Plastic Bag (2009)

In 1927, motivated by a longing for freedom, Fischinger set off on a walking trip from Munich to Berlin. Covering the distance in nearly four weeks, he captured the country’s hidden beauty. His voyage serves as a symbolical transition and underlines a belief that people are the same everywhere.

Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens follows the course of the famous wind as it originates in the Alps and finds its way to the Mediterranean Sea. Natural sounds and creative camera work provide a mood film showing the effect of the fury of the wind on the life of southern France.

Poetic essay about the beginning of life from labor pains and birth and about its symbolic meaning.

A little girl wanders all alone in the morning, through a bustling city, looking for the white bells she noticed in the window of a florist's shop. This film heralded the birth of a new film language in Latvian cinema. It received awards at the San Francisco and Oberhausen festivals. and was included on the list of the “world’s 100 best short films” by the film critics at the 1995 Clermont-Ferrand film festival.. All three of the film’s authors together with their peers became the creators of the legendary Riga School of Poetic Documentary.

In this child's game, a live-action boy and girl draw characters and compete who is better. The girl draws a flower and the boy draws a car that runs it over. Then a drawn lion chases a drawn girl, until it all becomes frightfully serious.

Often called a “film poem” or a “film symphonie” Huszárik’s masterpiece consists of montages of horses from the dawn of time to the modern times from cave paintings to horse races. (MUBI)

The film centers on an unusual photograph dating back to the 1930s. An investigation of its particulars reveals a tapestry of secrets hidden in the details, and a tale of kidnapping and murder captured in a haunting moment.

An animation made of beach sand on a piece of glass - directed by Caroline Leaf. Based on Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

A haunting look at children watching television.

Two weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, Indonesian Independence leaders proclaimed “Indonesia Merdeka!” ‘Freedom for Indonesia’ and an end to Dutch colonial rule over the Netherlands East Indies. Internationally renowned Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, in Australia as Film Commissioner for the Netherlands East Indies government in exile, resigned his position in protest against Dutch policy, which sought to re-impose its colonial rule. In collaboration with Indonesian activists, Chinese, Indian and Australian trade unionists, and local artists and filmmakers, Ivens made Indonesia Calling, a film documenting the crucial role of Australian trade union support in the establishment of the new Republic of Indonesia. Ivens’ film was an activist documentary; it actively contributed to the events it depicted. All those who worked on it became ‘adversely known’ to the security services.

This is a short film that, although a documentary in appearance, has very little to do with the generic conventions of that form. It would seem, then, that what we have here is the embryo of what he was subsequently to call the "elementary": an abstract or lyrical modality in the perception and exposition of the real.

Through paintings that interact on the principle of Russian dolls, we are drawn along the swirling path of the thoughts of a pilgrim, a solitary walker.

In his experimental short film "Brutalität in Stein" (Brutality in Stone), Alexander Kluge demonstrates how Nazi architecture used dimensions of inhuman and super-human scale to bolster the regime's politics of the same kind. Shots of huge neo-classical architectural structures from the Nazi period are confronted with equally anti-human national-socialist language as a voice-over.

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

An unknown observer is seen traveling through a bleak corridor. At the end of the corridor they see a naked woman, whom they are unable to reach as their trip seems to become increasingly twisted and looped.

Between a wave’s rhythm and the breath of a young woman in her sleep, some animated paintings go on modifying each other.

For Kaleidoscope, which was sponsored by Churchman Cigarettes, Lye animated stenciled cigarette shapes and is said to have experimented by cutting out some of the shapes so that the light of the projector hit the screen directly. As in Colour Box Lye uses music by Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra. - Harvard Film Archive

In 1952, Haanstra made Panta Rhei , another view of Holland through the eyes of a painter and filmmaker. Its poetic images of water, skies and clouds reflect Haanstra's own moods.

Inhabitants depicts animals in panic: the film is mostly filled with shots of mass migrations and stampedes (some, surprisingly, filmed from a helicopter). The title equalizes the species of the earth. Artavazd Peleshian merely alludes to the presence of human beings—a few silhouettes that seem to be the cause of these vast, anxious movements of animal fear. In many ways, this film is an ode to the animal world that moves toward formal abstraction, with clouds of silver birds pulverizing light. Peleshian said, “It’s hard to give a verbal synopsis of these films. Such films exist only on the screen, you have to see them.”

Title cards introduce images we watch without narration; they are displays of shape and color. François de Roubaix's electronic music accompanies these images, photographed under a polarizing microscope. The crystals appear to move like tiny organisms: small four-part fans share the frame with flowing lines of pink. Multiple patterns appear side by side.