Motion Painting No. 1 (1947)

An experimental short film of images and music made by Norman McLaren.

An illustration of a traditional French Canadian song in the form of progressing cutouts and still pictures.

In the 1936 short Allegretto, diamond and oval shapes in primary colors perform a sensual, upbeat ballet to the music of composer Ralph Rainger. The geometric dance is set against a background of expanding circles that suggest radio waves.

An abstract film in which every motion of coloured shapes is in strict synchronization with music

A waltz played with an accordion starts a short story about the running time.

A tense vignette about the fate of an unlucky man in poverty-stricken Weimar-era Germany.

Allures is a spectacular sequence of moving figures and points, a film which reaches out to the cosmic and the spiritual, where the spatial dimension becomes transcendental.

Conceivably the best of all of Breer’s films to date – has more to do with figuration, according to Breer’s formulation regarding titles with letters or numbers. This becomes clear right away as the title letters are intercut with a flurry of fish swimming past the frame lines, which are made all the more literal through the associative chain established by a snippet of Schubert’s Trout Quintet heard on the soundtrack, along with footsteps – which continue over a profusion of other shapes, colors, and objects, including the title letters again. -- Jonathan Rosenbaum

The fauna of the megalopolis, the jungle of the supermarket, the bedlam of brothels and bars, the effect of the bars in the fog, the swaying ears of corn, the swaying of men hanging from the gallows, the ripple of water – seen by the eye of the animator…

James Whitney’s Lapis (1966) is a classic work of abstract cinema, a 10-minute animation that took three years to create using primitive computer equipment. In this piece smaller circles oscillate in and out in an array of colors resembling a kaleidoscope while being accompanied with Indian sitar music. The patterns become hypnotic and trance inducing. This work clearly correlates the auditory and the visual and is a wonderful example of the concept of synaesthesia.

Experimental film showing film clips of a garden, with birds chirping for the soundtrack.

With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into chains of cells then more complex images from tribal cultures and contemporary modernist concepts. The images react, interpenetrate, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis (or redemption?) is achieved.

To a percussive soundtrack, a succession of more complex animals forms and is consumed by their successors (all formed from beads). Finally, We reach man, who develops ever more sophisticated forms of war.

Trade Tattoo went even further than Rainbow Dance in its manipulation of the Gasparcolor process. The original black and white footage consisted of outtakes from GPO Film Unit documentaries such as Night Mail. Lye transformed this footage in what has been described as the most intricate job of film printing and color grading ever attempted. Animated words and patterns combine with the live-action footage to create images as complex and multi-layered as a Cubist painting. Music was provided by the Cuban Lecuona Band. With its dynamic rhythms, the film seeks (in Lye’s words) to convey “a romanticism about the work of the everyday in all walks of life."

Billy Bitzer filmed 21 short actualities inside the Pittsburgh Westinghouse Works in April and May of 1904. Audiences of the day would have been treated to footage of factory panoramas, women winding armatures and turbines being assembled. These industrial films were produced for the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company.

A fast-paced rhythmic impression of dancers, musicians and sportsmen at a highlands event.

In 'Spirals' Oskar Fischinger designed visual patterns of extreme complexity which often develop in overlapping cycles, yet he interrupts these patterns with radical editing of single frames of contrasting imagery. 'Spirals' exists as a fragmentary unfinished experimental film.

An early impressionist short featuring a woman who dreams of, and escapes into, an autumn forest.

Come take an avant-garde walk in the Montparnasse of the late 1920's. This district of Paris, filmed in a most unusual way, shows how dedicated it is to art. Visit its art galleries and exhibitions, take a glimpse of famous painter Fujita, of Luis Buñuel eyeing the legs of beautiful Parisian passing the terrace of the café where he sits, of Italian futurists Marinetti, Prampolini and Russolo.

At the center are takes which do not change - a tree in a field in Vermont, U.S.A. Since the film was shot over a period of fifty days, the single frame shots create a storm of pictures.