Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

The film is the first in the Qatsi trilogy of films: it is followed by Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi. The trilogy depicts different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature, and technology.
Koyaanisqatsi is also a visual concert of images set to the haunting music of Phillip Glass The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse photography of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. Godfrey Reggio made an extensive use of them to comparise different types of physical motion. This technique of comparison exists throughout the film, and through it we learn more about the world around us. The film progresses from purely natural environments to nature as affected by man, and finally to man's own manmade environment, devoid of nature yet still following the patterns of natural flow as depicted in the beginning of the film, yet in chaos and disarray.




The power of Reggio's imagery is a function not so much of his subject matter, but of the way in which the imagery is presented. The Glass accompaniment emphasizes the grace of movement, which have the impact of a miracolous dance.
The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means 'crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living', and the film implies that modern humanity is living in such a way.
Reggio's montage is as fully slow motion as his individual images. We foreswear normal consumption patterns and meditate on individual human beings. Reggio's combination of slow motion and extended shots allows for a contemplation of the variety and beauty of individual, laboring human being. Beyond the headlines and every day crises of international events, a deeper shift in human affairs has occurred: Humanity no longer exists in the natural world, we are no longer connected to it!
You can buy Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance.

Deep Sea Tentacle

Deep Sea Tentacle is reminiscent of Norman McLaren’s early shorts.
One major theme in Kojirō Shishido’s work is reflections. He shows us beautiful reflections not only in surfaces like water, mirrors, but also in moving tentacles. Shishido renders his realistic backdrops images slightly blurry, endowing them with the hazy quality of memories or dreams.



Shishido clearly enjoys the possibilities of light and shade in his films. Not only does he experiment with intensity of light, but he also plays with the patterns made by light when it encounters different objects.

The Dot and the Line (Oscar 1965)

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics is a book written and illustrated by Norton Juster, first published by Random House in 1963, which Chuck Jones and the MGM Animation/Visual Arts studio adapted into a 10-minute animated short film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, narrated by Robert Morley.
Jones had fun with the form.



A straight line is in love with a dot; however, the dot finds the line too plain, unimaginative, and rigid. She would rather spend her time with an undisciplined squiggle who is much more fun. The dejected line later realizes that he doesn't have to be unbending.
When the line demonstrates his abilities to the dot, she realizes that true beauty comes from discipline and that the squiggle is not for her.
You can buy Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Academy Awards Animation Collection.

Copy Shop (2001)

Copy Shop is an ingenious, visually stunning experimental film about a guy who works in a copy shop. During his morning test of the machine, he accidentally copies his hand; while he's looking at that copy, the machine starts churning out scenes from earlier that morning. Spooked by this, he closes up early and goes home. Soon, it seems, he's part of a society in which everyone looks like him and wears check vest. Can he get things back to normal?


Virgil Widrich shot the film on digital video then took the footage into a computer and edited all the fancy effects. The result is truly unique.

Empire (2005)

As we see the Statue of Liberty from the air, the voice of President George W. Bush speaks about a great people facing terror. Then there follows a montage of images of offices, homes, and back yards of the U.S. in the late 1950s and early 1960s: the colors of avocado green and harvest gold dominate. People, all of them white, are well dressed and well scrubbed; houses and offices well kept.



Archives images compiled by Edouard Salier demonstrate the blissful consumers of the standard American family, which become deformed by their transparent backdrops. Each image is criss-crossed by optical effects that magnify or obscure, and that invite sharper observation. Empire is remarkable for its integration of form, technique and content, deploying digital technologies with glacial precision in its exploration of the pervasive, unsettling realities of our times. Empire is a graphic illustration of the American way of life, and its warlike tendencies.

Ballad of Mary Slade (Slamdance 2007)

Robin Fuller narrate a tale of passion, adultery and murder. The body of a young woman is slowly consumed by insects.



This is a gothic tragedy, told from an unusual point of view. The tragic story of her life and eventual demise slowly unfolds as the insects that consume her decaying body become actors in the fateful retelling of her downfall.

Tenshi no Tamago (天使のたまご, 1984)

Angel's Egg incorporates surrealistic and existentialist qualities but very little dialogue, making it a commonly cited example of progressive anime.
The whole film is beautifully animated and designed. The atmosphere is dark: empty streets creates a dreamlike, slightly sinister atmosphere reminiscent of proto-surrealist painters Giorgio deChirico and Dalì. And there is plenty of symbolic Christian imagery: almost the story of Noah's ark takes up a good portion of the sparse dialogue. There are also references to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.



In a desolate and dark world full of shadows, lives one little girl: she is the sole protector of a very precious, large egg. A mysterious man enters her life and when he wins her trust, they begin to discuss about the world around them.
Each metaphor spoken and piece of symbolism shown only helps to further deepen the mystery behind the film.
You can read this article about its simbolism.

Now Hear This (1962 Oscar nominee)

Now Hear This is without a doubt one of the weirder shorts that Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble ever made. This short is one of the Looney Tunes series produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons, Inc.
Looney Tunes is a variation on Silly Symphonies, the name of Walt Disney's concurrent series of music-based cartoon shorts. Looney Tunes originally showcased Warner-owned musical compositions through the adventures of cartoon characters.
This was the first Warner Bros cartoon to use the "modern" Looney Tunes opening and closing sequence featuring stylized animation.



An old man finds a red horn and uses it as a megaphone, unaware that it is really a lost horn from the Devil's forehead. The Britisher finds that the horn has the effect of amplifying every sound psychedelically and causing him serious bodily harm.
It's impressive how economically Chuck Jones packed in so much expression and character into so little. You'll enjoy his artistic style and abstract design!
You can buy Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Academy Awards Animation Collection.

Moving Still (2007)

This stereoscopic short film was made with an experimental tecnique: Santiago Caicedo de Roux created all the images in a single camera take and mixed them with CG images which build and destroy the city.



The routine of the daily train, with the same point of departure, same point of arrival, same route without surprise. You can feel feel the monotony of a recurring journey made too many times.
The images pass by outside and you follow the rhythm. Which rhythm do you choose? Are you free to change your life?

Precious Image (1986 Academy Award for Live Action Short Film)

Precious Images features approximately 470 half-second-long splices of classic movies and movie moments through the history of American film, chronologically arranged from The Great Train Robbery (1903) to Rocky IV (1985).



The scenes are organized by genre, which is matched to appropriate music. Chuck Workman chooses only about a second from each movie to push the audience into a kind of trance and take them on a journey into their individual memories of great films of three quarters of a century.
Workman wanted to evoke hundreds of fleeting memories in the viewers to look back on all the great films they have seen.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Meshes of the Afternoon is full of bizarre and creepy surrealist images. It's very poetic and disturbing. It reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.
Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid wanted to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.
This short is still one of the most popular of all American experimental films and is a landmark film that has provided an important model, setting the tone and style for other individual efforts over the next decade.
The entire film is seen through the eyes of a woman. You cannot tell when Maya's character is awake or dreaming. She carries a flower with her, which she holds upside down. She sees death, who wears a black hood and has a mirror for a face. She sees herself dreaming. In her dream she seems to foresee her own death. She seems to have a subconscious fear of knives, or being killed by a knife.



The film's narrative is circular and repeats a number of psychologically symbolic images, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper-like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean.
The film was produced in an environment of wartime volatility and this is reflected symbolically as throughout its mise-en-scène: the atmosphere is saturated in paranoia.
The beauty of this films is in its rhythmus: an innovative style of cutting on action, repetition and variation: a series of subtle structural, temporal, and logical mutations, creating a sublimely recursive, mind-bending meditation on the interaction between experience and memory, domestic banality and violence, imagination and causation.
You can buy Maya Deren: Experimental Films.

L'Etoile de mer (1928)

This film is based on a script by Robert Desnos and depicts a couple (Alice Prin and André de la Rivière) acting through scenes that are shot out of focus.



Originally a silent film, 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 and it fitted this film perfectly - haunting and hypnotic.



With these loose images, sometimes seen distorted through a glass, Man Ray refuses the authority of the look. We can recognize this choicee also in the editing, which draw out the disjunction between shots, rather than their continuity.
You can buy You can buy Photographs by Man Ray: 105 Works, 1920-1934 and Man Ray (Artists of the 20th Century).

Black and White High School (2003)

Charles Chadwick explores the existential potentials of non-narrative cinema and experimental music. Despite its title, this short isn't about racism but is a loose footage exploration of sexuality and infantilization.



There are repetitive patterns and visual motifs (above all the recurrence of two colors: red and blue), which explore the relationship between teenagers and sex and drugs. These arguments are depicted in the clinical and biological sense.
There are seven intermittent animated sequences, dispersed throughout the film, which illustrate the human body.

La Joconde: Histoire d'une obsession(1958)

How many films did you watch in your life? How many films narrate the obsession of a character? It's very simple, for a cinematographer, to leave all the intepretations open but sometimes the fact could be true.

A man is obsessed by the Mona Lisa after he has seen the famous painting at the museum of the Louvre. This anecdote is the inspiraton of Heri Gruel's short. Boris Vian give free course to his imagination and tries to solve the enigma of the smile of the Mona Lisa.

La Joconde won The Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.

Adjustment (2006)

Ian Mackinnon graduated in Animation at the Royal College of Art with his film Adjustment. The films is, in part, animation and ,in part, drama. The result is an original work, although the filmaking is conventional.

A diarist searches for flickers of hope in a drama of technical and emotional obsession. He can't forget his woman, he can't allow her to go away.
The silenct movements give emphasis to the entire story.
You can buy the DVD compilation of all Ian's 13 films.

Spook Sport (1940)

Spook Sport is an expressionistic interpretation of Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns.

In the 1940's, Mary Ellen Bute hired Norman McLaren, who didn't live in Canada yet, to draw directly on film strips the characters of ghosts, bats and other figures and to synchronize them with Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre. Some original paintings of McLaren would be reused in Bute's later films, including Tarantella (1941), Color Rhapsodie (1951) and Polka Graph (1952), where they seem less at home stylistically than in their original context. The final result is a mix of conventional cel animation and pen drawings, drawn directly on 35 mm film stock.

Although the animation moves in time to the music throughout the film, there are two particular moments that feature specific gestures synchronized to the music: when a xylophone plays a prominent theme in the music and when the timpani plays a motif later in the piece. In the first, the animation features the ghosts dancing over an xylophone made of bones; in the second, bone mallets play drums in time to the music.

This film is a splendid example of animation which responds to preexistent music both in terms of the narrative and in terms of actual sound.

The music is programmatic in nature. Although this is an abstract film, it tells a discernable story and the characters are always recognizable. Thus you feel more comfortable with the visual images.

You can buy Norman McLaren: The Masters Edition and The Film Work of Norman McLaren.

Le Vampire (1945)

The Vampire is a pseudodocumentary, in fact, it's largely fantastical in elements. This film has stuff that speaks sub textually about Nazi Germany and the like. It certainly covers a lot of the different types of horrors in the world and it's quite original, too. The Vampire it is full of rhythm and precision.
The bats are being macro analyzed and they are personifying human emotion. After a brief overview of the general weirdness of the animal kingdom, Jean Painlevé talks as some sea creature creeps along the floor of the ocean like something out of a German expressionist film.



Then The Vampire gets a little into Murnau's classic Nosferatu, which eventually leads to a discussion about what vampire bats are like, illustrated with a live guinea pig. Duke Ellington's music scores it to bring us back to the sort of New Orleans voodoo tradition of vampires.
And thus what should be a documentary about parasites and bloodsuckers, becomes a subtle critique of the Nazi party.
Painlevé's exploration of a twilight realm of bats is very poetic. The approach is quite interesting along with being somewhat self-conscious aware. Painlevé preoccupies himself with juxtaposing things to create quite odd effects. The film is full of lush imagery and imagination.
Painlevé sees in the shapes and behaviour of the creatures he is observing, his own especial analogies and associations: the terrors of human fantasy are
set beside the terrors of creation.
You can buy Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s.

Collision (2005)

Collision seems to be an abstract reflection on the clash of cultures which forcibly merges American quilts and Islamic patterns into beautiful kaleidoscopic scenes. I'm not sure this film is an original depiction of aesthetics into politics or an abstract satire based on the geometry of flags. Why couldn't it simply be a film about RGB, the three video color channels red, green and blue?
For an American audience, particularly, the sound cues must really help identify which culture the shapes and colors represent. Many Americans will only interpret this short as a disturbing yet potent piece of abstract political filmmaking. Personally I enjoy Max Hattler's film for its aesthetic quality.

The colours work well as do the sounds effects. The transitional movements into different shapes remind me of Oscar Fischinger's works. I can also see motifs of Islamic art in the patterns. The sound might be a collision but the video ends with the ambiguous sound of fireworks, which can either be destructive or celebratory. In the end the colors smash together into a manic color wheel of harmony. Thus this work can be interpreted in a radical number of ways.

Allegretto (1936)

Allegretto develops itself as an invigorating contrast between overlapping, expanding concentric circles and flocks of angular, foreground shapes that sail across the screen in time to Rainger's jazzy score.
There's a series of white and pale green lozenges, irregularly distributed across a larger rhomboid shape composed of rectangles divided into red and deep green at each of whose tip hovers a scattering of white diamonds. Diamond and oval shapes in primary colors perform a sensual, upbeat ballet to the music of composer Ralph Rainger. The geometric dance is set against a background of expanding circles that suggest radio waves. Allegretto presents an intricate layering of a number of recurring motives.



This was the first film Oskar Fischinger made after he emigrated from Berlin to Hollywood in order to escape the increasingly difficult political situation in Germany. He made the film for Paramount as a kind of interlude in a longer musical film but the collaboration collapsed completely and it was never used.
He found that Paramount had changed the film project from Technicolor to black-and-white. Also, Paramount printed the black-and-white version intercut with various live action images, so it was no longer totally abstract.
Several years later, with the help of Hilla von Rebay, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (Guggenheim Foundation) allowed him to buy his short film Allegretto back from Paramount, so he was able to complete it in color as he had originally intended. Fischinger then redid and re-painted the cells and made a color version to his satisfaction. The layers of cels allowed Fischinger to develop rhythms, harmonies and counterpoints of forms, while the colors change from frame to frame to create lush hues on divisionist principles, achieving particularly luminous and chromatic hues that could not be produced by normal methods of animation photography (William Moritz). Fischinger was forced to finance the distribution of this film himself and was able to make only a few copies but the film was shown at museums and centers of advanced art all over the world. This became one of the most-screened and successful films of visual music's history and one of Fischinger's most popular films.
You can buy these: The importance of being Fischinger and Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films (DVD).

Manhatta (1921)

Manhatta is the result of a collaboration between painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand (neither of the two had previous filmmaking experience and no connections to the film industry). It is a cinematic prose poem exalting the energetic and modern pulse of New York City.
This film is a rhythmic series of images, interspersed with verse excerpted from Whitman, fashioning an expression of the city over the course of a day. Their urban portrait begins at dawn as scores of people arrive in the city for a day of work. The ten minute film spans an imaginary day in the life of New York City, beginning with footage of Staten Island ferry commuters and culminating with the sun setting over the Hudson River.
It consists of 65 shots sequenced in a loose narrative in which the primary objective is to explore the relationship between photography and film.

Its many brief shots and dramatic camera angles emphasize New York's photographic nature. Strand and Sheeler exhibited Manhatta as both projected film as well as prints made from the film strips that were used like photographic negatives. They created a sense of life.
Manhatta can be viewed as a representation of New York City through the eyes of a still photographer (Sheeler) : camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions. For the most part, the camera stays stationary to capture the images of the extraordinary cityscape. Sheeler and Strand aimed their camera from great heights in the city’s office towers. The city’s architecture repeatedly minimizes its inhabitants. Even the construction of these mighty edifices is not a celebration of human greatness. Manhatta is an abstract and often disturbing glimpse across a city that seems too large for its people.