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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A Colour Box
It is one of the curious quirks of film history that the UK General Post Office is responsible for several masterpieces of cinema. Among them, John Grierson's NIGHT MAIL and this characteristically fizzy Len Lye short, his first camera-less film. Painted directly on film stock, Lye's colors and...Watch Movie
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Summer Has Been Over for a Long Time
Punk filmmaker David Markey gives visual voice to the end of the "Endless Summer" Southern California beach scene of the sixties and the rise of the "Dogtown and Z-Boys" asphalt and concrete scene of the seventies and eighties. A young man watches the bikinis and boogie...Watch Movie
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At Land
AT LAND begins at sea. In the film's stunning opening sequence, a woman (played by filmmaker Maya Deren) emerges on shore, climbs up a pile of driftwood... and finds herself in the middle of a formal banquet. She then moves from lush, verdant jungles to seaweed-strewn beaches, stealing chess...Watch Movie
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Psych-Burn
“PSYCH-BURN was what musicians call a contract-breaker. ABC had given us some coin to make a few short films for a TV pilot. LOVE-IN TONITE was to be a psychedelic rock variety show with live performances, skits and whatnot to cash in on the emerging hippie demographic. Even pre-Disney, the...Watch Movie
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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...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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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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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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Intervals
INTERVALS is the Peter Greenaway’s self-described “attempt” at creating an entertaining, abstract film; a series of bustling streetscapes from that most photogenic of cities, Venice. Using a self-conscious experiment in frame rate and a structure borrowed from the most Venetian of concertos...Watch Movie
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Pinball
Think of PINBALL as a spinning flying saucer which lands in your yard, performs, and then flies away to the sound of film flapping in a projector... The film visualizes George Antheil's 1952 revision of "Ballet Mecanique" using trigger fast cutting, painted imagery and sound effects. It might be...Watch Movie
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T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G,
"If you take the facts of the retina, the flicker mechanism of film projection," Paul Sharits wrote, "then you can make films without logic of language." T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G assaults language rather more directly with its single-word soundtrack ("Destroy") and the image of poet...Watch Movie
