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Tone Poem
see all genres ›Music often conjures pictures in our mind, so no wonder it has long inspired filmmakers to make motion pictures illustrating those thoughts. Variously fanciful and somber, these films bring beloved sounds to adventurous visual life.
Discover Tone Poem Films
Genres / Music / Tone Poem
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Adagio
Subtitled “Eros in Psyche” and set to a composition by Tomaso Albinoni, Lawrence Jordan’s rapturous live action short contemplates two nude figures in California idyll. They remain physically separated but Jordan’s spellbinding cutting and tactile camerawork suggest a loosening of inhibition. Parisian fountains and classical...Start your free trial to watch
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Ave Maria
Ivan Ivanov-Vano’s condemnation of the American war in Vietnam trades in some of the crude images one associates with Soviet propaganda: a soldier gunning down a child; clamoring capitalists superimposed over the killing fields. And yet its animation style is surprisingly subtle and its tone more elegiac than one might...Start your free trial to watch
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Johann Sebastian Bach
The rare film to enter into deep conversation with a piece of music, in this case Bach’s “Fantasia in G Minor,” Czech animator Jan Svankmajer orchestrates walls, doors and windows as Bach does the different registers of the organ. In its luminous attention to surface texture, the film resembles an abstract...Start your free trial to watch
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Beyond Enchantment
Where all is static motion; where music and light become one; where change and motion become one; and where the end is the beginning. Black and white cut-out animation with touches of color. Ladies of the past encounter science and natural phenomena.Start your free trial to watch
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Duo Concertantes
DUO CONCERTANTES has two parts, THE CENTENNIAL EXPOSITION and PATRICIA GIVES BIRTH TO A DREAM BY THE DOORWAY. Both PATRICIA and HAMFAT ASAR (made the following year), the two most spectacular of Lawrence Jordan's animated works, operate against the backdrop of a fixed scene. In the former, it is a back...Start your free trial to watch
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Roy Eldridge
Not long after settling on Camano Island, Bruce Baillie began creating works on video. Many of these shorts and fragments were little-seen since Canyon Cinema, the distribution organization he co-founded in 1961, limited its efforts to film and declined to distribute Baillie's video pieces. Undeterred, this brevity of video...Start your free trial to watch
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Gymnopédies
Lawrence Jordan took not only the music but the title from Erik Satie. These three pieces are probably the most famous of Satie's musical series. The precise sense of the word "gymnopédies" is unknown. Etymologically it denotes the goings on of named (gymno) children (paidos); yet here the word might also connote the...Start your free trial to watch
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Implied Harmonies
Hal Hartley's conscientious assistant in Berlin receives weekly letters from her boss and sends him the books he needs as he struggles in Amsterdam to create the staging for Dutch composer Louis Andriessen's opera, "La Commedia." Featuring Louis Andriessen, Christina Zavalloni, Claron McFadden, Jeroen...Start your free trial to watch
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In a Summer Garden
Part of a trio of films that also includes ADAGIO and WINTER LIGHT, IN A SUMMER GARDEN "draws much of its power from the way it is constructed and the ways it deals with images... [T]he camera pans and pauses, almost passively looks at the fields of flowers, and then plunges through them, carrying us...Start your free trial to watch
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The Magic Sun
Composer, photographer and filmmaker Phill Niblock's classic of experimental underground filmmaking with a sensational soundtrack by pianist Sun Ra and the members of his Solar Arkestra. Shot in the mid '60s, when the Arkestra was based in New York, this film was produced using a unique negative process and ultra-tight...Start your free trial to watch
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Masquerade
In the film MASQUERADE, we enter the experience of death with respect and reverence. The clouds disperse and the scene is revealed. As with all of Lawrence Jordan's films, the narrative is implied and can be viewed in a variety of ways. The man is dying, it seems, and the townsfolk stand around him as if offering assistance....Start your free trial to watch
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Moonlight Sonata
"After GYMNOPEDIES, I had long wanted to animate a film specifically for a pre-selected piano piece by [Erik] Satie. MOONLIGHT SONATA is that film. It was totally designed for the 'Gnossienne V' and the movements of the animation are timed to the overall rhythms as well as the specific beats of the music."...Start your free trial to watch
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The Other Also
A slow, meditative piece of visual music commissioned by the Paris Gallery of the Foundation Cartier for their group show, "Amours." Different artists, filmmakers and writers were asked to make something treating the concept of "amour" (or "love"). Hal Hartley decided to treat that aspect of love which is charity and...Start your free trial to watch
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Poet's Dream
The poet dreams a maiden's bubbles through edifices of forest and eclectic contagion. Yet another extraordinary work from filmmaker/animator/artist Lawrence Jordan that cleverly repurposes and rearranges pre-existing materials, crafting a compelling (albeit brief) narrative out of otherwise unrelated images. Do not be alarmed...Start your free trial to watch
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The Roe's Room
Within their apartment, a father, mother and son bear the dulling yoke of an ordinary urban life. His mind and heart borne aloft by the cycle of the seasons and the images and music within him, the son transforms his cloistered existence into a richly poetic emotional utopia. As autumn arrives, cracking flakes of plaster...Start your free trial to watch
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Winter Light
Though best known for his collage films, Lawrence Jordan here makes exquisite study of the different aspects of light lilting through the early morning fog of California winter. Painterly gradations of color and juxtapositions in scale are beautifully arranged to music by Antonio Vivaldi.Start your free trial to watch