - Specific Treat (2004)

Our desire to recognize and scrutinize the face of evil is framed by our experience of how different governments and the media have historically represented and continue to define the terrorist. Such attempts to locate and understand a threat or an enemy necessitate the creation of a character who is beyond reason, outside of civilized society and who becomes known to us as a fusion of real and fictional figures.
The figure is a young man with a shaved head wearing a black open-neck shirt, denim jacket, and silver chain around his neck. He is presented as a "non-specific threat," a gangster in a very lonely, someone who would seem or might be perceived to have no scruples about clearing the way for himself.



Willie Doherty moves the camera in a circular tracking shot around a tough looking baldheaded man with a gold chain around his neck and a denim jacket. As the camera tracks slowly around this threatening presence a male voiceover, disembodied from the central figure, makes a series of cryptic statements punctuated by pregnant pauses and he expresses explicit and veiled threats and attempts to describe the nature of his relationship to the viewer.
A group of large-scale photographs depict a young man in a variety of nondescript urban settings by day and by night. He emerges from dark alleyways and stands defiantly at street corners. The camera circles around the figure in a continuous pan so that we see every aspect of his head and shoulders front to back, back to front, and the background changes.

Jimmy the C (1977)

A claymation President Jimmy Carter, backed by a chorus line of leggy Mr. Peanuts, is the visual of Ray Charles' voice singing Georgia on My Mind.
The song by itself is wonderful just as straight audio. But the fun with using Jimmy Carter as a foil doesn't take anything from that. It's the gut punch of juxtaposition that makes it work so well.



Jimmy Picker has uploaded more of his animation to his YouTube channel at jimmypicker.

It Wasn't Love (1992)

This is a fractured tale of a love affair that is both heartfelt and tongue in cheek funny. Sadie Benning herself poses as various types of stereotypical masculinity and femininity: the rebel, the vamp, the biker, the bimbo. She also reveals the frustration of her position as a teenage lesbian growing up in Middle America.




This video ends on a far more positive note than many of her other films especially in terms of gaining access to an inner sense of power and autonomy rather than continuing to rely on media images and her imagination. Benning plays wonderfully with shadows and music.
Love is associated with danger and rebellion, opening up possibilities of adventure and self-discovery while reversing the ending of the traditional heterosexual romance that concludes with the submersion of the heroine's identity beneath the all-encompassing categories of wife and mother.



All the video centers on the narrator's construction of a series of imaginative roles and scenarios that enable her to act out her rebellion and defiance while reflecting her desire for autonomy, respect, and power. There is an imaginative envisioning of what it is like to have individual power and autonomy, a power that commands respect and awe in the onlooker.

Head (1993)

Cheryl Donegan ushered in a new era of brash, low-tech performance video. Here she confronts sex, fantasy, and voyeurism in an autoerotic work out performed to pop music, and provides a perfectly choreographed simulation of desire.
The piece is incredibly direct. A woman approaches a green plastic bottle with a plugged spout sticking out from one side. She pulls the plug free, and a white milkish fluid begins to stream through the hole. So she starts to suck at the hole, lick around it. Lick the bottle up and down.



In this image of sexual pleasure and fantasy, Donegan is both subject and object, directing the action and performing for the camera without acknowledging its presence. The role she plays mimics that of a sex industry worker, whose choreographed purr and bounce fake you into believing that what she does feels good.
Donegan studies what pleasure looks like and with Head she delineates just how scripted sex may have become, and how far many of us have traveled from real taste and touch. Head is what pleasure looks like when it turns into illusion.
She also forces us to confront the essential ruse of pornographic imagery: all those women we saw live on celluloid exhibiting insatiable hunger and receptiveness. And they always loved it, always asked for more.

Inseln

By Goran Gnaudschun.

The Reflecting Pool (1977)

All movement and change in an otherwise still scene is confined to the reflections on the surface of a pool in the woods. The camera angle of this film never moves. The camera is positioned in the same place for the entirety of the piece, starting from the woods and ending in the woods. Suspended in time, a man hovers in a frozen, midair leap over the water, as subtle techniques of still-framing and multiple keying join disparate layers of time into a single coherent image.



All Bill Viola's pieces concern the emergence of the individual into the natural world like a sort of of baptism. The water is a symbol of life and at the same time an important element in almost all his works. His unbroken reference water also stems from the fact that for decades now, he has drawn inspiration from Taoism, Buddhism and from Greek philosophers.
According to Viola, we cannot grasp our material world with our eyes, because no clear distinction can be made between reality and illusion. Our true identity, as Viola believes, is only visible when it is reflected.
Birth and death, our perception of time and its dissolution, consciousness, conscience and memory.

Fimage

Larry Vogel has been involved in photography since 1976 and in recent years has become a multi-talented artist using several mediums to pursue and express his creative explorations, including, photography, ceramics, painting and sculpture.

Private Hungary 1 (1988)

Private Hungary comprises more than 300 hours of home movies and an additional forty hours of interviews with the relatives of the amateur filmmakers who shot the footage.
Peter Forgacs places the original footage in context with images connoting great history and its universally recognizable political and public events. This montage interconnects great and small histories, often based on contrast or on parallel. He uses these devices in order to show both sides of a historical period, or at times simply only the down side, at the same time making the viewer more sensitive to the given period.
For most of the films, Forgacs collaborated with Hungarian minimalist composer Tibor Szemzõ.
His work with music, as well as the archive footage itself lends the footage a sense of urgency it lacked at the time it was filmed.



The first episode of the Private Hungary series tells the Bartos family Saga: a talented amateur filmmaker Zoltán Bartos, a chanson composer and lumber businessman made more than five hours of 9,5m amateur film from the late twenties until the mid sixties. In 1944 the Hungarian “Quisling government” plundered the half Jewish Bartos family. Following the Nazi period, surviving the war in a Forced Jewish Labor unite, Zoltán divorced and remarry. Later the Communists rage the Hungarian citizen's life; in 1949 his plant was nationalized and lost everything again, except his humor.

Awesome Storm Justice 41

You can continue to read it.

Writing: Stephen Offenheim (Ugga Bugga)
Pencils: Todd Diamond (PencilPunx)
Inks: Norman Hardy (Popninja)
Colors: Jorge Rodrigo (KaRzA)
Letters: Amadarwin

Cover pencils and inks: OJH
Cover colors: Garry Henderson ( Mudcat)

Editors: Stephen Offenheim (Ugga Bugga), Dawnsknight and Amadarwin

Three Transitions (1973)

Peter Campus' early work engaged his interest in the psychology and the physiology of perception, and was informed by the Minimalist aesthetic of the late sixties and early seventies. Especially, his video art is concerned with exploring the subtle balance between remote but penetrating and formal, but unsettling, elements.
One of his most important single-channel works is Three Transitions in which he uses chromakey processors and video mixers to create videos in the studio. This video engages this new method of perceiving oneself, Campus is watching himself live as he goes through the motions for the camera.



In three short exercises, Campus uses basic techniques of video technology and his own image to create succinct, almost philosophical metaphors for the psychology of the self. In these concise performances, he presents three introspective self-portraits that incorporate his dry humor. As Three Transitions moves between deadpan humor and seeming self–destruction, Campus explores the limits of visual perception as a measure of reality.
In each episode, Campus displaces an image of himself and eventually eradicates it. Three Transitions deals with duality in an ironic way, also with the video space made with this technological tool. The question of self is important, as the performer tries to expose the illusions the artist has set up.
Campus employs video's inherent properties as a metaphorical vehicle for articulating transformations of internal and external selves, illusion and reality. The tape's precise formalism and simplicity of execution advance the psychological wit and symbolic content.

Extrinsic

By Rebekah Bogard.

Shoot (1971)

Chris Burden's reputation as a performance artist started to grow in the early 1970s after he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. Burden subjected himself to danger, thereby creating a double bind, for viewers, between the citizenly injunction to intervene in crises and the institutional taboo against touching art works.



His most well-known act is the performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters.
Many interpretations have been made regarding this piece. Many saw it as a statement about both the war in Vietnam and the American right to bear arms. Films like Full Metal Jacket or Bultets over Broadway exerted a significant influence on the daring of Burden's experimental piece.

Yabilarki

By Clive Barker.

Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978)

Dara Birnbaum is an American video artist who is perhaps most famous for her provocative and influential contributions to the contemporary discourse on art and popular culture.
Recognized as one of the first video artists to employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy, Birnbaum recontextualizes pop cultural icons and TV genres to reveal their subtexts. Birnbaum describes her tapes as new ready-mades for the late 20th century.



Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moments of the real womans transformation into superhero. In doing so, Birnabaum is subverting its meaning within the television context. She condenses the comic-book narrative distilling its essence to allow the subtext to emerge.
A stutter-step progression of extended moments unmasks the technological miracle of Wonder Woman's transformation, playing psychological transformation off of television product. Birnbaum considers this tape an altered state which renders the viewer capable of re-examining those looks which, on the surface, seem so banal that even the supernatural transformation of a secretary into a Wonder Woman is reduced to a burst of blinding light and a turn of the body.

Talkdemonic

By Tyler Stout.

Gestures (1974)

Although best known as a photographer and a performance artist, Hannah Wilkebegan her career as a sculptor working in ceramics, a practice that was the foundation for all other aspects of her artistic practice.
Gestures traces the ways in which the artist’s expanded notion of sculpture threads through diverse aspects of her body of work.



The exhibition will begin with a focused look at Hannah Wilke’s early sculpture and include, as examples, her early box sculptures and the gestural objects.
The show will then consider the way in which Wilke’s complex conception of sculpture fed the development of her living sculptures, video, and performance art.

Puzzled

Omaha Perez has collaborated with numerous writers including Richard Hell, Robert Hunter and Steve Niles.
In the mid-nineties Omaha was known for such indie comics as Raw Periphery, Shock The Monkey and Prey for us Sinners.
The Society of Illustrators New York, the Society of Illustrators Los Angeles, and the Spectrum illustration annual have recognized Omaha’s work.

A Buck's Worth

This short is based on the short stories of Edgar Keret. The story is essential in his structure: gun in hand, a homeless man requests a dollar. It was used as proof of concept for the feature film $9.99.



Using refined stop-motion techniques, Tatia Rosenthal orchestrates an existential drama of interlinking and parallel stories, able to make the spectator forget the characters are puppets, creating emotions as if they were flesh and blood actors.

Connect

By Monty Tran.

Perfect Leader (1983)

The first in a series of social satire pieces, a powerful computer creates the perfect political candidate and, in the process, director Max Almy presents an alternative take on political image making and marketing. This topic is worked through via a combination of live action, audio and video special effects, an original soundtrack, and a heavy dose of omnipotent computer animation.



Perfect Leader shows that ideology is the product and power is the payoff. The process of political imagemaking and the marketing of a candidate is revealed, as an omnipotent computer manufactures the perfect candidate, offering up three political types: Mr. Nice Guy, an evangelist, and an Orwellian Big Brother. Behind the candidates, symbols of political promises quickly degenerate into icons of oppression and nuclear war.

Mondo Mecho

You can continue to read Mondo Mecho. It's by Jesper Nordqvist.

David Holzman's Diary (1967)

David Holzman's Diary is a film which spoofs the art of documentary-making. It tells the story of a young man making a documentary of his life, who discovers something important about himself while making the movie.
Newly unemployed and beset with doubts and worries, Holzman thinks that filming his everyday existence will bring life into focus. Staged to seem like a documentary of a real person's life, Holzman’s filming of his life starts to take over his life.



Brilliantly conceived and executed by Jim McBride, it manages to simultaneously be very much of its time and very many years ahead of its time.
Amid the free-flowing, episodic structure of this rather scratchy and low-key movie, there are some arresting moments. On the surface it looks like a verity film and it does include spontaneous scenes like the one where a transsexual pulls up the car and starts talking to a non-diegetic cameraman.

Fronde

By Marco Milone.

Mongoloid (1978)

Mongoloid is a prime example of music video, in which various black and white film clips containing anything from educational films to old commercials are spliced together and set to the old Devo song, Mongoloid. It was not actually made by the band, but by experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner. He combined 1950s television advertisements, science fiction film clips, and scientific documentaries with abstract animation and original film work.



It's a documentary film exploring the manner in which a determined young man overcame a basic mental defect and became a useful member of society. Insightful editing techniques reveal the dreams, ideals and problems that face a large segment of the American male population.
You can buy Two Films by Bruce Conner.

Seasick

By Jeff Canham.

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, (1968)

Paul Jeffrey Sharits was a visual artist, best known for his work in avant-garde filmmaking, particularly what became known as the Structural film movement, along with artists such as Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow.
Trained as a graphic artist and a painter, he became a noted avant-garde filmmaker noted for manipulating the film stock itself to create a variety of fascinating, abstract light and colorplays when projected on the screen.



There are moments in cinematic art when the narrative of the film is subjectively implied and subsequently written by the viewer. while this is common to most structural and lyrical films in the experimental genre, none hits louder than T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G,. an angry and demonic piece that simultaneously lulls you into awareness and hypnotizes you into an emotive overload.

Flipside

By Brion Foulke. You can continue to read Flipside.

Ventura (2001)

Stuart Pound has a background in film-making and computing, and digital video brought the two together. Over the past 12 years he has collaborated with the poet Rosemary Norman on a number of videos.



An experiment in personal history.The footage was shot in the London Docklands. But who is the speaker who was told that he was english? Was his mother really born in California? What was her connection with Ireland and Germany, if any? And what does the sculpture ‘black form’, in a park in Hamburg, have to do with it?

Unused

By Michael Le Forge.

Time/Temperature (1973)

John Baldessari's works often attempt to point out irony in contemporary art theory and practices or reduce it to absurdity. His videos have been featured in more than 120 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.



The artist as shaman or alchemist proves to be a tedious fraud. In Time/Temperature a small hourglass and thermometer measure properties that are otherwise invisible. Like the camera, these are indexical instruments, but where the camera would ordinarily be taken for granted, these devices seem self-evident.

Posse

By Red Labor.

The Cool World (1964)

The Cool World is about life in the African-American ghetto in the early 1960s. A black teenager robs, brawls, and peddles dope on the mean streets of Harlem, dreaming of walking tall with his gang, the Royal Pythons, and his idol, a hipster-pusher named Priest.
There is a clearly patent allegory of an attempt to attain manhood and identity in the only way accessible to him - the antisocial one: the desperate meaning of segregation that will not easily be erased even if every civil rights battle is won for the next ten years…



The Cool World is the first film about Harlem that was actually shot in Harlem. Shilrley Clarke's film is a landmark of American independent cinema for its blending storytelling with documentary-style location shooting. Hanging the camera from the ceiling provides a very personal experience for the viewer. Dark yellow hued interior scenes capture the true feeling of the dwellings of the gang members.
Clarke looks at the horrors of Harlem ghetto slum life filled with drugs, violence, human misery, and a sense of despair due to the racial prejudices of American society.
Armed with the eye of an Italian neo-realist, Clarke stand as benchmarks of the American new wave, exploring the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Clarke's lens was more than a recording device: it was a provocateur exploring the cinematic bond between actor, filmmaker and viewer.

Tommy Atomic 5

By Ryan Dunlavey.

Now (1965)

Santiago Alvarez fired off 'Now!', one of the most powerful bursts of propaganda rendered in the 1960s. He used a song by Lena Horne that was banned in America but that Horne gave Alvarez to use in the film. Using mostly photographs clipped from American magazines such as Life, Álvarez creates a dynamic montage of images in juxtaposition with the lyrics of Now.
Not intended as a work of great subtlety, Alvarez wields other people's images with perhaps more artistry than those who created them, and builds a remarkable piece of rhetorical cinema in the process.



The result is a highly emotional commentary on racism, using mostly pirated newsreel images, which synthesises music and visuals with astonishing precision.
Álvarez was almost certainly influenced by the photomontages of the German communist John Heartfield from the 1920’s and 1930s, but the only film collage work of a marginally left political nature that pre dates Now is that done in Northern California by Bruce Conner and Bruce Baillie.

Tommy Atomic 4

By Ryan Dunlavey.

Sunstone (1979)

As both an artist and a teacher, Emshwiller's pioneering efforts to develop an alternative technological language in video were enormously influential. His early experiments with synthesizers and computers included the electronic rendering of three-dimensional space, the interplay of illusion and reality, and manipulations of time, movement, and scale that explore the relationship between "external reality and subjective feelings.



Sunstone is a landmark tape. Symbolic and poetic, it is a pivotal work in the development of an electronic language to articulate three-dimensional space. The opening image is an iconic face, which appears to be electronically carved' from stone. A mystical third eye, brilliantly crafted from a digital palette, radiates with vibrant transformations of color and texture.
Emshwiller's humanistic approach to technology ushered in the 1980s with a new electronic vocabulary for conceptualizing and visualizing images in space and time has been amazing.

Tommy Atomic 3

By Ryan Dunlavey.

Heuschrecken (1969)

Heuschrecken is the first real video installation made by Wolf Vostell .
Two photos confront each other on a large screen: on the left, a lesbian couple making love, on the right a newspaper photo of Russian tanks rolling into Prague. The two topical subjects are juxtaposed as antitheses. Arranged above the photos are signs from a meteorological chart of the USA, below them a row of 20 monitors that show the face of any entering visitors who happens to fall within the video camera's field of view. On the floor is tar with residues of hair, shoes, bones.



Vostell's works were always critical of society. He tried to detach himself from the stigma of the artist as the suffering individual. As he considered art and life to be equal, he thought artists had to take joint responsibility for history.
His starting-paint was his theory of De-coll/age, which stands for an omnipresent process of decomposition and wear. This conception covers all destructive action. In his oeuvre he used destructive techniques and showed objects or concepts torn out of context in a new framework. He wanted to confront his public with fear, destruction and human distress, to achieve a therapeutical effect.

Tommy Atomic 2

By Ryan Dunlavey.

La Salla

Richard Condie’s unique creatures, motifs, sounds and situations have astonished and delighted audiences and critics around the world for over a quarter of a century. A brilliant animator, he has created a place like none other, filled with apprentices perpetually running into trees, squabbling Scrabble-playing couples, pig birds unleashing strange bugs on Canada, procrastinating pianists and headless boys who are heedless of risk, until it’s too late.

Here, Condie shifts from cell animation to computer-generated animation. Condie calls it “computer animation in opera form. Condie says the film resonates with his temptation to fiddle with the countless options available in computer animation.



In La Salla, the classic tale of temptation is revealed to us in the unique form of a comic opera. We are taken into the world of a character who does as he pleases, mindless of the consequences. In a room full of wind-up toys, he sets a chain of events into motion that ends up disturbing both his own, and the viewer's, sense of reality. Sitting alone in a playroom, our hero is intermittently disturbed by a spectral visitor who holds an apple out to him. When temptation gets the better of him, he is left to suffer the consequences.
Despite the head’s frantic expressions, his torso lights a cannon, rocketing a tiny cow smack in his direction. Nearly frozen with anxiety, the head considers the devastating result, then sings the aria, “Moments ago, I had everything. Now, I have a cow in my nose.”

Tommy Atomic 1

By Ryan Dunlavey.

The Great Cognito (1982)

The Great Cognito was the man of a thousand faces, whose vocal impersonations of people were matched by his face transforming into that person as well. He uses a metamorphosing, magical transforming technique as he performs his one-man comedy routine, all while impersonating a cast of thousands as the Generals MacArthur, Patton and Rommel, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Wayne, whose death scene forces the Great Cognito to leave the stage.



Will Vinton’s character animation milestones and pioneering productions have contributed immensely to animation history and he has helped launch the careers of countless other filmmakers in 3D animation productions.
It was the first time the studio produced a caricature of an actual person, but its success ensured it would go on to become yet another one of Vinton's specialties. In years to come the studio would animate everything from Bruce Willis as a frog to Michael Jackson as a raisin, but it found the perfect vehicle for displaying this aspect of its repertoire in its next short film.

1

By Marco Milone.

Undersirable Elements (1992)

Undersirable Elements is an on-going series of community-specific works by Ping Chong exploring the effects of history, culture and ethnicity on the lives of individuals in a community. The piece is made through a collaborative workshop process involving Ping Chong and a group of individuals who vary in many ways but share the common experience of having been born in one culture and now being part of another.



Undersirable Elements draws its power from the simple act of naming oneself in public. On one level, Undersirable Elements is an emotionally charged challenge to traditional views of culture and the other; on another level, it is a lyrical expression of the astonishing fact of human similarity, difference and indomitability. Since each individual's experience encompasses that of his or her ancestors and culture, the piece is a journey through the turbulent history of the 20th century from a global perspective.

Boy on Turtle

Kei Acedera, Imaginism Studios (c) 2006.

Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979)

Meetings with Remarkable Men is the second volume of the All and Everything trilogy written by the Greek-Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. A book of autobiography, it was originally published in 1963 and tells the tale of the young Gurdjieff growing up in a world torn between his unexplainable experiences and the developing modern sciences.
The book was made into a 1979 feature film directed by Peter Brook. Shot on location in Afghanistan, it starred Terence Stamp, and Dragan Maksimovic as the adult Gurdjieff.
The "plot" involves Gurdjieff and his his travels to achieve enlightenment and inner growth in a series of dialogues and vignettes. Beginning with his childhood, the movie follows his journeys through Central Asia as he discovers new levels of spirituality through music, dance and near-encounters with death.
Brook simply leaps from one portentous episode to the next, with an abruptness that will either leave viewers bewildered or send them back to Gurdjieff's own writings, depending upon the extent of their interest.
The film is noteworthy for making public some glimpses of the "Gurdjieff movements".



During his long career, director Peter Brook has conducted a wide range of theatrical experiments, pushing audiences and performers well beyond their typical experience of theater, in an effort to achieve not a temporary catharsis but a transcendent, transformative event. Driven by a sense of unwavering dedication to unraveling the meaning of human existence, he journeys throughout the most unattainable areas of the East, encountering an array of Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, whirling dervishes, and gurus of every stripe.
In search of truth, he climbs the Himalayas, walks across the desert on stilts, and uncovers evidence of an ancient order, guards of an arcane wisdom. Most fascinating, perhaps, is the form of dance he created as a form of meditation and later taught in the West.
You can buy Meetings with Remarkable Men.

Empathy

By Thomas Erpich. He's an illustrator and an animator who's done work for Bill Plympton and Spumco, among others. He's also the author of Gongwanadon and Cusp.

Fausto 5.0 (2001)

La Fura dels Baus is a Catalan theatrical group founded in 1979 in Barcelona known for their urban theatre, use of unusual settings and blurring of the boundaries separating audience and actor.
Goethe's classic 'Faust' has been one of la Fura del Baus' obsessions for many years. In this very personal screen version, we find a modern Faust with very human contractions; there's no devil here but only an accurate representation of a two faced character, a very human side which probably lives inside of all of us.
Using the Faust story as a jumping off point, Fausto 5.0 turns out to be more interested in the set designer's vision of an apocalyptic cyberpunk cityscape than in Faust's psychological state.






Fausto is an earnest sombre doctor working with terminally ill patients. He travels to Barcelona for a conference on caring for the terminally ill. Once he arrives there he is met at the station by Santos, a former patient whose stomach he removed, who ends up showing him to his hotel. Once he is there a woman turns up to have sex with him and Santos turns up in his room for breakfast. Hounded by Santos, the doctor asks him to stay away but after Santos seems to grant a wish of remission for one of his patients he gets drunk with him and lets him know his darkest wishes. Will his wishes lead him to his downfall or to his heart’s desire?
The main centre of the film is the doctor’s descent into his desires.
The dark mise en scène reminds us of the claustrophobic and nightmaresque atmospheres created by David Lynch and works perfectly to recreate the duality of this character, whose actions represent the fight between heart and mind, the good and the bad.
You can buy Fausto 5.0.

Ratti

Paolo Parisi is the author of Ratti, Fame, Gli ultimi giorni del Pitbull, Chernobyl – Di cosa sono fatte le nuvole, Il caso Moro and Le cose nascoste.

The Far Side of the Moon (2004)

The Far Side of the Moon is a fantastical voyage into space - outer space, and the space within ourselves. The film is set in the context of the USSR-United States Space Race of the 1960s. The leading characters are the brothers André and Philippe, both played by Robert Lepage.
The script has been written with a clear ear for naturalistic rhythms, but is not limited in the richness or depth of its content. Lepage takes a relatively simple set of reference points and constructs an insightful and moving drama around them, and though the metaphoric linkages between them are far from subtle, they work.



Robert Lepage's glorious investigation of the limits of human perception uses dazzling technical wizardry to tell two stories - the public history of the space race, and the private story of two brothers coming to terms with a personal loss.
After the death of his mother, a man tries to discover a meaning to his life, to the universe and to rebuild a relationship with the only family he has left: his brother.
Poignant, funny, endlessly inventive on a technical level, The Far Side of the Moon is an affecting study of human emotions grounded in a world filled with frustrated aspiration.
You can buy Far Side of the Moon.

New Freelance Piece

By DanielKrall.

The Emperor Jones

The Emperor Jones is a play by Eugene O'Neill which tells the tale of Brutus Jones, an African-American man who kills a man, goes to prison, escapes to a Caribbean island, and sets himself up as emperor. The play recounts his story in flashbacks as Brutus makes his way through the forest in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.
An experimental video by Christopher Kondek and Elizabeth LeCompte showcases the production of the play by the New York-based performance troupe The Wooster Group, starring Kate Valk and Willem Dafoe.



Voice and movement predominate, bringing the expressionism of the play to a new level. These two figures are specific about their stances, poses, and movement patterns, throughout the stage space, both individually, and in relation to one another.
It is astonishing how a two-character play with an essentially bare stage and few props can produce such a concentrated effect. The flickering TV screen, unique projecting of voices, gamelan, gongs, ticking clock, and embroidered materials of the costumes, work mysteriously with the three performers to create a ritualistic drama that haunts its audience.
You can buy The Wooster Group Work Book

Something Fishy!

By Michael Wandelmaier.