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Wheel of Ashes
After being heralded by Jean-Luc Godard as the great hope of the New American Cinema, Peter Emanuel Goldman relocated to Paris just in time for 1968. Social dissolution permeates WHEEL OF ASHES, a stripped-down account of a young man's existential reckoning. "As dust hides a mirror, lust hides...Watch Movie -
Pestilent City
Unspooling without dialog and with visionary, hair-raising force, Peter Emanuel Goldman's disquieting lyric is less a "city symphony" than dirge, a kind of prelude to TAXI DRIVER. Negative photography, slow motion and plain attentiveness to the everyday uncanny are all marshaled to reveal the...Watch Movie -
The Endless Summer
They call it THE ENDLESS SUMMER: the ultimate surfing adventure, crossing the globe in search of the perfect wave. From the uncharted waters of West Africa, to the shark-filled seas of Australia, to the tropical paradise of Tahiti and beyond, these California surfers...Watch Movie -
Big Sur
In describing the process of BIG SUR, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, "As with RODIA-ESTUDIANTINA only one shot, which probably was the result of lapse in concentration, was deleted from the original camera roll. This film was intended to extend my experiments with the 'in-camera' film, and is...Watch Movie
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Rodia-Estudiantina
In explaining the filming of RODIA-ESTUDIANTINA, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, "Except for the removal of one out-of-focus shot, which I did not feel fit into the texture of the piece, I have never been able to change this footage from the way it came out of the camera. The...Watch Movie -
Schmeerguntz
Memorably described by Ernest Callenbach as "one long raucous belch in the face of the American home," Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley's montage remains a bracing analysis of misogyny's governing dialectic of idealization and disgust. With acid wit, the filmmakers link the detritus of popular...Watch Movie -
The Heisters
Tobe Hooper grew up in motels, hotels and movie theaters. He says he watched at least two films a day. Some of his favorite films were produced by the iconic British horror filmmakers at Hammer Films. THE HEISTERS (restored at 2K from a 35mm print) is Hooper's trippy, Looney Tunes send-up of...Watch Movie -
The Brig
"I went to see 'The Brig', the play, the night it closed. The Becks were told to shut down and get out. The performance, by this time, was so precisely acted that it moved with the inevitability of life itself. As I watched it I thought: Suppose this was a real brig; suppose I was a newsreel...Watch Movie
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Pink Swine
One of Lawrence Jordan's earliest animated films, PINK SWINE is an energetic and playful mix of various animation styles. Described as "an anti-art dada collage film," this free-form short presents cut-out images animated across old photos (a style picked up by Terry Gilliam a few years later)...Watch Movie -
David and Lisa
Two adolescents make a connection with each other in a home for disturbed youngsters. David Clemens was placed in the home by his mother because of his constant fear of being touched; while Lisa is a fifteen-year-old schizophrenic who speaks only in rhyme, when she speaks at all. David rejects...Watch Movie -
Fanny
Almost nineteen, Marius feels himself in a rut in Marseille, his life planned for him by his cafe'-owning father, and he longs for the sea. The night before he is to leave on a five-year voyage, Fanny, a girl he grew up with, reveals that she is in love with him, and he discovers that he is in...Watch Movie -
Portrait of Sharon
A kinetic collage of superimposed warm, soft-colored 16mm film set to percussive jazz, Lawrence Jordan's PORTRAIT OF SHARON features beat poet Kirby Doyle on a motorcycle and Sharon "Didi" Morill, poet and onetime girlfriend of the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, blinking her big...Watch Movie
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Triptych in Four Parts
In describing the basis for TRIPTYCH IN FOUR PARTS, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, "Part one is the Portrait of a North Beach artist, John Reed. Part two and three take place in the desert of the Southwestern United States and Mexico, where I went in quest of, and found, the...Watch Movie -
Trumpit
Lawrence Jordan shot TRUMPIT in the basement of a house on Baker Street in San Francisco that he shared with Stan Brakhage in the mid-1950s. Brakhage himself stars in the film (along with Yvonne Fair). Featuring a card game played on the body of a naked woman, Jordan portrays male sexual...Watch Movie -
Man is in Pain
San Francisco based filmmaker Lawrence Jordan's 1954 short follows his hand, gesturing through a house of mirrors, cards and paintings of women. Shot in black-and-white and playfully incorporating direct animation, enhancing the photographed image by scratching and etching directly on the film. A...Watch Movie -
A Study in Choreography for Camera
"If I did not live in a time when film was accessible to me as a medium, I would have been a dancer, perhaps, or a singer," the filmmaker Maya Deren once said. "But this is a much more marvelous dance. In film, I can make the world dance!" After college, Deren landed her first...Watch Movie
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Meshes of the Afternoon
One of the most important films in the history of American avant-garde cinema, Maya Deren's MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON is captivating and dream-like, filled with tinges of psychodrama, murder mystery, and film noir. In a seemingly ordinary Los Angeles home, the film's...Watch Movie -
Too Much Johnson
In 1938, three years before CITIZEN KANE, New York theater tyro Orson Welles filmed comedy sequences for his stage production of TOO MUCH JOHNSON, a rapid-fire farce of mistaken identities. The slapstick prologue features Joseph Cotten doing Harold Lloyd antics through the...Watch Movie -
Too Much Johnson [workprint]
In 1938, three years before CITIZEN KANE, New York theater tyro Orson Welles filmed comedy sequences for his stage production of TOO MUCH JOHNSON, a rapid-fire farce of mistaken identities. Long assumed lost, the reels were found in 2008 and preserved through an international...Watch Movie
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The Count of Monte Cristo
Edmond Dantes has been wrongly accused of a plot against the post-Napoleonic French government. Condemned to a prison cell in the impenetrable Chateau D'If, Dantes vows vengeance against the four conspirators who framed him. He is particularly anxious to give his ex-friend...Watch Movie -
What's the World Coming To?
This zany Hal Roach production of WHAT'S THE WORLD COMING TO? takes place in a future "one hundred years from now, when men have become more like women and women more like men." The film opens with the "blushing groom" approaching the altar where his tuxedoed bride awaits to...Watch Movie -
Rhythmus 21
Hans Richter's position in the art world was unique. As one of the earliest exponents of Dada, he was also one of the first to recognize the new possibilities cinematography offered the artist. He participated in the first avant-garde film movement alongside Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Man...Watch Movie -
Behind the Door
Writer Gouverneur Morris's bizarre tale unfolds in a series of disquieting flashbacks that serve to continually ratchet up suspense and foreboding. Producer Thomas H. Ince and director Irvin Willat showed daring and imagination in their adaptation of the sensational material. U-boat captain...Watch Movie
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Mothers of Men
Made two years before the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote, this melodrama depicts a future in which a woman holds high political office. Dorothy Davenport Reid plays an ardent suffragist who ascends from judge to governor and manages, despite the odds, to maintain her...Watch Movie