Tar pits form as petroleum seeps to the surface through fissures in the Earth’s crust, leaving viscous asphalt pools. To make Tar Pits Film, Jennifer West threw a strip of film into the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, still-bubbling asphalt pools which have seeped from the ground for tens of thousands of years. The film was then ridden over hot asphalt by a motorcycle and drenched in other substances including thick mayonnaise and body lotion.
After the pandemic isolated him from his normal life and friends, a boy must deal with the unbearable dullness of a new life at home, the hurtful and escapist trappings of nostalgia, and distorted perceptions of life and his family through seeking the colors that defined the best years of his youth. A zero-budget experimental short film that expresses universal feelings of loss, paranoia, and hope the world experienced during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic through some abstract scenarios and sounds.
Experimental film consisting of a single static shot of the Empire State Building from early evening until nearly 3 am the next day.
A musical horror story about two young women who are stalked through a shopping mall by a cannibal. He follows them home, and here the victims become the aggressors.
Via the New York Times: "...a severely obscure meditation on pre-revolutionary Russia in the form of an encounter between a ghost from the past and the ghost's present-day guardian. In fact, the two characters seem to be the shade of Anton Chekhov and the young man who tends a Chekhov museum in the Crimea, though that is never made explicit."
A synthesized video environment.
"Momentum is Belson's most serene and gentle film since Allures. This treatment of the sun as an almost dreamlike hallucinatory experience is both surprising and curiously realistic." -Gene Youngblood
The human psyche unfolds and becomes something different in this musical dance film featuring specialised choreography and direction.
The first step is taken inward and in silence.
How would a found footage film look if the footage was never found? This conceptual art experiment questions the very nature of film and cinema while serving as an ironic tribute to the found footage horror pop culture. The found footage format provides the narrative justification for such a film to exist: the non-existence exists because the footage existed yet it was lost and never found.
A hand animated film that is a precursor for Belson’s later work
Nura is determined to live her life to the full, despite a future without her eyesight.
An NTSC space opera.
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
Abstract shapes morph in and out of focus.
A commission for the San Francisco Exploratorium, this film-collage studies the water systems and architecture of the San Francisco waterfront, in abstract and formal contexts.
Computer imagery dances before a techno soundtrack.
