Un Homme de tetes (1898)

The earliest of Melies's early films were only one to three minutes long each & made every effort to make their entire point in the shortest amount of time possible.
Widely regarded as a miniature masterpiece of the silent era, Un homme de têtes is a short comic film which bubbles with wit and energy; this short demonstrats already Georges Méliès’ extraordinary talent as both a performer and filmmaker.
The skill of Méliès’ performance and technical wizardry are pure cinematic magic.

Less than two minutes long, in Un Homme de tetes Georges Melies appears before the audience, with his head in its proper place. He then removes his head and throwing it in the air, it appears on the table opposite another head and both detached heads sing in unison. The conjurer then removes it a third time. You then see all three of his heads, which are exact duplicates, upon the table at one time, while the conjurer again stands before the audience with his head perfectly intact, singing in unison with the three heads upon the table. He closes the picture by bowing himself from the stage.
You can buy the dvds Georges Melies: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) and Melies the Magician and the book Georges Melies.

Jamon

by Luis Belmonte Diaz

Drink (2001)

made his directorial debut in the stylistic MTV animated series “Down-town”. He went on to direct several seasons of the popular series “Daria”. Currently, Smith is working full time on independent films. In 2000, the New York-based Smith made his filmmaking debut with the animated short, Drink, which drew worldwide acclaim and was subsequently featured in more than 70 international film festivals.




You might be interested in Patrick Smith's Small Configuration 2 .
You can buy: Liquid Tales, Avoid Eye Contact, Vol. I, Avoid Eye Contact, Vol. II, Spike and Mike's Cutting Edge Classics.

Pulci 2

Pulci is by Claudio Cardinali. If you want to read Pulci 1, click here.

Cassette Memories (2003)

Aki Onda has performed with multiple cassette walkmans and electronics, using field-recording sounds that he has recorded himself as a diary for more than a decade. He released the first album of the series, Cassette Memories in 2003, under the title Ancient & Modern, followed by the second album, Bon Voyage!
Cassette Memories is a music performance, or a ritual, that conjures up the general essence of memory as Onda playes his own personal memories. He uses old tube guitar and bass amps to deliver the desired warmness and depth of cassettes.
These cassette diaries are only memories of sound, dreamscapes, freed from all meaning and even from Onda's own subjectivity. The artist conducts his attention to the origin of the sounds. It is an event that is partly visible but seen mostly in one's imagination. I think Onda openly acknowledges his debt to visionaries of the medium such as Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas.

Cassette Memories has been realized as a site-specific performance because Aki Onda found that his music is stronger when he performs in a space which has its own memories: memories awake memories. Inside this memorial space, he burns candlelight as a symbol of reminiscence.
This project began with Aki Onda's travel: he got into the habit of making cassette recordings of sounds and ambiences he heard wherever he went. He used a little hand-held device to do it. It became so important that he turned it into a project and gave it a name: Cassette Memories.
Thus, Onda, who forged the music from the sounds of everyday life, began to record those sounds around him that caught his attention. He captured all those songs that contained an eerily familiar quality, altough they're divorced from any specific moment in time. Onda mixed the etereal element to obtain an eternal deja-vu; a moment in which all sound seems to flash back in a single spectacle. And naturally, one day, he noticed his collection of cassettes was beginning to take up too much shelf space!

The Labours of Hercules

Leonie Purchas.

Selected by the Magenta Foundation 2007
Winner of the Arts Foundation Fellowship for photography
Selected for the Joop Swart World Press Masterclass 2006
Awarded 15 month scholarship from Fabrica, Italy, to collaborate on the ‘Les Yeux Ouvert’ exhibition at The Pompidou Centre, Paris.
Winner of the Jerwood Photography Award Selected as one of the Photo District News 30 emerging photographers
Winner of the Tom Webster Award
Winner of the Ian Parry Memorial Scholarship
Winner of the Metro Bursary Award

A Colour Box (1935)

A dizzying parade of dancing lines, squiggles, dots and arabesques is set to a joyful Cuban soundtrack. A Colour Box is probably one of the most innovative uses of film in the history of advertising and a tribute to the instincts of the GPO Film Unit under John Grierson. In order to turn an abstract film into a GPO advertisement, Grierson came up with the idea of inscribing a few words at the end of the film to promote the use of the postal service.
Len Lye originally planned a self-sufficient abstract film. When John Grierson watched A Colour Box, he was so impressed by it that he suggested adding some words extolling the value of the parcel post which are incorporated into the final minutes of the film. These words are somewhat incongruous in the context of the film but they are incorporated appropriately.

A Colour Box was created by the application of paint directly onto film stock itself, dispensing with the need for a camera. This was the first time Lye had painted directly onto film. He then used tools such as a camel-hair brush and a fine-toothed comb to build up colour textures upon the filmstrip. He presented a mass of complex and jumbled movements by painting directly onto celluloid, creating a sense of off-screen space. Lye used the soundtrack as a creative base by associating particular shapes with certain sounds, so that there is a loose relationship between sound and image.
This short film was also notable for being a colour film. Lye used the process of Dufaycolor at a time when colour film was still in an experimental phase.
A Colour Box so impressed the judges at the International Cinema Festival in Brussels that they invented a category for it and awarded it a medal of honour.

You can buy the books Len Lye and Len Lye and the problem of popular films.

Paris

You can watch the artwork of architect and artist Hartwig Braun on Artyglobe.

Blueberry (2004)

Blueberry (Blueberry: L'expérience secrète) is a French movie adaptation of the popular Franco-Belgian comic book series Blueberry, illustrated by Jean Giraud (better known as Moebius) and scripted by Jean-Michel Charlier. This adptation is very loosely based on the comic and adds mystical and shamanic elements not present in the source material of interest to the movie's director, Jan Kounen.
In the 1870's, U.S Marshal Mike S. Blueberry tries to stop Wally Blount, the man who killed his girlfriend from getting to a stockpile of gold hidden in Indian territory. On his way, he meets Prosit, a German villain on a persistent mission to find gold in the Superstition Mountains.
The film combines some action-packed western sequences with lots of druggy references as Blueberry follows his Indian brother Runi (Temuera Morrison) into the depths of his own unconscious while battling a hardened killer (Michael Madsen) and trying to woo love interest Juliette Lewis.

The movie features several elaborate psychedelic 3D computer graphics sequences as a means of portraying Blueberry's shamanic experiences from his point of view. Jan Kounen, the director of the film, drew upon his extensive first hand knowledge of ayahuasca rituals in order to design the visuals for these sequences, Kounen having undergone the ceremony at least a hundred times with a Shipibo native speaker in Peru. An authentic Shipibo ayahuasca guide appears in the film and performs a sacred chant. In the film, the exact nature of the entheogenic sacramental liquid which Blueberry (and his enemy, Blount) drink remains undisclosed. During the final visionary scene, however, a bowl of leaves is shown accompanied by a twisting vine which closely resembles the shape of Banisteriopsis caapi.
You can buy Blueberry, l'expérience secrète.

Senza Titolo (Without Title)

"Senza Titolo" (Without Title, 2008, 21 cm x 30 cm).

Claudio Parentela is an illustrator, painter, photographer, mail artist, cartoonist, collagist, free lance journalist... Active for many years in the international underground scene. He has collaborated & he collaborates with many, many zines, magazines of contemporary art, literary and of comics in Italy and in the world...& on paper and on the web...
He has also worked with many bands of industrial, noise, experimental & electronic music. He has produced some booklets of illustrations and comics, too.

Dog Interface (2000)

The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time (TMGLMOAT) is a Radiohead DVD released on December 1, 2004. It is directed and edited by Chris Bran. The film contains all four episodes of TMGLMOAT and features new songs with numerous live videos. It also has animations and interviews with the band.
One of the episodes is The Dog Interface, a short film directed by the acclaimed Juan Pablo Etcheverry. It's pure poetry!

In a futuristic world, human society has been annihilated. People continue to live but they have mutated and even if their knowledge of science and techology continues to grow, they no longer comunicate with each other.
Their life is impersonal, without a soul. Everything, every human life can be "rehealed" artificiously. People don't need anything, they no longer need to be human.
Dog Interface is the most poetic cyberpunk tale I've ever watched!

Contraband Chapter 1

A near-future tale revealing an all-too-possibly-real world of underground video, violence and crime on cell phone networks, Contraband follows a young man's journey into a new "voyeur underground", where profit-hungry youths prowl streets secretly filming radical events with mobile devices to satisfy society's demand for sensational on-the-go content.
It's an Orwellian Graphic Novel: the use/misuse of camera phones, loss of privacy and the boom in the spy cam industry that this generates. It reveals how our life going to be in the next few years!

Contraband is a 144 page graphic novel written by Thomas Behe and illustrated by Phil Elliott. Published by SLG Publishing.

Canadian writer TJ Behe has twelve years experience developing wireless content for global entertainment companies including BBC, Playboy, MTV and T-Mobile.

UK Artist Phil Elliott ’s graphic novels include Illegal Alien (Dark Horse) and Tupelo (Slave Labor) and he has over 20 years experience working with publishers including Marvel, DC, Image and Fantagraphics.

Inker & Toner Ian Sharman and Cherie Donovan are active professionals in the UK comic scene currently developing sequential titles at Orangutan Comics.

Filmstudie (1926)

Hans Richter’s pioneering Dada work Filmstudie was an early attempt to combine Dadaist aesthetics and abstraction. Made in 1926 Richter’s film presents the viewer with a disorientating collage of uncanny false eyeballs, distorted faces and abstract forms (none of these themes is treated constantly). It's similar to Man Ray's work in its ballet of motion which combines a playful tension between figurative and abstract forms, both in negative and positive exposure.
Filmstudie is essentialy a transitional work of mixed styles. A number of devices drawing attention to the technical specificity of photography (multiple exposures and negative images) are also included and enter into a successful fusion with the remaining elements.


Dreamlike motifs of magical realisms correspond to the style of surrealist movement (especially in the use of surrealist motifs such as glass eyes, birds, and mask-like faces) which had recently achieved its breakthrough in France. But you can also find animated geometric surfaces and lines from Richter's first films and there are also signs of influence from Cinéma pur and reminiscences of Léger's Ballet Mechanique (1924). Photographs of light and shadow, circular motifs of varied shadings, point-style shapes, light reflections and photographs of a girl's head multiplied through prisms occur in a series in which the abstract forms seem in large part to be blurred and foggy.
Although Richter does not reach the formal subtlety of Eggeling or Ruttmann, his work still contributes substantially to the Absolute Film. He isolated certain parameters and he contributed to construct a basis for a cinematic art independent of the realism and concrete nature of the photographic image. This film also wellded the aesthetic thresholds between photography and animation, erasing some differences and accentuating others.

Nude A Poppin Horizon

by Brad Troemel

Hokusai - An Animated Sketchbook (1978)

This award winning short film was written, directed and animated by Tony White who is known for his versatility and range of styles, way back in 1978. His career includes twenty years at Animus Productions/Entertainments as president and founder, seven years at Richard Williams Animation Limited as personal assistant to Richard Williams on A Christmas Carol (Academy Award), five years at Halas and Batchelor as Head of Design, Director, Designer, Animator of numerous projects such as the animated tv series Jackson Five and Tomfoolery, various commercials and short films.

The film brings to life the worlds of Japanese ukiyo master, Katsushika Hokusai (best known for his iconic The Great Wave). Hokusai's work is so pervasive in Japanese culture that you can still see it influencing today's artists.
This short British film is a wonderful overview of the artist's life and work and also his philosophy about art. White has used 60 Hokusai prints to animate this wonderful tribute to the artist who called himself the old man mad about drawing.
It deservedly won the BAFTA award in 1979 in the Best Short Factual Film category.

Amsterdam

You can watch the artwork of architect and artist Hartwig Braun on Artyglobe.

The Blood of Yingzhou District (潁州的孩子), 2006

Ruby Yang is a noted Chinese-American filmmaker whose work in documentary and dramatic film has earned her an Academy Award and numerous international awards. She lives and works in Beijing, directing documentaries and public service announcements for the China AIDS Media Project.
The Blood of Yingzhou District, which Yang directed as part of the project, won an Academy Award in February 2007.
The subject is AIDS in China, specifically in the province of Anhui. The victims are poor families. The adults donated blood in evidently unsanitary conditions: one individual, apparently connected to the blood drawing procedure, describes combining the donated blood of fifty individuals and then re-injecting a little bit of the mixture into the veins of the donors.

Yang enters the Yingzhou region and follows the plight of a number of these orphans, including a particularly unfortunate one, Gau Jun. The suffering of these orphans is all the more devastating for being largely unnecessary: the results of misinformation about the nature of the disease. Abandoned by his family, Gau Jun hasn't uttered a word since then and is now treated as a pariah by surrounding communities. The film reveals how the little boy is taken in by a loving, accepting family and given a second chance.
No-one knows how old Gao Jun is. Four? Older? Younger? Whatever his biological age, he has none of the verbal babble, or ready tears of a child his age. The film tracks this orphan for a year as his closest surviving kin -- his uncles -- weigh what to do with him. The older uncle’s dilemma: if he allows his children to play with Gao Jun, who is HIV-positive, they will be ostracized by terrified neighbors. The younger uncle’s dilemma: so long as Gao Jun remains in the house, the young man may not be able to find a wife.
Though the film is primarily concerned about the social conditions of these children, political issues are indirectly raised. One can't help but dismayed by China's social services. It is hard to believe that China's health system could be so primitive!
Yang reminds us that because of governmental irresponsibility, many other less fortunate children are left to fend for themselves. These children may never find adoptive parents and social acceptance.

Brace 3

Barbara Caveng. Since 1991, she participated as a free-lance artist in numerous art projects, concentrating on sculpture, installation and object art. Her installations have been recently shown in projects in the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, in Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, the Gaus der Kunst in Munich, the Art Museum of Akurery, Iceland, the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Heidelberger Kunstverein.

In 2003, she was awarded the H. W. & J.Hector Award by Kunsthalle Mannheim for installation and in 2002 the Award of the city of Limburg for her work U MENJA EST METSCHTA – I HAVE A DREAM. In 2001, she was also awarded the cultural exchange scholarship for Moscow by the Senate of Berlin.

Tusalava (1928)

Tusalava (The Samoan word Tusalava means 'In the end, everything is just the same'), is a 9 minute black and white animation on the origin of life, based on Polinesian art. Len Lye had recently arrived in London from the South Pacific when he began this film in which he merges elements of European modern art with the primitive art which he had experienced in the South Sea Islands.
It was particulary influenced by the witchetty grub (Baldwin Spencer's and F.J. Gillen's The Native Tribes of Central Australia has been the main source for Lye's ideas on witchetty grubs), a source of food for the Aboriginal people. The shapes inherent to much of Lye’s direct animation and paintings are derived from dots and indigenous tapa patterns. His enduring fascination for and extensive studies of Pacific imagery, rhythms, myths and legends was translated into many of his paintings, films and theories of art.
This short film was funded in part by the London Film Society and Lye laboured over it for two years. The Society couldn't afford an optical sound print so it showed the film in 1929 with live piano music written by the Australian Jack Ellitt.


Tusalava is now a silent film as its score has been lost, maybe forever, since Ellitt recently died in N.S.W. Tusalava had an almost minimal slowness, quite different from the pace of Lye's following films. There is a slow development and interaction of forms. Len Lye thought not of forms in themselves but of them as movements in time. He needed a new kind of imagination to seize this idea fully but the public regrets that the film was not amusing.
With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positives, the other negatives, the film evolves primaeval single-celled nuclear forms into living, rhythmic chains of existence and then, beyond, into creatures of tribal consciousness, both ancient and utterly contemporary. The images react, interpenetrate, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis is achieved. This film captures the mutability of existence, the ambiguity between fertile penetration and aggression, absorption and synthesis.
It represents a self-shape annihilating an agonistic element. lt should be the first part of a trilogy, with the beginnings of organic life. The second part would have shown geology and the sea and the third would have dealt with humanised forms. For financial reasons, he was unable to process the second and third parts and it was not until six years later that he had the opportunity to launch another film. In the meantime, he pursued activities as a designer and painter.
You can buy the books Len Lye and Len Lye and the problem of popular films.

The Persepolis Mission Statement

by Mike Russell

Emak-Bakia (1926)

Emak-Bakia, ( the title comes from an old Basque expression that means don't bother me), subtitled a cinépoéme, features many filming techniques used by Man Ray, including rayographs, double exposures, soft focus and ambiguous features. The film features sculptures by Pablo Picasso and some of Man Ray's mathematical objects both still and animated using a stop motion technique.
It was, originally, a silent film (note: the first screening was with a phonograph recording of a popular jazz tune, along with a live pianist and violinist who took over with tangos when the records were changed) but recent copies have been dubbed using music taken from Man Ray's personal record collection of the time. The musical reconstruction was by Jacques Guillot.

This short film involves a series of illusive, unrecognizable monochrome images juxtaposed with more naturalistic scenes. A light board appears from time to time carrying the news of the day. Then, an eye. A woman in a car drives along country roads. Farm animals. She descends from the car, again and again (the shot is repeated three times, the fourth time it fades and is replaced by a stepped superimposition of all four shots and as the film progresses the car theme becomes dominant). Images: dancing legs, seashore, swimming fish, geometric shapes, cut glass. A man removes his starched collar. It rotates. A girl has garishly painted eyes. No, she's only fooling. Those were her eyelids.
Individual images are striking for their humor and originality but Ray still apparently felt it necessary to impose a conventionally readable theme -the car ride -to hold the film together.
Some consider this a much less concise version of Le Retour de la raison. But here Ray is going for a surrealist approach, which doesn't work in a few important ways because this short film isn't abstract. Man Ray uses more concrete parts that fit with the more abstract things. There's also a huge disjunct between the fractured narrative and the exploration of spinning, warped lights and patterns.

I agree that this short film is in part a continuation of the technique introduced in Le Retour à la raison in that it, too, includes a series of rayographs. But this film, however, is more sophisticated in a technical sense than the first, employing rapid cutting, superimposition and slow motion to create a far more complex, though equally abstract film. In addition, Ray also incorporates a great deal more play with light in the film, even inserting non-objective reflections into the body of the film. In addition to these purely abstract images, Ray interposes realistic images of daily objects, people and landscapes.
The motion graphics elements of the film were achieved with Man Ray’s cadre of filming accessories: deforming mirrors, an electric turntable, an assortment of crystals and some special lamps (Self Portrait, 1963). These optical moments are interwoven with live action fragments that are both dreamy and graphic. The result is a highly visual study of motion, shape and light, that reveals a methodical experimentation with the possibilities of representing such phenomena.
The relationship between dreams and desire is also very interesting. Emak-Bakia has been interpreted, by the cinematography critic, as a woman dreaming about her own intimate desires, transposing her conscious sensual experiences into a chaotic, revolving morass of abstract thoughts. We see both of her worlds in this film: the physical world of corporeal pleasures and the inner world of her mind, which no man can ever hope to interpret.
You can buy Photographs by Man Ray: 105 Works, 1920-1934 and Man Ray (Artists of the 20th Century).

Company of American Girls

Melissa Ann Pinney.

Grants and Awards

2007 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award
2006 Photography Now: One Hundred Portfolios
1999 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
1997 LaSalle National Bank, Chicago Marathon Project Commission
1992 Chicago Women in Philanthropy, Mac Arthur Foundation
1989 Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award
1987 National Endowment for the Arts, Midwest Regional Fellowship Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award
Community Arts Assistance Program, Chicago
Changing Chicago Documentary Project, Chicago
1981 Illinois Arts Council Project Completion Grant
1980 Illinois Arts Council Project Completion Grant
1977 Artist in Residence, Evanston Arts Center, Evanston