Seven Images of Disappearance (2023)

short film by Guy Sherwin

A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shoshtakovich, and replete with rapidly mutating geometries, Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. In the late 1940s, Lewis Jacobs observed that Bute’s films were “composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment.” Bute herself wrote that she sought to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music.”

"I try to leave the imagination of the spectator as free as possible by using purely invented, abstract forms rather than representational forms. In watching these films it is not necessary to search for hidden meanings of try to associate these invented forms with familiar objects. The spectator may simply relax and look at these films as one would listen to music in order to fully respond to them." -Davis

Seven actors are brought to an isolated house where they must stay in character for three days under constant surveillance.

Utilising an apparently new-found obsession with the colour red and reinvigorating some of the circular imagery of A Man and His Dog Out for Air and 69, Breer delves into the very basis of animation to explore how a variety of easily recognisable objects can be portrayed and manipulated differently using pixillation and classically drawn animation. -Malcolm Turner

For the 1977 intermedia exhibition Tangents I, Dammbeck and artist Frieder Heinze had planned a film that would combine non-camera animation with 35mm footage of a train ride through Dresden. When Tangents I was banned Dammbeck continued working on the film by himself. METAMORPHOSES I – the first experimental film to be shown publicly in the GDR – marks the filmic beginning of Dammbeck’s long-term art project the HERAKLES-KONZEPT (HERCULES CONCEPT).

This is one of those rare, total in-camera edits that provided options for many of my later, densely layered films. The timing and lap dissolves were a pitch-perfect gift! Super 8, silent, experimental.—Joseph Bernard

“Requiem pour le XXè siècle” is a manifesto against war. It is an elegy. The photograph is connected with images that are part of our collective memory: extracts from newsreels of World War II that have been reworked and transformed through various optical and electronic processes. World War II was a condensation of violence (biological and environmental destructions, racism, ethnic clearing, and persecution of people who are different…) and ongoing wars perpetuate that violence. This work is a metaphorical representation of all past, present and future wars. Constructed on the dramatic tension between the violence of wars and the presence of the intersex hermaphroditic “Angel”: Their eyes are bandaged; they are a symbol for difference, having an ambiguous position: observer, witness, victim or judge.

Brakhage's hand carvings directly into the film emulsions are illuminated and textured by Solomon's lighting and optical printing.

The footage shown here features a mix of still images, moving images, and short animated clips. The still images are primarily of a woman in various scenarios, from riding a bike to lying nude on a jagged rock formation. The animated scenes throughout the film include black backgrounds with the following items in bright colors and patterns: mushrooms, the phrase Good-by Fat Larry, and a tiny truck. The soundtrack to this film is a folk melody.

Sabine vows to give up married lovers, and is determined to find a good husband. Her best friend Clarisse introduces her to her cousin Edmond, a busy lawyer from Paris. Sabine pursues Edmond, with the encouragement of Clarisse, but Edmond does not seem very interested.

For this I used 3 different types of VHS static first, then I started messing with them, and when I was happy with the end result, I decided to shoot the whole thing on my monitor with my phone 3 different times, they're all shot in 720p 15 fps with varying shutter speeds. Then I superimposed the videos and exported the full project in 480p 400 kbps. The song is withoutu by SALEM. Obviously inspired by Stan Brakhage, got the inspiration to finish the project by watching the work of Audrey Robinovitz. Hope you get something out of this like I did :3

A children's film about the largest mass suicide of the 20th century reconstructs the 1978 event. The Reverend Jim Jones forced nearly a thousand followers of his People's Temple sect to drink poison in the settlement of Jonestown, Guyana, South America. A third of them were children. Jan Bušta gives sadists, voyeurs, and necrophiliacs one minute to leave the cinema. His self-reflective documentary, which is the result of ten years of time-lapse filming, does not depict dramatic scenes. To the sound of an audio recording from that fateful day, we see a collage of child ghosts preaching about escaping the corruption of the world.

Fajar Suharno was a theater maestro from the 80's to the 90's. He was imprisoned because his theater activities were considered against the New Order government. At its peak, he made a show entitled "Geger Uwong Ngoyak Macan" about the events of crushing people who were considered thugs/criminals (Petrus). The show was held exactly the day before the massacre took place

“The ocean is the only crossing to reach Mount Analogue. Through each wave, which breaks into each of the primary colours, a gateway opens to a new perception...”. First piece of a short film series, inspired by the pre-Hispanic myth of the Sixth Sun.

An interconnected look at tradition, colonialism, property, faith, and science, as seen through labor practices that link an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning.

Erkki Kurenniemi was arguably one of the first artists to propose or fantasise about a complete cultural surrender to cyber existence, and his entire career, covering such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, music, engineering, film, dance or rhetorics, testifies to this desire to escape the limits of the human body and transgress into a different dimension, bordering on techno-fetishism. In his 1964 short Electronics in the World of Tomorrow, Kurenniemi presents a slideshow of the most aseptic signs of technological imagination: diagrams, chips, machines, cold surfaces. But footage of human warmth also comes up - mostly in black and white, as if to give humans the status of a memory. Originally silent, the film was in this version endowed with a electronic music piece by Kurenneimi himself: a cold, aggressive soundtrack that could be said to present technology as a potentially menacing affair, although this is a reading that the director would certainly refute.

This is Dr. Francis Schaeffer's spectacular series on the rise and decline of Western culture from a Christian perspective. The series presents profound truths in simple language and concludes that man's only hope is a return to God's Biblical absolute -- the Truth revealed in Christ through the Scriptures. Each 30-minute episode focuses on a significant era of history while presenting answers to modern problems: The Roman Age The Middle Ages The Renaissance The Reformation The Revolutionary Age The Scientific Age The Age of Non-reason The Age of Fragmentation The Age of Personal Peace & Affluence Final Choices