Object Lesson (1941)

Photographer Rudy Burckhardt shows us the ebb and flow of people rushing about Manhattan. Equally exhilarating in his novel approach to snap images quickly on the run, a method he inaugurated and that continues to the present day. In film, he added slow and fast motion, split-screens and superimpositions to his repertory.

Synchromy No. 2, synchronized to the "Evening Star" aria from Wagner's Tannhäuser, uses a statue of Venus to represent the star.

Parabola is a celebration of film’s ability to create new ways of seeing the forms around us. Creating juxtapositions between light/shadow, stasis/motion, and form/music, this black-and-white short invites us to see the parabolic curve, or “nature’s poetry,” as both invigorating and beguiling.

Cale makes a short film called Police Car. No sound, and it is in black & white. Part #31 in the Fluxus Film series.

A montage of elephants, children, Native Americans, logging, a barnstormer, a blimp, people on and in the water, and a man who sings like a bird.

A lady uses her maid to lick her stamps, when an overtly excited man notices the maid, forcibly kisses her, and they wind up stuck to each other.

A balding man drinks a whole bottle of hair tonic. The unexpected surplus of hair promises a successful showbiz career for him and his wife.

A runaway barrel wreaks havoc all over the city.

One of Joseph Cornell’s funniest films, Thimble Theater is structured like a vaudeville variety show about nature.

Breath governs life and is also the sign of changes in emotion.

Experimental color film that shows a magician and his assistant making objects and people appear and disappear. Then they stack up some blocks and a moving picture of a little girl appears on them.

This short film consists of a crazy old colonel being asked to entertain party guests about his exploits of daring. However, being a totally insane old coot, he runs amok acting out his war-time heroics--smashing and throwing everything in the room!

Nymphs and cupids dance in celebration of the arrival of Spring.

Starting in the late 1930s, illustrator and experimental animator Douglass Crockwell created a series of short abstract animated films at his home in Glen Falls, New York. The films offered Crockwell a chance to experiment with various unorthodox animation techniques such as adding and removing non-drying paint on glass frame-by-frame, squeezing paint between two sheets of glass, and finger painting. The individual films created over a nine-year period were then stitched together for presentation, forming a nonsensical relationship that only highlights the abstract qualities of the images. —Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance

A beautiful panoramic view of lower New York from Barclay Street to Battery Park, showing a beautiful stereoscopic effect of the sky-scrapers in the business section of the city.

Carousel - Animal Opera (c.1938), a visual symphony by artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell.

Single frame exposures of words.

Polin performs a song.

In a European seaside village, a maiden takes clean sheets down from the clothesline. Carrying her basket of linens home, she stops to consult a fortune teller. The cartomancienne sees love in the cards. The young woman pauses to reflect. We then see water, swirling, and into view swims a man, as if just appearing on earth. He arrives on shore - is he just in her mind's eye, or is he real? She weaves a garland for her hair. Will they meet?

This sequel to Themis similarly simulates the movement of abstract colours and shapes to form distinct visual patterns.