"Forced to paint, the artist will either create or be consumed."
Forced to paint, the artist will either create or be consumed. A modern gothic art film told through a series of striking still images.
Social & External
The people behind it
Samuel Jean Butler
The Painter
In 1944 Lye moved to New York City, initially to direct for the documentary newsreel The March of Time. He settled in the West Village, where he mixed with artists who later became the Abstract Expressionists, encouraged New York’s emerging filmmakers such as Francis Lee, taught with Hans Richter, and assisted Ian Hugo on Bells of Atlantis. Color Cry was based on a development of the “rayogram” or “shadow cast” process, using fabrics as stencils, with the images synchronized to a haunting blues song by Sonny Terry, which Lye imagined to be the anguished cry of a runaway slave. —Harvard Film Archive
The Lesbian Almanac is a Situationist calendar of dyke objects. This video features 12 paintings from the dyke community, examples of word play and literal interpretation through political claims and personal visions that become a lesbian collective unconscious.
Somnambulistic circus Ribera&Velazquez welcomes everyone to the show, where shadows, that escaped the platonic cave, turn the carousel in the foggy catacombs.
Four Poems is a series of video poems in which the horizontal lines of a poem, usually composed of text, have been substituted for horizontal lines of moving image. The piece explores what remains of a poem when its language is removed, and how images might interact with each other in similar or different ways to words. It asks whether rhyme, rhythm, sibilance, or dissonance, might be effectively created by juxtaposing images. It also asks whether arranging images might create a sense of authorship, intentionality, or a tone of voice, in the way that arranging words might. Finally, Four Poems invites the viewer to consider how they might ‘read’ a poem – does a reading have to occur from top-to-bottom, or might new interpretations be possible when the moving parts of the poem can all be seen at once?
Experimental short film by Bastian Clevé (1976).
Experimental short film directed by Bastian Clevé (1976).
Bastian Clevé - 14 mins - 1976
Bastian Clevé - 10 mins - 1977
A teenage actress makes a fateful deal in an attempt to grab Broadway stardom, and everything begins to fall apart.
A film by Paul Clipson.
Quatre altitudes bosniaques is an exercise in topographic cinema shot in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The document draws on the geography of the city of Sarajevo, from which the filmmakers construct a visual ethnography fragmented into four levels of elevation.
A woman experiments with a Dreamachine, hoping to escape trouble. Within the light and dark of the machine, violent emotions awaken.
Symphonic documentary exploring the Miami identity in six movements. It was performed and projected live by the New World Symphony, led by Michael Tilson Thomas on Feb 22, 2018. The film is made up of five separate and synchronized video channels, projected onto the walls of the New World Center concert hall, above a full symphony orchestra.
The first 12 minutes would later be released as "Fountain of Dreams"
As a teenager, I used to take a bus, whose ticket had the inscription "To the Flores Cemetery" as the end of its route. At that time, whenever I saw the ticket, I thought of Charles Baudelaire's "The Flowers of Evil" and of imaginary walks the bus would take me on until I reached the Flores Cemetery. Thirty years later, I found one of those tickets in a box, and it makes me think of finitude and the transient. Film made with Floripondio flowers, Hollyhock and Santa Rita petals, blood, cobwebs, insects found after a storm, mushrooms, onions, and hair on 16mm film.
Victor Frankenstein is a promising young doctor who, devastated by the death of his mother during childbirth, becomes obsessed with bringing the dead back to life. His experiments lead to the creation of a monster, which Frankenstein has put together with the remains of corpses. It's not long before Frankenstein regrets his actions.
20 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.
In the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider. Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds… and remembers.
Clinging to a smooth, curved surface high above a sentient abyss, a woman tries to cover the few feet back to safety without losing purchase and falling to her death.
A man on the verge of a promotion takes a mysterious hallucinogenic drug that begins to tear down his reality and expose his life for what it really is.
The government gets wind of a plot to destroy America involving a trio of nuclear weapons for which the whereabouts are unknown. It's up to a seasoned interrogator and an FBI agent to find out exactly where the nukes are.
The film goes behind the scenes of the 1999 sci-fi movie The Matrix.
An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.
The Shadow Mountains, 1983. Red and Mandy lead a loving and peaceful existence; but when their pine-scented haven is savagely destroyed, Red is catapulted into a phantasmagoric journey filled with bloody vengeance and laced with fire.
Ebony Jackson, a struggling single mother fighting her personal demons, moves her family into a new home for a fresh start. But when strange occurrences inside the home raise the suspicions of Child Protective Services and threaten to tear the family apart, Ebony soon finds herself locked in a battle for her life and the souls of her children.
A Chicago artist's sanity starts to unravel, unleashing a terrifying wave of violence when he begins to explore the macabre history of the Candyman.
To put their demons to rest once and for all, Josh Lambert and a college-aged Dalton Lambert must go deeper into The Further than ever before, facing their family's dark past and a host of new and more horrifying terrors that lurk behind the red door.
In 1973, a young gallery assistant goes on a wild adventure behind the scenes as he helps aging genius Salvador Dali prepare for a big show in New York.
A masked maniac terrorizes the same small community where a murderer known as the Phantom Killer struck decades earlier.
Vampire death dealer Selene fends off brutal attacks from both the Lycan clan and the Vampire faction that betrayed her. With her only allies, David and his father Thomas, she must stop the eternal war between Lycans and Vampires, even if it means she has to make the ultimate sacrifice.
A gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.
This special explores the return of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker to the screen, as well as Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen to their classic roles. Director Deborah Chow leads the cast and crew as they create new heroes and villains that live alongside new incarnations of beloved Star Wars characters, and an epic story that dramatically bridges the saga films.
Nicole Walker always dreamed of being swept away by someone special — someone strong, sexy and sensitive who would care for her more than anything else in the world. David is all that and more: a modern-day knight who charms and seduces her, body and soul. But her perfect boyfriend is not all he seems to be. His sweet facade masks a savage, dark side that will soon transform Nicole's dream into a nightmare.
A precocious girl, her nasty parents, two punk-rock losers and a weak-kneed salesman inadvertently become the guests of two ghoulish senior citizens in their dark, haunted mansion.
A subjective documentary that explores various theories about hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick's classic film The Shining. Five very different points of view are illuminated through voice over, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments.
