Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961)

Genre : Documentary

Runtime : 5M

Director : Marie Menken

Synopsis

Filmed at the Alhambra in Spain in just one day, according to Marie Menken. Arabesque for Kenneth Anger concentrates on visual details found in Moorish architecture and in ancient Spanish tile. The date 1961 refers to the addition of Teiji Ito's soundtrack and its subsequent completion, but the film was likely shot in 1960 or earlier. - David Lewis

Actors

Kenneth Anger
Kenneth Anger
Willard Maas
Willard Maas

Crews

Marie Menken
Marie Menken
Director
Teiji Ito
Teiji Ito
Music
Marie Menken
Marie Menken
Cinematography

Similar

Happiest Season
A young woman's plans to propose to her girlfriend while at her family's annual holiday party are upended when she discovers her partner hasn't yet come out to her conservative parents.
Shiva Baby
College student Danielle must cover her tracks when she unexpectedly runs into her sugar daddy at a shiva - with her parents, ex-girlfriend and family friends also in attendance.
Blockers
When three parents discover that each of their daughters have a pact to lose their virginity at prom, they launch a covert one-night operation to stop the teens from sealing the deal.
Below Her Mouth
An unexpected affair quickly escalates into a heart-stopping reality for two women whose passionate connection changes their lives forever.
Moonlight
The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.
D.E.B.S.
The star of a team of teenage crime fighters falls for the alluring villainess she must bring to justice.
The Edge of Seventeen
Two high school girls are best friends until one dates the other's older brother, who is totally his sister's nemesis.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post
Pennsylvania, 1993. After getting caught with another girl, teenager Cameron Post is sent to a conversion therapy center run by the strict Dr. Lydia Marsh and her brother, Reverend Rick, whose treatment consists in repenting for feeling “same sex attraction.” Cameron befriends fellow sinners Jane and Adam, thus creating a new family to deal with the surrounding intolerance.
Carol
In 1950s New York, a department-store clerk who dreams of a better life falls for an older, married woman.
20th Century Women
In 1979 Santa Barbara, California, Dorothea Fields is a determined single mother in her mid-50s who is raising her adolescent son, Jamie, at a moment brimming with cultural change and rebellion. Dorothea enlists the help of two younger women – Abbie, a free-spirited punk artist living as a boarder in the Fields' home and Julie, a savvy and provocative teenage neighbour – to help with Jamie's upbringing.
Ava
Ava, 13, is spending the summer on the Atlantic coast when she learns that she will lose her sight sooner than expected. Her mother decides to act as if everything were normal so as to spend their best summer ever. Ava confronts the problem in her own way. She steals a big black dog that belongs to a young man on the run...
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.
An Education
Despite her sheltered upbringing, Jenny is a teen with a bright future; she's smart, pretty, and has aspirations of attending Oxford University. When David, a charming but much older suitor, motors into her life in a shiny automobile, Jenny gets a taste of adult life that she won't soon forget.
Yes, God, Yes
Alice, a young innocent Catholic girl, is tempted into masturbating after an AOL chat suddenly turns sexual, however is conflicted as the act would be considered a sin.
Tell It to the Bees
Dr. Jean Markham returns to the town she left as a teenager to take over her late father's medical practice. When a school-yard scuffle lands Charlie in her surgery, she invites him to visit the hives in her garden and tell his secrets to the bees, as she once did. The new friendship between the boy and the bee keeper brings his mother Lydia into Jean's world.
LelleBelle
19-year old Belle practices playing the violin diligently, but is unable to impart her music with a sensitive undertone. Her life changes when she discovers that sexual desire stimulates passion in her music.
My First Summer
Isolated on a remote property, 16-year-old Claudia finds her world transformed when a spirited girl named Grace wanders into her garden.
Water Lilies
Set during a sultry summer in a French suburb, Marie is desperate to join the local pool's synchronized swimming team, but is her interest solely for the sake of sport or for a chance to get close to Floriane, the bad girl of the team? Sciamma, and the two leads, capture the uncertainty of teenage sexuality with a sympathetic eye in this delicate drama of the angst of coming-of-age.
Transhood
Filmed over five years in Kansas City, this documentary follows four transgender kids – beginning at ages 4, 7, 12, and 15 – as they redefine “coming of age.” These kids and their families show us the intimate realities of how gender is re-shaping the family next door in a unique and unprecedented chronicle of growing up transgender in the heartland.
High Art
A young female intern at a small magazine company becomes involved with a drug-addicted lesbian photographer, both of whom seek to exploit each other for their respective careers, while slowly falling in love with each other.

Recommend

Scotch Tape
Shot in 1959, Scotch Tape is Jack Smith's first film -- a joyous, three-minute romp, in color, using Peter Duchin's rhumba "Carinhoso" for its soundtrack. Three young men merrily bop through the wreckage of razed buildings at the site of what would become Lincoln Center. Apparently, Scotch Tape was never edited and, instead, was cut in the camera by Smith, combining long shots and close-ups while filming mostly from overhead. The title comes from a small strip of scotch tape that was accidentally stuck on the camera and so is visible in the lower-right corner of the frame throughout the film.
Children's Party
Director Joseph Cornell evokes the nostalgia of childhood by filming a children's party.
The Midnight Party
A short film where circus performers entertain children.
Five Minutes of Pure Cinema
Avant-garde short focused on the pure elements of film like form, visual composition, and rhythm.
The Cuckoo Waltz
London to Brighton in Four Minutes
London to Brighton in 4 minutes BBC interlude. From the days when TV was all live and programming was hectic. Often when one program finished, the next one was not ready yet, and the gap had to be filled. So the BBC developed a number of interludes to fill these gaps, this being the most famous one.
Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse
A high-speed view of Paris via train-track; Zooming down the Seine by boat. Chomette's first film, Games of Reflections and Speed, traverses tunnels and elevated railways to produce a disarming rhythm.
Recreation
Featuring a commentary by Noël Burch (in nonsense French), Recreation's rapid-fire montage of single-frame images of incredible density and intensity has been compared to contemporary Beat poetry.
OffOn
The human eye, the human form, the human face: these are the three central images of this avant-garde collage and kaleidoscope of shifting and fractured images, changing colors, and pulsing rhythms. Near the end, a tree appears briefly, and birds fly - first white, then red and blue. Celtic knots morph from one to another. The images become Rorschach tests although the mood, driven by the rapid changing images and the soundtrack, remains frantic.
Color Film
Further examining the medium of film itself, Colorfilm is a work Lawder made while trying to make a minimalist, "pure color" film. Using spliced-together strips of colored film leader in white, yellow, blue, red, green, etc., Lawder ran the film through a projector and found the results to be quite boring. While he was running the film, though, he noticed how beautiful the colored strips of film looked as they ran through the projector. So, he turned a camera on the projector and filmed the colored film gorgeously winding its way through the projector's machinery." - Noel Black, Colorado Springs Independent
High Kukus
In this homage to Zen poet Basho, the subtle changes of a pond are chronicled on film over a period of time. Broughton recites his cuckoo haikus in the background.
The Wall
A wall blocks the path of two people. One man submits, while the other refuses to admit defeat.
The March of the Machines
La marche des machines is a thundering, thumping symphony of turbines, belts, flanges, wheels and sparks.
Valse Triste
With a similar dreamy mood like its predecessor "Take the 5:10 to Dreamland" (1976) this clip starts with a boy getting into his bed. The camera zooms in into the boy's mind and a slow, sad waltz (i.e."Valse Triste") accompanies images of a locomotive, a miner, the globe, the sky, a sheep heard, etc. Disparate elements, but if one concentrates only at the movement of the figures, one can perceive a commotion, slowly livening up: The starting wheels of the heavy locomotive, the tired miner pushing the heavy cart of coal bricks, the globe smoothly turning around and around, the clouds imperceptibly floating in the sky, the sheep idly moving in the herd, etc. We reach the first climax when a mannequin opens her coat like a flower. The second big crescendo spurts out from a "water hose", after watching schoolgirls doing gymnastics for quite a while. A sad, but nostalgic aftertaste lingers in the end when funeral cars drive away through a flooded area…
69
Robert Breer animation from 1969. 16mm, color, silent, using spray paint & stencils.
Pacific 231
An engine moves from the roundhouse to a track where it couples with several passenger cars. At 2:10 in the afternoon, it starts a trip out of the station through the countryside to its destination. The film consists of a montage of shots, some close up, of the engine and its gears and wheels. With the accompanying ambient sounds and an orchestral score, the emphasis is on the engine's power and speed. Parallel lines of multiple tracks, telephone wires, and trees confirm a careful composition.
Eyewash
A free flow from photography to geometric abstraction hand-painted by Breer. - Harvard Film Archive
The Dead
An experimental short film from Stan Brakhage.
Study II: Hallucinations
"Studie II (Hallucinationer)" (Study II (Hallucinations)) (1952), comprises twelve staged scenes that were modelled after a set of drawings. Accompanied by metallic sounds, various body parts, limbs and objects form surrealistic collages against the background of a black space. Peter Weiss intended to create associative images that can not be deciphered completely. Beyond any logical interpretation, he wanted to show pure inner feelings.
Samadhi
Samadhi is both mystical and mysterious, an incredible fusion of movement, sound and colour. Belson notes the influence of his study and practice of Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism on the creation of Samadhi. The film is inspired by the principles of yogic meditation: the movement of consciousness towards samadhi (union of subject and object), the fusion of atma (breath and mind), a state which reveals the divine force of kundalini, a bright white light we discover at the end of Samadhi. The Tibetan Book of The Dead is the inspiration behind Belson’s use of colour in Samadhi, corresponding to descriptions of the elements of Earth, Fire, Air and Water in the book. —Sophie Pinchetti, The Third Eye