The Sacred Art of Tibet

An accurate depiction of the basic tenets of northern Mahayana Buddhism, cast into living or "experiential" form, consistent with powerful mantras heard on the soundtrack of the film. Tarthang Tulku, a Tibetan Lama, was the advisor.

Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America

Baldwin’s “pseudo-pseudo-documentary” presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.

Animal Charm: Golden Digest

Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature" and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.

Between Science and Garbage

A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.

Behind a Hill

This documentary is a journey into our own fascination, a collection of portraits of folk musicians living in New England, and a study of the ground on which their music is founded. We listen to them as they tell their stories and play their music. First and foremost, Behind a Hill is a tribute to these musicians and a rare peep into the house parties and basement jams of New England, in the northwestern corner of the USA, with the vain hope attached that maybe you, the viewer, will grow as fond of the music as we have. When we first encountered these musicians, we were overwhelmed by the quality of their musical output. We were entranced by the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and tempos and every other element that constitutes a song (or, as is often the case, a piece of abstract drone music, heavy feedback, or someone banging a steel pipe against a bag of dirt while chanting in a yet undiscovered language, or...).

Selbstportrait 1

Chance Encounters With Oxygen

A psychedelic, avant-garde collage film designed to accompany PRPL PPL's experimental album of the same name.

Urgent ou à quoi bon exécuter des projets puisque le projet est en lui-même une jouissance suffisante

Gérard Courant applies the Lettrist editing techniques of Isidore Isou to footage of late 70's pop culture. Courant posits that his cinema offers an aggressive détournement to the French mainstream, reifying a Duchampian view of film: "I believe in impossible movies and works without meaning... I believe in the anti-movie. I believe in the non-movie. I believe in Urgent... My first full length movie that is so anti-everything that I sometimes wonder if it really does exist!"

Black Hole Radio

Black Hole Radio is an installation that consists of taped confessions of callers of the New York City Phone Confession Line and video images. The Phone Confession Line is based on anonymous callers ringing to confess on things they had done or thought like adultery, theft, murder or regrets. Thereafter anybody could call and listen to the confessions. Although making a confession was free, listening to a confession costs money. After Cohen got his hands on the confessions, he used them as an audio heartbeat to accompany video-images of every day life in New York City he had taken over the years. This installation is a portrait of the city with its dark secrets, hushed voices and nocturnal images. In this way Cohen tries to bring across an experience to the viewer that relies on absence, waiting and the effort to hear something in the dark.

橋の下から

In this tape, Ko Nakajima and Video Earth Tokyo interview a homeless man. The subject is initially angry and frustrated, but gradually opens up and shares stories about his life. Under A Bridge was later broadcast on cable television.

Sylvia Kristel – Paris

Sylvia Kristel – Paris is a portrait of Sylvia Kristel , best known for her role in the 1970’s erotic cult classic Emmanuelle, as well as a film about the impossibility of memory in relation to biography. Between November 2000 and June 2002 Manon de Boer recorded the stories and memories of Kristel. At each recording session she asked her to speak about a city where Kristel has lived: Paris, Los Angeles, Brussels or Amsterdam; over the two years she spoke on several occasions about the same city. At first glance the collection of stories appears to make up a sort of biography, but over time it shows the impossibility of biography: the impossibility of ‘plotting’ somebody’s life as a coherent narrative.

King of the Jews

King of the Jews is a film about anti-Semitism and transcendence. Utilizing Hollywood movies, 1950's educational films, personal home movies and religious films, the filmmaker depicts his childhood fear of Jesus Christ. These childhood recollections are a point of departure for larger issues such as the roots of Christian anti-Semitism.

Short of Breath

A woman is reduced to tears. She bends over backwards trying to be a good wife and mother. Her head is cut off from her heart. A doctor picks her brain. A boy inherits his mother's depression. Short of Breath is a haunting, emotional collage about birth, death, sex and suicide. It's like a punch in the stomach.

You Will See Me

A five-channel video installation commissioned for the permanent exhibition space at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI). “The camera doesn’t just capture us, it frames who we are and how we’re seen. Since the camera became more accessible in the mid-20th century, artists and amateurs alike have turned the lens on themselves to create a stage both private and public. This tradition is continued, amplified and transformed through reality TV, the internet and social media, the latest forms to use straight-to-camera techniques to share our common humanity, project authenticity and illuminate how a sense of self can be constructed through the moving image.”

Collage

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.

Global Groove

Global Groove was a collaborative piece by Nam June Paik and John Godfrey. Paik, amongst other artists who shared the same vision in the 1960s, saw the potential in the television beyond it being a one-sided medium to present programs and commercials. Instead, he saw it more as a place to facilitate a free flow of information exchange. He wanted to strip away the limitations from copyright system and network restrictions and bring in a new TV culture where information could be accessed inexpensively and conveniently. The full length of the piece ran 28 minutes and was first broadcasted in January 30, 1974 on WNET.

Anamorphosis

The Quays' interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed from different angles, mischievously revealed hidden symbols.

Dance Fight Love Die: With Mikis On the Road

An intimate look into the life of composer Mikis Theodorakis from 1987 until 2017: comprising three decades, four continents, 100 locations and 600 hours of film material. The film interweaves personal moments with archive footage, documentary recordings and fictional pieces, all accompanied by Theodorakis’ music in jazz, classic, electro and rap versions.

Portrait de ma mère poète

Intimate portrait of Marie-Jo Gobron, belgian poet and the director's mother. 20 years after the release of a film about his father's paintings, the filmmaker continues the description of the artistic universe of his parents. Born in 1916 in Flanders near the French border, Marie-Jo writes mostly in French. Aged 85, she starts an autobiographical novel about her youth, its many events, and about her daring emancipation in art and love, which she confides here.

EMPATHY (a digital love letter)

EMPATHY (a digital love letter) is a short essay documentary, a heartbreaking comedy about a break-up, an attempt to concretize emotion and evoke empathy from a writer’s approach. After getting her heart crushed in a relationship, a woman writes a letter to the man she loves for a simple reason—to evoke his empathy towards her. Knowing the premise of human emotions, the woman starts her letter with her own life stories, follows with a blunt confession of affection, and ends with a cursing when she can’t handle the emotions anymore.