Autism Is a World (2004)

Autism Is a World, a co-production of CNN Productions and State of the Art Inc., is a candid and compelling look into the mind of Sue Rubin, a 26-year-old Los Angeles woman living with autism. The film has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.
Gerardine Wurzburg chose to make this film to bring people into the world of autism. Autism is a world so difficult to explain to someone who is not autistic.

This short film is written by Sue Rubin herself. At the age of thirteen, she learned to express herself through a computer keyboard, otherwise known as facilitated communication, revealing that she was in fact highly intelligent. She went on to study history, specializing in Latin American History at Whittier College and to write speeches about her life with autism.
Autism Is a World explores Sue's world, her writings and the remarkable friendships she created while in college.
As the film moves to its conclusion, it comes to a wrenching emotional climax. Sue shares her final thoughts as the film concludes. Her words are simple: “The last thing I want to clarify is that no matter how much social interaction one has, one will never be free of autism. The tendencies to be and act in certain ways may subside but I will always be autistic.”

Because, because...

Stefan Leyh .

Selected Exhibitions
2008 »relocated #3«, Filipp Rosbach, Leipzig
2007 »Unter Löwen«, Sächsische Staatskanzlei, Dresden
2006 »im nu«, Dresden
»Grand Ouvert«, Filipp Rosbach, Leipzig
»Il mondo reale«, Laden für Nichts, Leipzig
2005 »624 miles«, Oslo
»Spuk«, Kustodie Leipzig
2003-2007 Jahresausstellungen der HfBK Dresden

It's So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House (1979)

Paul Fierlinger has been a professional independent animator since 1958, when he made his first TV commercial in Prague. Since then he has produced roughly 1000 films of varying lengths, including the Teeny Little Super Guy series for Sesame Street. He received an Oscar nomination in 1979 for his short, It's So Nice to Have a Wolf Around the House.



This animated film is based on a novella by Harry Allard.



The wolf in this tale is a fully humanized character. He has made some grave mistakes in his life that have put him on the wrong side of the law. An old man advertises for a companion to take care of his animals and is answered by a fuzzy stranger named Cuthbert Devine. The wolf behaves well and becomes a trusted friend. Then comes the revelation of the wolf's criminal past through an article in the newspaper. The wolf is devastated.
It's a nice tale about racial and unfair prejudice. The story is humorous but I find the message about the redemption through good works a bit too do goody.

Reclaim Public Space

Pietari Posti

Russian Ark (Русский ковчег, 2002)

Russian Ark opens with a black screen and the voice of an unnamed man explaining that he's just regaining consciousness after some mysterious accident. Unseen by the audience and voiced by the director, he wanders through the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

In each room, he encounters various real and fictional people from various time periods in the city's three-hundred-year history. He is accompanied by a companion, "the European", who represents the nineteenth-century traveller the Marquis de Custine and who is visible to the audience. The fourth wall is repeatedly broken and re-erected; at times the narrator-director and the companion interact freely with the other performers and at other times, they go completely unnoticed.

The film contains Aleksander Sokurov's visual meditations on the history of the Russian people and the lives of their descendants today, an amazing voyage through war, revolution and social upheaval, which has left in its wake all the landmarks of a great culture. Like the biblical Ark, the Hermitage (Winter Palace) has steered a difficult course through the adverse currents of time and tide. A treasure-house of life and art, it is also a testament to the buoyancy of the human spirit.
The Hermitage is to be seen in a new and revealing light in a forthcoming film. In the popular imagination the Hermitage is a living entity, a fabric that breathes Russian history and culture. Generations of the Romanov family actually lived, loved and, in some cases, died in a place they called 'home' for all its rare splendour.
The film was recorded in uncompressed high definition video using a Sony HDW-F900. The information was not recorded and compressed to tape as usual, but uncompressed onto a hard disk which could hold 100 minutes. Four attempts were made to complete the shot; the first three had to be interrupted due to technical faults, but the fourth attempt was completed successfully.
Russian Art is a purely cinematic movie which allows us to take a trip throughout the museum and throughout the history of Russia's last three hundred years.
You can buy Russian Ark: The Masterworks Edition.

(b)ananartista è un pinguino

(B)ananartista Is A Penguin is by (b)ananartista (orgasmo sbuff) , an Italian multimedia artist, painter, illustrator, videomarker, performer, poet, songwriter, musician, sculptor, shaman, designer and living museum.

Rainbow Dance (1936)

After A Colour Box, Len Lye made another abstract advertisement, Rainbow Dance, for the Post Office Savings Bank with this surreal, innovative film.
Due to the pressures of working within a documentary environment, Lye incorporate more concrete images in this and in the next films but the commercial messages continue to be always subsidiary to Lye's experiments with music, colour and movement and are added at the conclusion as an apparent after-thought.
Rainbow Dance employs shot footage and overlays it with a number of abstract colour effects.
The main image is a silhouetted figure in the film, enacted by dancer Rupert Doone. Light transformed the surrounding mise-en-scène into a colourful, shifting landscape, aided by the use of deregistration effects and stencil patterns to produce the colour echoes that appear throughout the film.

In Rainbow Dance, Lye experimented with the new colour separation processes such as Technicolor: he used a black and white footage coloured by manipulating the three red, green and blue matrices of the Gasparcolor 3-colour separation system, as had Oskar Fischinger in his 1930 advertising film, Circles. After this process, the animated film looked like a cubist painting or a collage by Matisse. Lye manipulated the celluloid through different levels of exposure. When shooting the original footage, he then used black and white sets, which allowed him to adjust the colours later in a controlled way.
Abstract and semi-abstract shapes surrounding the figure, constantly moving and changing, create a a mass of complex and jumbled movements.
The advanced effects, visual motifs and music that Lye used on this short film can be seen as a precursor to today's music videos and as the first experiment towards a new kind of cinematic reality.
You can buy the books Len Lye and Len Lye and the problem of popular films and the vhs Rhythms.

Inkspinster 2

Inkspinster is by Deco. If you want to read Inkspinster 1, click here.

Im Anfang war der Blick (2002)

When a writer investigates Austria through the image presented by postcards, the landscapes around Erzberg and Salzburg province become something between a dream and a nightmare. And the words on the back of the cards seep into the scene as whispers. These are terrible and painful texts, written by unknown hands over the course of time.

The result of five years of work is a 45-minute art movie about Austrian landscapes.
The camera acts as a winking eye spying into a poet’s workroom. Books are stacked to the ceiling and the poet moves agilely between typewriters and shelves, leafs through books or, like Alice, enters a looking-glass. Bodo Hell cuts a restless figure, a man of the word setting off on a journey into the images. In a rhythmic montage, innumerable postcard motifs rain down upon the viewer, which the protagonist then enters as if they were real landscapes.

Bady Minch's cinematic narrative of a poet’s search for images provides the framework for a critical reconquest of an idyllic Alpine landscape. Using breathtaking montage work and elaborate film technology, she penetrates deep into the sultry colour of the postcards without succumbing to their camped-up charms. Single frame shots, dissolves and language employed as a musical element in a fast-paced composition of words and images are combined to create a film which goes against conventions and expectations. For In The Beginning Was The Eye, Bady Minck used also single frame techniques, time-lapse and slow motion.
This is a film about story-telling and remembering, the volatility of language and images.

Im Rausch der Tiefe

Frank Kunert


Award

2006		Silbermedaille beim "3rd Biennial Dimensional Salon", New York
2004		Förderpreis Kunst & Museum Hollfeld
2000/1998/1997		jeweils Bronze Award bei der "3-Dimensional Illustrators Awards Show", New York
1998		2. Platz bei der Wahl des Publikumspreises beim "Berliner Karikaturensommer"
1994		Bronze-Auszeichnung beim Wettbewerb zum "Kodak Panther Work Book"

Fehérlófia (1981)

Can a film be experimental, pop-art, fairy-talish and mainstream at the same time?
Son of the White Mare is all these things and it was also voted as one of the 50 greatest pieces of animation by a group of LA film critics.
A great deal of Jankovics' works are base on folklore and mythology. The plot has been mixed together from folktales of middle and eastern Europe. The respect for folk traditions makes a surprisingly coherent and unbelievably powerful whole. The film uses an original story developed from a collage of common fairy tale themes to create an exciting adventure filled with trials, courage and romance.

Following the demise of his equestrian mother, the son of the White Mare embarks upon a magical journey through far away lands. Witness him befriend his faithful servants Stonecrumbler, Treeripper and Ironmolder, deliver a well-deserved beating to a diabolical little goblin and take a ride on the wings of a mother griffin.
The design is radical and subversive but always functional. Jankovics makes the movement a primary aspect of the design. Every element is synthesized into a cohesive whole: a total composition in motion, which allows the filmaker to approach the idea of animation as a visual equivalent to music, with references to melody, rhythm and harmony working in a non-literal evocation of ideas and feelings.
The folk art is filtered through the sensibility of psychedelic poster design and combined with art deco and art nouveau.

The Evergreen Mon

Florian Satzinger is a production designer, character designer and writer ("Toby Skybuckle - Adventurer By Mistake"; "Adrian's Tower"; "2Q3 - The Creating Dragons Formula"; "The Recalibrated Fantastic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn") at S&H FEATURES.

Hardwood (2004)

The Academy Award nominated Hardwood is a personal journey by director Hubert Davis, the son of former Harlem Globetrotter Mel Davis, who explores how his father's decisions affected his life and those of his extended family. Mel Davis, now a coach for young basketball players in Vancouver, recalls falling in love at first sight with Hubert's mother, a white woman, at a time when racism seemed to make their union impossible. Despite their emotional bond, still resonating over 20 years later, Mel chose to marry a black woman, with whom he also had a son.


Elegantly structured into three chapters entitled "love," "recollection" and "redemption," Hubert Davis uses personal interviews, archival footage and home movies to delve into his father's past in the hope of finding a new direction for his own. He unites both sides of his family, speaking movingly about the complex web of love, betrayal and family ties that bind them all. This is a very touching and emotional story of mending relationships and unconditional family love.
Hardwood is about the healing power of redemption and the bonds between fathers and sons. This film is a heart-wrenching look at the socioal and emotional impact of fatherless families and the absentee African - American father.
This film is also important for African - American studies, multicultural studies, psychology and sociology.

Blood Oranges

by Kathryn Parker Almanas.

Seelische Konstruktionen (1927)

In the early 1930s, German and Austrian emigrants influenced the American film scene. One of the most important of avant-garde artists was the animator and painter Oskar Fischinger: one of the greatest artists of the XX century.
His films and paintings have long enjoyed the status of cult icons, influencing a whole generation of artists and continuing anonymously to serve as models for computer graphics and MTV video-clips.

Spiritual Constructions opens with two silhouetted male figures drinking together at a table. Over the course of the next few minutes, they change rapidly into all manners of shapes, objects and creatures.
The final result is a surreal and nightmarish imagery: a wonderfully witty exploration of a vast interior landscape.
You can buy these: The importance of being Fischinger and Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films (DVD).

Inkspinster 1

Elisabetta Decontardi (Deco). Her strip "Inkspinster" is published weekly on: Inkspinster and La Striscia.
In 2003, it the first collection of Inkspinster was released by Lilliput.
Deco has received awards in illustrations, satire and comics contests. She collaborates with comic-related sites, webzines, magazines and free-press newspapers.

L' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895)

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat shows a steam train arriving at a station and moving towards the camera.
It has passed into film folklore for the incident that occurred at its world premiere, when the audience, unfamiliar with the cinema thought the train was really coming right at them and panicked!

This short film is generally considered to be the "first motion picture" in modern history because the illusion of reality was achieved without much difficulty and the dramatic resources of depth of field are exploited. The train thrusts itself towards the camera creating a dynamic close-up.
The development of mass spectatorship was the main factor in the growing popularity of film. This not only allowed for the development of a profitable business but also moved the centre of attention from the artistic value of the film as conceived by the director to the need to fulfil the spectator's expectations.
You can buy The Lumiere Brothers' First Films.

A Standardized Way Of Expressing Emotional Connection

Amir Fallah founded Beautiful/Decay as a black and white, hand-photocopied “zine” while still in high school. Along with business partners Fubz and Ben Osher, Fallah has transformed B/D into an internationally distributed publication with a circulation of over 40,000 readers in less than ten years. As the Creative Director of B/D, Amir has molded the magazine into one of today's most well-respected and reputable independent publications.

Tim Tom (2003)

Romain Segaud codirected his first film, Tim Tom, with Christel Pougeoise, as graduating project at SupInfoCom.
Tim and Tom are two little men (whose faces are in fact notepads!) trying to keep in touch with each other. But the Creator, a giant omnipotent hand, tries very hard to interfere with this. To succeed in their quest, they must face more severe perils!
The plot is clever, full of intentional references to animation. Tim Tom is, in fact, a homage to the cartoon film, with touches from the Thaumatrope, the studio Aardman and the influences of Tex Avery. Segaud's inspiration for the film came also from Georges Méliès, Norman McLaren George Pal and Ian Svankmayer.


This short film boasts excellent timing and character animation. The characters designs are very simple and the animation is simply perfect. The film is funny but also complex because it exhibits multiple layers of meaning: it manages to mimic a stop motion/puppet like feel and to explore the boundless world of 3d animation.
This is a high class and self-referential movie, where the heading titles are strictly correlated with the ending. An exceptional aesthetic and a technical quality gives originality to this 3d short film, which won the Grand prix des Imagina Awards 2003.

Zero or One

Andrea Scopetta. He created, in 2001, together with Alessandro Rak, the animation studio Rak&Scop. They created Ark (Grifo Edizioni), Petrolio (Lavieri) and Zero Or One(Lavieri). Scopetta also drew Fujiko o Margot (Lupin III Millennium, Kappa Edizioni )

Anemic Cinema (1926)

Duchamp used the initial payment on his inheritance to make Anemic Cinema and to go into the art business (Calvin Tomkins). The film was shot in Man Ray's studio with the help of cinematographer Marc Allégret. Various versions were made in 1920, 1923 and eventually in 1926.
This is the only film directed by French artist Marcel Duchamp, whose name is associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements. As with similar avantgarde works made by Man Ray, Hans Richter or Fernand Léger, there's no plot, only moving shapes and objects, in an attempt to deny the vision of art as contemplation and ecstasy. This characteristically dada film by Marcel Duchamp consists of a series of visual and verbal puns with nonsense phrases inscribed around rotating spiral patterns, creating an almost hypnotic effect; an exploration of wordplay intermixed with optical illusions.

A spiral design spins dizzily. It's replaced by a spinning disk. These two continue in perfect alternation until the end: a spiral design, a disk. Each disk is labelled and can be read as it rotates. The messages, in French, feature puns and whimsical rhymes and alliteration. The final message comments on the spiral motif itself.
The spinning wheel is a recurring theme/movement in Duchamp's works: Bicycle Wheel (1913), Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and his Rotorelief (1935).
Duchamp explains that he enjoyed watching the wheel spinning. Thus, we can guess this short film is a moment of ectasy or spiritual meditation.

Downtown 20

Francesca Galliani. Her last exhibitions:
Luxardo Gallery, Roma
Up to the sky 2, photo festival, Milano
LEVI'S Project - Triennale, Milano
Il Torchio contemporary art gallery, Milano
Duplex Art Gallery, Genova

Night on Bald Mountain (1933)

In 1933, Alexandre Alexeieff invented the pinscreen method of animation, a tecnique which consists of a white screen pierced by hundreds of thousands of pins that can slide back and forth, each in its own hole.
After two years of work, Alexeïeff, with the help of his wife Claire Parker, completed Night on Bald Mountain. This short animation is based on Noch' na lïsoy gore (Night on Bald Mountain), a fantasy for orchestra composed by Modest Mussorgsky and arranged by Rimsky Korsakoff. The piece is performed by The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Albert Coates.
Another inspiration for this work was the pointillism of Seurat. Alexeieff, in his work, combinined sensibilities at once surrealist and classical, ancient and modern.

Night on Bald Mountain has much affinity to Walt Disney's evocation of the same Moussorgsky work in Fantasia (1940). While Disney's Fantasia used cell animation in a direct and explicit way, the power of Alexeieff's work derives from the extraordinary versatility that he and Claire Parker brought to their unusual medium. Their technique is most closely akin to the music that they visualize in their manipulation of time and space through shadowy referents. The description of both sight and sound is dark and lyric. There are unexpected harmonies between visual and musical images and the tonalities are always elastic and balanced. Animation and music become metaphorical equivalents to one another. Through a suite of immaginative pictures and metamorphosis, they narrate a tragicomic story of life and death.
Unfortunately, the distributors objected that the only way to make a profit was to produce a dozen films every year. Alexeieff and Parker, therefore, left art and cinema to turn to advertising.
You can buy the dvd Animation Works of Alexander Alexeieff and the book Alexeieff.

Lackadaisy

Tracy J. Butler. You can read his webcomics Lackadaisy

My Architect (2003)

In A Son's Journey, Nathaniel Kahn examines the life and career of his father, Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974), whose work included the Salk Institute and the Parliament and Capitol Buildings in Dhaka, Bangladesh, before dying of a heart attack in a Penn Station bathroom in 1974, unidentified (it took three days before someone claimed his body) and broke despite having been one of the century's most influential architects.
Louis I. Kahn's obituary listed his survivors as a wife and daughter. But the list was incomplete because Louis I. Kahn also led three different personal lives, with three different families, fathering a daughter with his wife, and a child each by two other lovers.

The film was made by Louis Kahn's illegitimate son Nathaniel Kahn and features interviews with many giants of modern architecture.Throughout the film, Kahn visits all of his father's buildings. Thus, he pursues the object he wanted: by describing the obstacles and influences that shaped his father, he gains knowledge of a lost father.
Why should people watch this documentary? Because My Architect offers a fascinating insight into Kahn’s architecture and then into him as a man. Louis I. Kahn was a man obsessed by his work. His life was neither private nor public, but transcendent. He was a visionary man, whose aesthetics forced him beyond the dichotomy of public and private. And although Louis I. Kahn was already dead at the time of making the film, he is very much a presence in the film because his son was able to use documentary footage of his father from a series of films from the Museum of Modern Art. It’s a very satisfying, very informative documentary experience.
My Architect was nominated for the 2003 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.
You can buy My Architect: A Son's Journey.