Film-makers' Cooperative
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Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
The midwife of American avant-garde cinema, Jonas Mekas (along with his brother Adolfas) was unloaded in New York City by the United Nation Refugee Agency in 1949. There were surely worse places to end-up and Mekas was "hungry for culture," observing the immigrant community in...Watch Movie
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Sea Child
Marina Shron's poetic short film about a young girl, Lila (played by Argentine actress Federica Cafferata), who has lost her father, SEA CHILD is a surreal coming-of-age story. Filmed against the beautiful backdrop of Laguna de Tota, a dreamy mountain lake in Columbia, Shron composes a...Watch Movie
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Coda I
Peter Gidal's structuralist short CODA I is composed of three lines of a thousand-word story he wrote (as read by William Bouroughs in a cutup tape collage) amidst an ultra-abstract play-of-light through a camera. Gidal describes his "socalled" imagery as "a complex of barely visible cuts in...Watch Movie
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Iterations
Gregg Biermann slices Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW into nineteen vertical columns, each slightly out of phase with the next, reverberating out from a solitary instant in the temporal center of the work where the entire frame coalesces. The result dissects, illuminates and obscures different...Watch Movie
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Happy Again
The signature scene from the Hollywood musical SINGIN' IN THE RAIN is split into seven layers. Each layer is moving at a different speed and is visible equally in superimposition. At the temporally central point all visual and audio elements coalesce in a single frame. The result uncovers a new...Watch Movie
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Blushes
BLUSHES is an exploration of the body. It contrasts gentle imagery of the female form with stark geometrics and powerful rushes of color. Self-depiction and tangible manipulation of the filmstrip establish a new agency for the filmmaker. Through its confrontational nature it subverts the gaze...Watch Movie
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Apple
Gregg Biermann dismantles the titular fruit into its component parts in APPLE. A kaleidoscopic collage film in the tradition of Stan Brakhage’s MOTHLIGHT, the film combines the camera-less avant-garde film with the limber possibilities of digital editing and plenty of crunchy apple sounds. - Tom...Watch Movie
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Crop Duster Octet
One of the most iconic sequences in the history of Hollywood cinema (from Alfred Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST) is deconstructed and reassembled to illuminate the patterns, rhythms and choreography of the original so as to break through and make for an eight banded kinetic...Watch Movie
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Horizons
One of the greatest if all-too-often overlooked landscape films in American cinema, Larry Gottheim’s HORIZONS displays a sensitivity to the seasons that seems more in keeping with Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” than the typical nature documentary. HORIZONS was not only Gottheim’s first...Watch Movie
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Fog Line
Called “a small but perfect film” by no less than American avant-garde cinema’s patron saint Jonas Mekas, Larry Gottheim’s groundbreaking early work is a silent single-shot short in which the camera remains stationary but nature provides magical action. A landscape framed by the stretch of...Watch Movie
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Forged Ways
Photographed on-location, FORGED WAYS combines elements of documentary, narrative and experimental film form. Structurally the film cycles between the first person account of filmmaker, the third person experience of a man navigating the streets of Harlem and day-to-day life in cities and...Watch Movie
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Orange
ORANGE is inspired by the direct film (cameraless) tradition. This tradition includes works in which the filmstrip is directly manipulated by painting, scratching, or otherwise placing objects on it. This tradition was probably originated by Len Lye in his hand painted A COLOUR BOX from 1935. To...Watch Movie
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Chop Off
Iconoclastic filmmaker M.M. Serra presents a provocative portrait of a man who practices self-amputation as performance art. Introducing the film with footage from Todd Browning’s indelible FREAKS and THE UNKNOWN, as well as alluding to Katherine Dunn’s unlikely pop novel, “Geek Love,” Serra is...Watch Movie
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Harmonica
Arguably Larry Gottheim’s most exuberant experiment in the single-shot, single-roll format (and his first with a soundtrack), HARMONICA trains the camera on a friend improvising a tune in the backseat of a moving car. Held out the window, the harmonica becomes a musical conduit for the wind,...Watch Movie
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Barn Rushes
The long way around the barn never looked so good. Larry Gottheim composed BARN RUSHES from eight tracking shots tracing the same arc around a barn in different conditions. The fact that nothing changes makes it all the much more apparent that everything does: a meditative approach that Tony...Watch Movie
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Labyrinthine
Forty-one separate shots that have been appropriated and excised from the Hitchcock classic VERTIGO are repeated and transformed into a composite sequence of concentric rectangles. Each rectangle appears over the last and grows larger over time. The narrative of the original is all but lost and...Watch Movie
