My Name Is Oona (1969)

Gunvor Nelson chose to create a haunting, intensely lyrical evocation of her daughter's inner and outer worlds. The film consists of looped sound, elliptical cutting, slow motion, and superimpositions which construct a dream world in which Nelson's daughter plays, at one with nature. The child moves through rhythmically changing scenes, on to the meaning of letting go, respective harnessing the inherent power of life.
A series of extremely brief flashes of her moving through night-lit space or woods in sensuous negative, separated by rapid fades into blackness, burst upon us like a fairy-tale princess, with a late sun only partially outlining her and the animal in silvery filigree against the encroaching darkness. Throughout the entire film, the girl, compulsively and as if in awe, repeats her name, until it becomes a magic incantation of self-realization.




The film creates an unsettling rather than an idealized portrait of childhood: Gunvor Nelson doesn't want this film was a normal, cute picture of Oona; he think the world Oona was in and Gunvor Nelson own childhood world are combined there. As a child, you're pretty secure in your known world, but the rest is very mysterious and scary; maybe there are monsters and trolls lurking out there, even if you've never seen them.

Chinese Master Spy 5 – The Kobasa Solution

Chinese Master Spy is by Fernado Relvas.

Dhrupad (1982)

Mani Kaul came to the cinema rather late in life, because he had eyesight problems as a child. He was already thirteen when the doctors found a cure. It was then that he discovered the world and choose to gave his life to cinema.
Its Dhrupad' explores an exquisite form of Indian classical music, dating from the 15th century and possessed of a mesmerizing intricacy. The film isn't so much a documentary as it is an exploration: every shot with immense love and care for tone, texture and colour, it is a landmark film.
Featuriing two famous masters, the Dagar brothers of Dhrupad school, this film is truly a pioneering work in the sense that nothing quite like this had been attempted before. It not only captures for us, and posterity, the magical quality of the two great masters' voices, but provides a valuable clue to the evolution of their art with its beginning in tribal music.



Dhrupad observes the musicians as they sit atop a beautiful mountain fortress and perform. As the camera traces the curves of the architecture and examines the landscape around them, and with a narrator's occasional commentary, this music casts its spell.
Mani Kaul puts forth the argument that tribal music had two aspects: one concerned itself with ritualistic hymns and the other related to changing seasons, as also birth, marriage, death, etc. While the folk music stayed in the villages, the ritualistic music evolved into classical music and moved to the courts.

Chinese Master Spy 4 – Repa And Kriska Investigate.

Chinese Master Spy is by Fernado Relvas.

Talysis II (2006)

After trashing the idea of being part of the 'art world' and being in the enviable position of being unemployable, Paul Prudence spent a few years travelling, then voluntary working as an art therapist in a mental hospital. Spare time was spent staying up until morning painting pictures influenced by altered states of consciousness.
spent drafting fantastical landscapes in pen and ink.
He's widely known for his impressive output of generative artworks. Having migrated from Flash to the more powerful VVVV, he’s now focusing on audio-responsive generative systems that evoke organic 3D spaces.



Talysis explored elements self-organisation and crystallisation - autocatalytic replication and recursive symmetry. It navigates the possibility of a sentient geometry to produce a stream of geometric archetypes; a collective unconscious for emergent dynamical systems.
The film mimics analog video feedback systems, recursively transforming a geometric form through a series of render passes until a crystalline form emerges. The patterns produced seem unstable, constantly about to morph into new configurations. The strict symmetry evokes a sense of folding and unfolding movement, as though one was watches fragments of a 4-dimensional form projecting into Cartesian space.

Chinese Master Spy 3 – Lokarda Goes Berserk

Chinese Master Spy is by Fernado Relvas.

Milch (2005)

Milch is a wordless but nowhere near silent dramatic piece by long-time Klasky Csupo director/animator Igor Kovalyov.



The density of his art expresses human experiences of loneliness, madness, reclusion and redemption.



Kovalyov's characters are not idealized, nor are they horribly grotesque - they are extremely ordinary people in a bizarrely permissible world. Milch merges adult themes with the unforbidden landscape of animation.

Chinese Master Spy 2 – Two Shots

Chinese Master Spy is by Fernado Relvas.

I Am Sitting in A Room (1970)

I Am Sitting in A Room is a psycho - acoustic classic by Alvin Lucier for voice and tape. It features Lucier recording himself narrating a text which describes this process in action, and then playing the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re - recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have characteristic resonance or formant frequencies, Lucier had also specified that a performance need not use his text and the performance may be recorded in any room. However, Lucier himself has recorded the piece in at least one room he did not find aesthetically acceptable.
In fact, certain frequencies are emphasized as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself.



The process continues until all we can hear is white noise. Different rooms affect the decay of sound in different ways, so this performance is different to the original recorded version. It is not easy to understand and it is not necessarily the most enjoyable listen you will come in contact with. There is no beat and thus no driving force. But what you hear throughout the extent of this album transforms beautifully. By the end of the recording, you are no longer hearing Alvin Lucier’s voice, although it is still there. You are hearing a room. You are hearing the room Alvin Lucier is sitting in.
You can buy I Am Sitting in a Room.

Chinese Master Spy 1 – An unfortunate morning

Chinese Master Spy is by Fernado Relvas.

Humdrum (1998)

Humdrum is a self parody. Since the characters themselves are composed of cast shadows from animated figures, the joke is heightened when they resort to playing shadow puppets with their hands.



This film was born out the need to make a film that was relatively cheap. In Peter Peak's sketchbook, he has been knocking around the idea of making an animated film using shadow puppets, if only because it meant they didn't have to spend a lot of money making complex models.

Lamp

By Dave Allies-Curtis.

JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (Sundandce Film Festival 1980)

For the next 125 minutes, we have a ringside seat to Michelson's stream-of-consciousness ramblings, augmented by fragmentary surrealistic shots culled from modern Berlin and revolutionary Russia. In fact, to explore the ramifications of terrorism, Rainer employs an extended therapy session to evoke the daily experiences of power and repression.



The feminist propaganda films of the late 60's and early 70's were often forceful, this film is not. Its puts forwards feminist ideals without hiding femininity or alienating others. It also presents both sides of an argument about the use of political violence without ever condoning either cause.
Journey from Berlin/1971 declares also a revolution in the structurally obsessed American avant-garde film scene, stating that language is more important than image. Obvious connections between image and sound occur enough to alert viewers to the fact that there are connections they're missing, and, more importantly, to communicate a vision of the world engaged in a historically ongoing global struggle.

Cieco

By Roberto La Forgia. You can watch his short films.

When the Wind Blows (1986)

When the Wind Blows is an amazing piece of animation, which still remains little known to this day, for the seamless mode in which it combines dimensions, propping 2D characters up against both 2D and 3D backgrounds.
Jim and Hilda are an elderly couple living a tranquil life in a small cottage out in the countryside. Their home is hit indirectly by a Soviet nuclear bomb, leaving it in ashes and barely standing. Jim and Hilda survive by ducking behind a door that Jim set up as an inner refuge. Then they are doomed to suffer the most for something over which they have no voice. They place their trust in a line of government-issued pamphlets and, in spite of the obvious flaws and contradictions in their advice. Their shelter, miraculously, works, altough it leaves them totally unprepared for a threat even more horrifying, devastating and noxious than the blast itself: the nuclear winter that must follow.



When Raymond Briggs first set out to tell this incredible and nerve-jangling story, he chose to do it in one of the most unlikely formats available: a children's comic book. Jimmy Murakami's film is a faithful adaptation, and really maintains Briggs' look, feel and sense of character , but in merely being a movie it lacks the naïve innocence that only a children's storybook could really provide.
You can buy When the Wind Blows.

Untitled

By Antonello Noto.

The War Game (Oscar 1966)

Peter Watkins's depiction of the impact of Soviet nuclear attack on Britain caused dismay within the BBC and in government. It was scheduled for transmission on August 6, 1966 but was not transmitted until 1985, the corporation publicly stating that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting".
Some of the images are almost impossible to look at; they truly illustrate the theory that, in the wake of such a
holocaust, the living will envy the dead. The most heartwrenching scene is the simplest. Asked what he
wants to be when he grows up, a sullen young boy, physically unhurt but with obviously deep emotional
scarred, mutters "I don't want to be nothin'".



The story is told in the style of a news magazine programme. Part interviews and quotations, part acting, this film simulates the aftermath of a large-scale nuclear attack near a rural area of England. It argues that citizens and Civil Defense authorities are poorly prepared for this eventuality, and describes possible physical, psychological and social damage in graphic detail.
It features several different strands that alternate throughout, including a documentary-style chronology of the main events, featuring reportage-like images of the war, the nuclear strikes, and their effects on civilians; brief contemporary interviews, in which passers-by are interviewed about their knowledge of nuclear war issues; optimistic commentary from public figures that clashes with the other images in the film; and fictional interviews with key figures as the war unfolds.
The "dramatic" sequences, with their highly "documentary" look, are retained as fragmentary and discontinuous illustrations of an ongoing documentary narrative which itself disorientingly moves back and forth between statements and assumptions that this is "really happening" before our eyes, and other types of proposition and warning that this is how it "could be" and "might look."
You can buy The War Game.

But Meanwhile 5

By Senoeni.

Mr. Hayashi (1961)

Baillie's films are characterized by images of haunting, evanescent beauty. An object will appear with spectacular clarity, only to dissolve away an instant later. Light itself often becomes a subject, shining across the frame or reflected from objects, suggesting a level of poetry in the subject matter that lies beyond easy interpretation. Baillie combines images with other images, and images with sound, in dense, collage-like structures.
The effect of Baillie's films is to make the viewer feel that any moment of the viewing, any single image he is looking at is a mere illusion that will soon vanish.



Mr. Hayashi places the poetic and the social in a very precise balance. The narrative, slight as it is, mounts a social critique of sorts, involving the difficulty the title character, a Japanese gardener, has finding work that pays adequately. But the beauty of Baillie's black-and-white photography, which consists of evocative, sun-drenched images forming a short, haiku-like portrait of a man. On the soundtrack, we hear the man speak of his life, and his difficulty in finding work Rather than a study of unemployment, the film becomes a study of nested layers of stillness and serenity
This work also functioned as an advertisement for the film society collective Canyon Cinema, of which Baillie was a co-founder. The natural and intimate pictorial handling of Mr. Hayashi is characteristic of all of Baillie's work,

But Meanwhile 4

By Senoeni.

Fly (1970)

Although only one person was filmed, in contrast to the 331 gathered for the Legs film, Fly was a more complicated project. John Lenno and Yoko Ono asked New York actress Virginia Lust to lie down naked whilst they filmed a fly exploring her body. Approximately 200 flies were used and each had to be stunned with a special gas. The film shows a woman lying so still she looks almost comatose. The only movement is that of a fly, which we follow as it lands on different parts of her body. The film is so slight, and yet there is something in the stillness of her body, the gentle movement of this fly, that seems sensual, even erotic. It was claimed that Virginia Lust also had to be sedated during the filming.

Yoko Ono, along with John Lennon, creates a most irregular surprise in Fly. Sort of a deviant crooked smile is by far one of the albeit queerest pieces of experimental cinema this side of the Lower East Side.
They took two days to film in a New York atticNineteen to show us nineteen minutes of pure heteromorphic deeelight.

But Meanwhile 3

By Senoeni.

Wavelenght (1965)

Wavelength describes a single zoom movement for three quarters of an hour across an almost empty New York loft, resting eventually with the frame of a black-and-white photograph of waves pinned to the wall of the room. Within this pseudo-continuity there are innumerable changes of color filters, sudden shifts into negative, changes from day to night, occasional super-impositions, and a series of human events of increasing dramatic significance.
Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three character scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat briefly, and listen to "Strawberry Fields Forever" on the radio. Later, a man enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.
Briefly men and women enter and exit the frame, triggering the pretense of a narrative. But in reality, the viewer becomes increasingly absorbed in the purpose of the zoom and where it's heading. The sound is a total glissando while the film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum which attempts to utilize the gifts of both prophecy and memory which only film and music have to offer.



The human events are filmed with the direct sound which interrupts the steadily increasing sine wave of piercing electronic sound which contributes largely to the uncanniness of the film. The filmmaker dissects the illusion of continuity imposed by zoom, evoking an impressive series of metaphors for memory and death in the process.
Snow wanted to do something where the music could survive and not only be a support for the image.
Wavelenght opens with what appear to be a narrative. The narrative is at best skeletal, but it's one of the most potent critical gestures. Snow was aware that wiever will assume that film is about the death of a man. His decision to invoke character and plot and then ignore them is a way to challenging the conventions.
The zoom is a particularly appropriate tool for Snow's critique, because its movement is virtual, in actuality a relationship between two lenses, the image of an image.
This realization adds the first of many new dimensions to come: by introducing the element of motion, specifically invisible motion like the hands of a clock, the filmmaker adds the temporal element to a composition that in all other respects appears static. Motion is the only phenomenon that allows perception of time; the motion here, like time, is wholly conceptual.
Minutes pass and we can notice subtle details.

But Meanwhile 2

By Senoeni.

69 (1968)

Breer's work has often focused on the mechanics of cinema and has featured hand drawn 4x6 index cards that are composed into formalist, repetitive studies, such as 69, which is so absolutely beautiful, so perfect, so like nothing else. Forms, geometry, lines, movements, light, very basic, very pure, very surprising, very subtle.
Like many of his generation, Breer's early work was influenced by the various European modern art movements of the early 20th century, ranging from the abstract forms of the Russian Constructivists and the structuralist formulas of the Bauhaus, to the nonsensible universe of the Dadaists.



Breer acknowledges his respect for this purist, cubist cinema, which uses geometric shapes moving in time and space.
Breer continued to search for historical perspectives in his work and discovered the color theories of Chevreul and Rood. He also began a series of minimalist pieces based on number series, which were nonfigurative and based on geometry and formal issues. 69 relyes on formalist images from his early research into color paintings.

But Meanwhile 1

By Senoeni.

Les Oiseaux Blancs Les Oiseaux Noirs (2003)

Les Oiseaux Blancs Les Oiseaux Noirs is an African tale about wisdom, animated by Florence Miailhe. The story is based on a book by Amadou Hampaté Bâ about the work of Tierno Bokar and his African fable of good and evil. It explores how people live with good or bad feelings and how it is better to have good feelings towards others.



We are introduced to the two birds almost effortlessly as images merge together, break apart and metamorphose into different shapes or people. At one point as birds break away into a flock it is a genuine moment of sheer beauty. The black birds represent bad thoughts and words, white birds the opposite.

29

Mark Brown is currently happily re-exploring his world, visiting old friends and painstakingly documenting the strange flora and fauna that moved in while he was away.

Uliisses (1992)

Uliisses is a Homeric journey through the history of cinema. Its theme is based on the mythological Odysseus of Homer, the James Joyce's Ulysses, and the synthetic figure, Telemach/Phil, from the 24-hour-long piece The Warp by Neil Oram. Werner Nekes combines these figures, and he shows their stories. His central theme, however, is visual language in of itself: Odysseus/Bloom is transformed into Uli the Photographer, Penelope/Molly into his model and Telemach/Stephen into Phil, who begins his Telemachia.



The object of the odyssey is pictorial language as such: learning to see and wanting to see. It ranges from cinematographic archaeology to playful innovations of the latest kind.
There is no film technique that does not occur in this movie. Uliisses requires attentive viewing. The film's details disclose themselves only after one has seen it several times.
This short is an attempt to replicate in film some of the stylistic and technical innovations of Joyce's Ulysses, offering an anthology of cinematic techniques developed since the medium's inception.

Doc Atomic

Shawn McManus is an American artist who entered the comic book field in the early 1980s with work for Heavy Metal and DC Comics.
McManus gained wider attention when he illustrated two 1980s issues of Swamp Thing written by Alan Moore. Since then he has drawn issues of Omega Men, Batman, Doctor Fate and a pair of limited series about the witch Thessaly written by Bill Willingham.