Natural History (2014)

This short film is Godard’s message to the people of Lausanne, specifically journalist and critic Freddy Buache, addressing his reasons why he will not make a film about their town’s 500th anniversary. Rather than cynical or defensive, Godard's bemused narration of the footage of Lausanne is imaginative and even playful, a rumination on cinema's possibilities.

A slow-motion study by Norman McLaren of the pas-de-deux adagio, one of the most exacting and difficult dances of classical ballet. A ballet originally choreographed by the Russian ballet master Asaf Messerer is performed for this film by the internationally known Canadian pair, David and Anna Marie Holmes, to the music of Albinoni’s Adagio. A film to heighten the aesthetic appreciation of classical ballet and to afford observation of the technique and mechanics of the adagio movements.

A short about Romanis in Sweden breaking up camp and moving on.

Ingmar Bergman speaks with Gunnar Bergdahl.

Parajanov's collage of all the footage that remained from his film "Kyiv Frescoes," which was halted by the authorities who demanded that all the negatives be destroyed.

This remarkable companion piece to In the City of Sylvia offers a compendium of images recorded by Guerín in Strasbourg while searching for the traces of a (fictional?) brief encounter some years earlier with a young woman named Sylvia.

A color cocktail by Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, translating into moving patterns of color and light the moods of music written for a jazz ensemble by Eldon Rathburn. Inscribed and colored directly on film.

Roy Andersson's short movies focus on working class and youth daily life, capturing and portraying a small slice of his characters' day.

The title of this twenty-minute video by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, “Freedom and Fatherland,” is the official slogan of the Canton de Vaud, in Switzerland, where the filmmakers live and grew up. To fulfill their commission from a Swiss cultural festival, they adapted a great Swiss novel, “Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud,” by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, from 1911 (about a local artist who goes to Paris for his education and then returns home) and extruded its autobiographical analogies to Godard’s own life and work. Using a choice set of clips from Godard’s films to coincide with events from the painter’s life, verbal references to modern times and to Godard’s own—Sartre, the late nineteen-sixties, the cinema—and images of the Swiss terrain, which plays a decisive role in the work of Pache, Godard, and Miéville (an important filmmaker in her own right), they produce the effect of mirrors within mirrors.

A portrait of people who live on the margins of life and exist outside normal society.

A man sets a ping-pong ball into motion and it becomes fruitful and multiplies.

In 1912, Szczebieniew, a rich and ailing old man, comes to Italy with his young wife, Zinaida. Bored with his company, she looks for amusement and casual affairs.

Animated photographs (made with Jan Lenica) with elements of animated cartoon. A display of military drill.

Paper cutouts over images of mixed colorful liquids, creating hypnotizing swirls and aesthetic explosions, as well as combining original and futurological sounds. Starting with the relentless hunting of antelopes, the geometric cutouts show the constant struggle between the warring groups. We have been observing it since the primeval times, when the tools of the battles were arches and spears, through the times of the domination of swords, later replaced by firearms. The increasing automation and power of war machines, the emergence of tanks and aircraft, eventually the use of weapons of mass destruction lead to total annihilation

A portrait of a traveling circus.

A surreal journey of a displaced spirit as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question - "What is happiness?" - an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness.

In this short film by Norman McLaren, dancers enact the Greek tragedy of Narcissus, the beautiful youth whose excessive self-love condemned him to a trapped existence. Skilfully merging film, dance and music, the film is a compendium of the techniques McLaren acquired over a lifetime of experimentation.

A student is visited in his university lodgings by his critical parents.

This three-part ballad, which often uses music to stand in for dialogue, remains the most perfect embodiment of Nemec’s vision of a film world independent of reality. Mounting a defense of timid, inhibited, clumsy, and unsuccessful individuals, the three protagonists are a complete antithesis of the industrious heroes of socialist aesthetics. Martyrs of Love cemented Nemec’s reputation as the kind of unrestrained nonconformist the Communist establishment considered the most dangerous to their ideology.

Rythmetic is a 1956 Canadian short animated film directed by Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart where numbers are the main characters.