Rudolf Thome

Rote Sonne (1969)

Trailer

Staring Uschi Obermaier, icon of the 1968 student-movement in Germany and one-time member of West Berlin's radical Kommune 1, Thome's second feature film revolves around four women whose own communal apartment is governed by a simple rule: male lovers must be killed after five days.

Emile Cohl

Emile Cohl
Fantasmagoria (1908)



Emile Cohl's charming and surreal film, comprised of over 700 drawings, is considered the first fully animated film ever made.

Richard Long

From Stones and flies: Richard Long in the Sahara by Philip Haas (1988)



British artist Richard Long draws rivers of the world in the deserts of North Africa.

Mary Ellen Bute

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)





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.

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.