1. Eighteen fragments from Malcolm Le Grice’s After Leonardo
"This installation or performance work puts my own earlier film of the Mona Lisa through another stage of transformation – my own irretrievable self of some 34 years ago is now also part of the subject I first saw the ‘actual’ ‘Mona Lisa’ when I was about thirteen. Of course I had seen dozens of reproductions in books and postcards by then and the popular mythology of the enigmatic smile was already well engrained in my mind. My strongest impression, as I recall, was how small and unsurprising it was – a heavily protected cultural icon – no longer really a picture – and I was much more excited by the painting of the distant landscape than by the face. My own ‘version’ of ‘la Giaconda’ was never an homage, nor like Marcel Duchamp’s ‘L.H.O.O.Q’, an attack on its cultural power. Instead it came from a fascination with change and transformation – maybe also with arbitrary appropriation." Malcolm Le Grice
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
2. Ripple
RIPPLE, 2020. HD digital video loop & steel & hardware, duration: 5 minutes. Soundtrack by Kevin Carey.
3. Alma
"The details of the script for Alma were modeled from data that the artist collected from her own digital devices. The film describes a woman who enters into a private contract with a room. The objects in the room monitor how she feels as they respond to her in real time, comforting her with their physical presence and touch. The room tracks the character’s steps and her screen time, but it also monitors impossible data points, like what she would have accomplished if she had lived a different life. The first half of the film celebrates the unreality of her wishful thinking that technology is capable of solving any problem. In the second half of the film, these optimistic ideas are traded for a catastrophic vision of her digitally connected self. In the end, she is immersed in a space that describes what it once was like to be among other people. While physically separated, she waits indefinitely in a digital rendering, surrounded by a phantom of human presence." — Jane Lombard Gallery
4. Duration-Landscape: Rocks (Paisaje-duración: rocas (C))
"The evaporation or the centralization of the self. Everything is there." —Charles Baudelaire A sensorial approach to landscape In the deep contemplation of landscape the senses are altered. We feel a sublimation experience where the mental image of landscape undergoes a metamorphosis. The actual space is distorted, time flows in a different way: it stops in our consciousness. It is the connection at the "full instant," the idea of "durèe" of Henri Bergson, where the intensity of the experience makes the image of landscape expands.
It has an average vote of 7 on TMDB.
5. The Stolen Body
Made for Italian national television, Ellis Donda’s Il Corpo Rubato is an experimental documentary on psychoanalisis in 70s/80s Italy, its analytical practices and forms of suggestion.
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
6. Cinema Exercises (Esercizi di Cinema)
A workshop film made with a group of students of the Pietro Zorutti School in Palmanova, Esercizi di Cinema is an experimental adaptation of Raymond Queneau's book Exercises in Style.
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
7. Elle
Elle is an experimental dance film shot in a semi industrial landscape in Brooklyn reflecting on every day movements of falling and getting up.
8. Shot! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock
A reckless joyride into the darkest corners of popular music that delves deep into the mind of Mick Rock, the genius photographer who immortalized the seventies and the rise to rock stardom of many legendary musicians.
It has an average vote of 6.8 on TMDB.
9. Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes)
An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.
It has an average vote of 7.1 on TMDB.
10. There Is No Authority But Yourself
A Dutch documentary about the history of the anarchist punk band Crass. The film features archival footage of the band, and interviews with former members Steve Ignorant, Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher.
It has an average vote of 5.8 on TMDB.
11. Notes on the Circus
The short film is a montage of sped up clips of The Ringling Brothers Circus in action set to a musical track. The film is separated into four segments, each segment which focuses on different acts within the circus. The later segments often incorporate clips from earlier segments, mostly as background to the featured acts. The speed of the clips match the tempo of the soundtrack music.
It has an average vote of 6.8 on TMDB.
12. Terminal City
Terminal City records the demolition of the Devonshire Hotel in Vancouver; through extreme show motion and symmetrical diagonal framing, Gallagher underscores the passage from order to chaos within the event. The sparseness of this centering and he patience required of the viewer heightens the literally explosive climaxes of the film, and transforms the everyday violence of the events into moments of convulsive beauty. – Jim Shedden, Michael Zryd, The Independent Eye
13. Moby Dick (Moby Dick)
Guy Ben-Ner, one of Israel's foremost video artists, gained international recognition with a series of low-tech films, starring his family in absurdist settings carved out of their intimate spaces and their everyday surroundings. Many of his videos are inspired by screenplays for films, folktales and novels. Analyzing these literary and cinematographic passages allows him to exploit the conventions of film narrative: how to tell a story, captivate an audience through a tale, sustain a degree of tension and entertainment, and so on. At the same time, he corrupts the magic of fiction by openly showing us the entrails of everything he records, without worrying about revealing the tricks of the trade. A large part of his filmic oeuvre features a conglomeration of cinematic and literary references which the artist quotes, adapts or interprets. Ben-Ner self-referentially links the great themes and their literary, cinematic and artistic realization.
14. Johnny Physical Lives
This heart-rending love letter from one brother to another uses animation to mythologize Jonathan's fantasy life as punk singer Johnny Physical. After being hit on the head with a beer bottle, Jonathan was dealt a devastating diagnosis—and escape into rock star Johnny's sex, drugs and rock ‘n' roll lifestyle becomes a vital source of energy as he fights for his life
It has an average vote of 3 on TMDB.
15. Ara crema (Ara crema)
(Ara crema)
16. Now Eat My Script
"Now Eat My Script is a precipice, a fluid solution in which some spectral noises of the self float adrift. Narration takes the role of a pregnant writer who continuously affirms her hunger and clumsiness towards language and history. Her body is crossed over by both the years to come and the stories that have been buried. As a would-be pirate, she navigates through the tumult of familiar waters."
17. Monument
In the fall of 1967, intermedia artists Ture Sjölander and Lars Weck collaborated with Bengt Modin, video engineer of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation in Stockholm, to produce an experimental program called Monument. It was broadcast in January, 1968, and subsequently has been seen throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. Apart from the technical aspect of the project, their intention was to develop a widened consciousness of the communi - cative process inherent in visual images. They selected as source material the "monuments" of world culture— images of famous persons and paintings.
18. How to Squash a Squat
1989, New York City's Alphabet City and East Village. A year after the Tompkins Square Park Riot, squatters and their community allies try to stop the demolition of their building after an arson. Police forces occupy the neighborhood while the demolition continues. A portrait of an East Village that is no more. An homage to the voices and sounds of a neighborhood before its gentrification.
19. Gimme Danger
No other band in rock'n'roll history has rivaled The Stooges' combination of heavy primal throb, spiked psychedelia, blues-a-billy grind, complete with succinct angst-ridden lyrics, and a snarling, preening leopard of a frontman who somehow embodies Nijinsky, Bruce Lee, Harpo Marx, and Arthur Rimbaud all rolled into one. There is no precedent for The Stooges, while those inspired by them are now legion. The film will present the context of their emergence musically, culturally, politically, historically, and relate their adventures and misadventures while charting their inspirations and the reasons behind their initial commercial challenges, as well as their long-lasting legacy.
It has an average vote of 6.804 on TMDB.
20. Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head (Pensées et visions d'une tête coupée)
The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.
It has an average vote of 5 on TMDB.