Non-Narrative
see all genres ›The short form has proven ideal for more abstract cinematic expressions, whether channeling dreamtime logic or pastiching elements from other media.
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Genres / Short / Non-Narrative
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Drift and Bough
Lynne Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness create the sensation of a painter's...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
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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
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Night Hunter
In this handmade film, composed of more than four thousand collages, the actress Lillian Gish is seamlessly appropriated from silent-era cinema and plunged into a new and haunting role. NIGHT HUNTER evokes a disquieting dreamscape, drawn from allegory, myth, and archetype. Music and sound by...Watch Movie
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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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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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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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Phantom Canyon
Stacy Steers' beautiful, surreal animated film is the autobiographical story of a woman trapped in an unhappy relationship and her eventual escape through the Grand Canyon. Steers meticulously crafted the film, using close to four thousand handmade collages, illustrations and drawings, each of...Watch Movie
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Rated R for Nudity
Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve takes a playful stab at mass hypnosis. Celebrating the mesmerizing power of movies, he offers mischievous glimpses into a subconscious world inhabited by Ingmar Bergman, Steven Spielberg and Bo Derek. The audacious creative force behind POLYTECHNIQUE...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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Une fois habiteé
Sandra Davis' final part of her trilogy of French travelogues is less focused on nature than its companion pieces. The film concerns itself with the beauty of human manipulation (a Parisian courtyard, a swimming pool, the ribbed vaulting of an immaculately-lit chapel) while...Watch Movie
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Note to Poli
NOTE TO POLI is, in the words of his student and fellow experimental filmmaker Marjorie Keller, "a note to the filmmaker Poli Marichal 'about' penetration." P. Adams Sitney observed that the film revealed "the visionary power of sexuality for the filmmaker" and it is indeed one of his most...Watch Movie
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Garden
This collaboration between experimental filmmaker Abraham Ravett and iconic modern dancer Bill T. Jones accompanies the latter's "The Breathing Show." Impressionistic scenes in the titular garden are paired with a voice-over by Jones narrating an unseen choreography. [The source for this film has...Watch Movie
