Tarantella (1940)
As with many pioneer animators, Mary Ellen Bute is hardly known today, primarily because her films are not easily available in good prints. This was not always true. During a 25-year period, from 1934 until about 1959, the 11 abstract films she made played in regular movie theaters around the country, usually as the short with a first-run prestige feature, such as Mary of Scotland, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, or Hans Christian Andersen--which means that millions saw her work, many more than most other experimental animators.....Tarantella seems Mary Ellen's best film. Using an eccentric modern composition by Edwin Gershefski, Mary Ellen herself animated most of the imagery, using jagged lines to choreograph dissonant scales.
--William Moritz
Gordon Matta-Clark
Fresh Kill (1972)
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Fresh Kill revolves around the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck at the eponymous landfill, and was shown as part of Documenta 5.
data="http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/flash/flvplayer.swf?file=Matta-GC_FreshKill.flv&autostart=false">
Fresh Kill revolves around the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck at the eponymous landfill, and was shown as part of Documenta 5.
Ernie Gehr
Serene Velocity (1970)
Ernie Gehr's structuralist masterpiece SERENE VELOCITY is a hypnotic film which is nothing more than a rapidly edited, rhythmic piece consisting of two shots of an office hallway (one long shot, one zoomed-in close up). Our persistence of vision makes us believe that this film is a perpetual zooming in and out from one end of a hallway to another. Rather, it is a carefully edited and timed film, which consistently cuts back and forth between these two shots. The result is a mesmerizing piece which, as it progresses, treats the eyes to much profundity out of something so simple. We begin to notice the perfect geometry of the composition as the lines of the hallway converge to the center. The film becomes some kind of cosmic heartbeat, as this meticulously timed work of art becomes visual music. There is no beginning, middle or end."---IMDB
Les Blank
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)
An episode in Herzog's history of mock-heroic self-sacrifice [jumping into a cactus bush, walking from Munich to Paris in a blizzard], "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe" is a documentary short in which the German director fullfils his promise to Errol Morris that he would eat his shoe if Morris ever completed his first film (Gates of Heaven.)
The film features Herzog boiling his shoes (the ones he claims to have worn when he made the bet) in garlic and herbs for 5 hours. He eventually eats one of them before an audience at the premier of the film.
Blank went on to direct Burden of Dreams (1982), a feature-length documentary about the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.
An episode in Herzog's history of mock-heroic self-sacrifice [jumping into a cactus bush, walking from Munich to Paris in a blizzard], "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe" is a documentary short in which the German director fullfils his promise to Errol Morris that he would eat his shoe if Morris ever completed his first film (Gates of Heaven.)
The film features Herzog boiling his shoes (the ones he claims to have worn when he made the bet) in garlic and herbs for 5 hours. He eventually eats one of them before an audience at the premier of the film.
Blank went on to direct Burden of Dreams (1982), a feature-length documentary about the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.
George Kuchar
I, An Actress (1977)
George Kuchar, in typical form, outcamps and outacts [in his appropriately bad sense] his titular actress Barbara Lapsley in this low-fi, plotless and nearly themeless film 'about' directing.
George Kuchar, in typical form, outcamps and outacts [in his appropriately bad sense] his titular actress Barbara Lapsley in this low-fi, plotless and nearly themeless film 'about' directing.
John Zorn
Cobra [1992]
John Zorn's improvisational game meets musical composition, Cobra is based on a loosely structured set of rules controlled by Zorn as 'prompter'. Working with a set of cues [as notations] on cards, and sets of basic rules corresponding to those cues, Zorn sets off an indeterminate play of instrumentation and improvisation. The basic form of the Cobra games works as follows:
Players raise hands to get the prompter's attention.
The prompter selects a player.
The selected player indicates the desired card by pointing to a body part that indicates the type of cue, and holds up the number of fingers indicating the specific cue to be given.
The prompter then shows the corresponding cue card to the ensemble---thus putting it into 'play'.
The ensemble performs according to the rule that is represented by the cue card.
This is repeated from until an ending cue is given.
John Zorn's improvisational game meets musical composition, Cobra is based on a loosely structured set of rules controlled by Zorn as 'prompter'. Working with a set of cues [as notations] on cards, and sets of basic rules corresponding to those cues, Zorn sets off an indeterminate play of instrumentation and improvisation. The basic form of the Cobra games works as follows:
Players raise hands to get the prompter's attention.
The prompter selects a player.
The selected player indicates the desired card by pointing to a body part that indicates the type of cue, and holds up the number of fingers indicating the specific cue to be given.
The prompter then shows the corresponding cue card to the ensemble---thus putting it into 'play'.
The ensemble performs according to the rule that is represented by the cue card.
This is repeated from until an ending cue is given.
Alexandr Hackenschmied
Bezucelna prochazka (1930)
Bezucelna prochazka (Aimless Walk) in many ways inaugurated the avant-garde film movement in Czecholovakia, while also proposing early ideas of 'psychogeography' later developed by the Situationist movement. Alexandr Hackenschmied's first film, it made him a leading avant-garde photographer and filmmaker until he emigrated to the US in the late 1930s, marrying Maya Deren in 1942. The majority of the Hackenschmied archive was lost in World War II.
Bezucelna prochazka (Aimless Walk) in many ways inaugurated the avant-garde film movement in Czecholovakia, while also proposing early ideas of 'psychogeography' later developed by the Situationist movement. Alexandr Hackenschmied's first film, it made him a leading avant-garde photographer and filmmaker until he emigrated to the US in the late 1930s, marrying Maya Deren in 1942. The majority of the Hackenschmied archive was lost in World War II.
Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet
En rachâchant (1982)
Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet have created some of the most intellectually demanding, formally austere, and yet politicized films in the history of postwar cinema. Prior to working with Huillet, his late wife and co-director, the French born Straub was an assistant to Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, and Robert Bresson. Their meeting in 1954 eventually resulted in a body of work of uncompromising rigour, defining not only New German Cinema in its attack on the conventions of film language and naturalistic acting, but the intellectual and formal potential of film art in general.
En rachâchant is based on Marguerite Duras’ story Ah! Ernesto, about a young boy who refuses to go to school because they teach him things he doesn't know.
Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet have created some of the most intellectually demanding, formally austere, and yet politicized films in the history of postwar cinema. Prior to working with Huillet, his late wife and co-director, the French born Straub was an assistant to Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, and Robert Bresson. Their meeting in 1954 eventually resulted in a body of work of uncompromising rigour, defining not only New German Cinema in its attack on the conventions of film language and naturalistic acting, but the intellectual and formal potential of film art in general.
En rachâchant is based on Marguerite Duras’ story Ah! Ernesto, about a young boy who refuses to go to school because they teach him things he doesn't know.
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