Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

The Shining: Forwards and Backwards

An experimental film comprised of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING played forwards and backwards at the same time on the same screen, creating bizarre juxtapositions and startling synchronicities

Bear

Bear (10 minutes, 35 seconds) was Steve McQueen's first major film. Although not an overtly political work, for many viewers it raises sensitive issues about race, homoeroticism and violence. It depicts two naked men – one of whom is the artist – tussling and teasing one another in an encounter which shifts between tenderness and aggression. The film is silent but a series of stares, glances and winks between the protagonists creates an optical language of flirtation and threat.

69SEC

This is a story of love seen from a square, in which a couple gets united, separated and rearranged again. A special kind of puzzle.

Complainant

There is nothing left to do but complain.

Nikamowin

Deconstructing and reconstructing Cree narrative, this film experiments with language to create a linguistic soundscape.

Satrapy

Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

Closed Vagina

Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive

the quarry

the quarry is a silent document of five minutes in the presence of the sublime. This small, quiet 16mm film serves as a testament both to cinema’s failure to reproduce the lived moment and to its success in replacing that moment with one that is equally wondrous.

The Twenty-One Lives of Billy The Kid

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.

Highlights

Lights flicker & fade as focus shifts from artificial to natural light, ending on a second artificial light speeding through the blackened miasma of the night sky.

Roadz2Home

3 minute experimental film.

Entrance to the Grand Burial Chamber

1 minute experimental film.

Castle Two

Found film sequences brought together in the paranoia of the cold war and Vietnam.

Face Lift

Be better and more beautiful than you were before.

Frozen Flesh

A mass murderer kills his victims, then cooks and eats them

Cremaster 3

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...

Cremaster 4

CREMASTER 4 (1994) adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island's folklore ...

Glen or Glenda

A psychiatrist tells two stories: one of a trans woman, the other of a pseudohermaphrodite.

A Thought of Ecstasy

August 2019. Frank recognizes his own story of twenty years ago in a recently published book. He remembers Marie, with whom he had a relationship before she moved to the United States and disappeared from his life. Frank sets out in search of her and finds himself in a USA petrified by a heat wave and lost in suspicion and political paranoia. He heads into the desert in pursuit of Marie.

Cathodic Works

"Presenting, for the first time, a selection of the cathodic experimental works from the seminal Italo-American artist Aldo Tambellini; A selection of classic documents of one of the first pioneers of video art and audiovisual experimentation from New York east side scene of the '60s and '70s. Unreleased and classic works available for the first time." Works included: Black Video 1, Black Video 2, Black Spiral, Black Video Projections, 6673, Minus One, Clone, Interview at the Black Gate Theatre.

Flow

Lion

The lion has to become more physically fit. The gazelle does not think he is capable of doing so.

Heavenly Touch

Jonard is having trouble making ends meet. His mother is suffering from depression, and he and his sister are forced to quit school in order to take care of her. One day, Jonard meets up his friend Rodel, and Rodel introduces him to the world of massage parlors. Rodel teaches him massage, and brings him to Heavenly Touch, a syndicate-run massage parlor that mostly caters to homosexuals.

A

In a close-knit community, imagine a teenager’s struggle with asexuality, where faith clashes with personal discovery.

Pimpinero: Blood and Oil

When Juan, a young gasoline smuggler, is forced to work for a mysterious organization in the desert bordering Colombia and Venezuela, his girlfriend Diana embarks on a journey to uncover the secrets that inhabit this no-man’s-land.

Old Man Junior

Morbius Jr, now an OId Man, is nearing the end of life, when he finds the last hope for all Morbkind. However, as he fights to protect the future of Morbheads, he finds himself facing off against an unlikely of enemy... HIMSELF.

A Mistake

In the midst of a new scheme to publicly report surgeons’ performance, a gifted surgeon’s life is thrown into disarray as her colleagues begin to close ranks, and even her partner, a nurse at the hospital, turns her back on her.

An Ideal Father

Michel, the jovial owner of the only café in a small Normandy town, sees his life turned upside down when his teenage daughter is murdered. The community has his back but soon rumor spreads and Michel is singled out. From the ideal father, he becomes the ideal culprit.

El Rio De La Muerte

Four kayakers take the wrong river into a jungle inhabited by a tribe of merciless cannibals.

Ad Libitum

The talented and practical journalist German Krylov, in pursuit of sensation, finds himself in a company that sells a feeling of love. Unexpectedly for himself, he becomes the object of manipulation and falls into a trap from which it is difficult to get out.

The Quiet Ones

In 2008, a group of men from Denmark and across Europe pull off the biggest heist of all time on Danish soil. Kasper, a boxer with few chances left in life, is offered the opportunity to plan the robbery by its foreign initiators.

I Take a Step

A dyslexic graduate of a pedagogical institute is forced to become a teacher of Russian language and literature in a secondary school. Despite the illness, he manages to establish contact with the students, who in the end will help him keep his job.

Last Straw

A rural roadside diner becomes the host of a maniacal killing spree – leaving a young waitress to clean up the mess. After hard-headed Nancy fires the staff at her dad’s diner, she decides to cover the last shift of the night by herself. Little does she know, she is far from alone. The day is coming back to haunt her and when things begin to spiral out of control, she must fight for her life over the course of one long night.

Lion

Adam is a broken man in the emotional transition as his family crumbles. Through the heartbreak and pain a chance meeting gives hope once more.

Will & Harper

When Will Ferrell's good friend Harper comes out as a trans woman, they take a road trip to bond and reintroduce Harper to the country as her true self.

Alarum

Two married spies caught in the crosshairs of an international intelligence network will stop at nothing to obtain a critical asset. Joe and Lara are agents living off the grid whose quiet retreat at a winter resort is blown to shreds when members of the old guard suspect the two may have joined an elite team of rogue spies, known as Alarum.

The Price of Money: A Largo Winch Adventure

Largo Winch, devastated by the kidnapping of his son, realizes that if he finds those responsible for his bankruptcy, maybe he'll see his son again.

Werewolves

A year after a supermoon’s light activated a dormant gene, transforming humans into bloodthirsty werewolves and causing nearly a billion deaths, the nightmare resurfaces as the supermoon rises again. Two scientists attempt to stop the mutation but fail and must now struggle to reach one of their family homes.