Wolf Vostell

Sun In Your Head (1963)



Sun In Your Head was first screened on September 14, 1963 as part of a larger 'happening' by Wolf Vostell called "9 Decollagen," which took place in nine different locations in Wuppertal, Germany. The film is based on Vostell’s principle of ‘décollage,' but since no commercially available moving image technology provided the playback aspects of video at the time, Vostell had to film distorted images off a TV screen and later compose the temporal sequence.

Maya Deren

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)
(with Talley Beatty)



"The movement of the dancer creates a geography that never was. With the turn of the foot, he makes neighbors of distant places. Being a film ritual, it is achieved not in spatial terms alone, but in terms of a Time created by the camera."
--Maya Deren

Click here to read Erin Brannigan's essay on Maya Deren and the history of film utilising choreographic content and form.

René Viénet

Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)

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"Imagine a kung fu flick in which the martial artists spout Situationist aphorisms about conquering alienation while decadent bureaucrats ply the ironies of a stalled revolution. This is what you’ll encounter in René Viénet’s outrageous refashioning of a Chinese fisticuff film. "
---Pacific Film Archive

Wojciech Bruszewski

Matchbox (1975)



Matchbox is deceptively simple, consisting of only two brief shots: a hand striking a matchbox against a ledge, in the exact middle of the shot, and part of the rest of the window. Yet while the cut and the diegetic sound are synchronous at the beginning of the film, subsequent frame shifts create a subtle drift of time, eventually accumulating into the displacement of sound and image.

Popol Vuh

Improvisation (1971)



Keeping with the sound-based, durational part of the theme, here is a modular improvisation by Florian Fricke and Holger Trulzsch, pioneers of electronic music as Popol Vuh, from 1971.

Len Lye

A Colour Box (1935)



New-Zealand born Len Lye, who literally worked his way to London on a steamship in the 1920s, made A Colour Box, the first direct film screened to a general audience and widely considered one of the most important works in the history of animation, by painting his signature abstract patterns directly onto film.

Owen Land (ne George Landow)

Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc (1965-1966)



With typical humor and mocking charm, Land explores the material qualities of celluloid film, turning its imperfections into content, in this early film, made from a brief loop of a Kodak colour test.