Tung (1966)

Eleven major film makers from Europe, America and Asia talk about Akira Kurosawa and discover surprising influences on their own work.

7362 is concerned with dividing and joining together. It begins with two black circles against a white background, knocking together and gradually moving further apart. The circles fade out, and return as white circles against black inside a square. Images similar to Rorschach blots appear. Gradually the viewer realizes that the images were not originally abstract, but were human forms (dancers, gymnasts, etc.), bridges, and others that have been split down the center of the frame, with their mirror images printed on either side of the split. Red, green, and white tints further abstract the images from their original foundations in the natural world, making dancers appear to be amoebas or dividing cells. The accompanying sound track is a mixture of electronic music and musique concrète ("real" recorded sounds manipulated to sound abstract).

A businessman lives out his daily routine until he meets unexpected stress in the form of his apartment building's elevator.

A darkish journey down memory lane, to visit some news events, folkways and thought patterns associated with the late forties and early fifties. The film is also concerned with such perceptual phenomena as color-space, "false tones" caused by varying black-white alternations of simultaneously seen rhythms set up by multiple repetitive actions, and the use of image outlines as "containers" for other imagery. Sort of a working notebook, which is continued in EASYOUT and DOWN WIND.

A high school outcast new to town becomes friends with a violent loner still haunted by the death of his parents.

Interweaving the forms of personal filmmaking, abstract animation, and the rock opera, this animated musical documentary examines the rise and fall of a nearly-defunct poster and postcard wholesale business; the changing role of physical objects and virtual data in commerce; and the division (or lack of) between abstraction in fine art and psychedelic kitsch. Using alternate lyrics as voice over narration, the piece adopts the form of a popular rock album reinterpreted as a cine-performance.

Utilising an apparently new-found obsession with the colour red and reinvigorating some of the circular imagery of A Man and His Dog Out for Air and 69, Breer delves into the very basis of animation to explore how a variety of easily recognisable objects can be portrayed and manipulated differently using pixillation and classically drawn animation. -Malcolm Turner

A look at the inner workings of a hospital.

A film by Pat O'Neill

3-D puppet animation adventure about two kids from Warsaw in Poland who discover an old piano in amongst a pile of junk that transforms into a magical flying machine. The kids, Anna and her cousin Chip Chip, use the Flying Machine to fly across Europe to find Anna's father in London. Before it happens, they have to learn how to fly the magical machine... On their way they have to navigate an obstacle course of hot air-balloons, swoop into Paris on a mission of the flying machine, weather a fierce storm in the English Channel, and with sunset fast approaching find dad in the big darkening city of London. Before they reach him they are torn from the flying machine by a magic storm, and find themselves back in the pile of junk in Warsaw. However maybe the Dad saw something in the stormy skies of London, because the next day he comes home to his daughter.

Martin is a 30-something photographer who has made it his life quest to find his soulmate. After seeing a girl admiring his work in a gallery, he runs into her again at a photo shoot for a wedding. The two hit it off, but Martin becomes puzzled when she leaves before he wakes up the next morning. From there, we get a peek inside Martin's psyche, as he cannot comprehend why she hasn't made a life-long commitment to Martin after one date.

Featuring interviews with daughter Nicola Lubitsch, film historians Enno Patalas and Jan-Christopher Horak and filmmaker Tom Tykwer (among others), Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin documents the life of the legendary filmmaker from his birth in 1892 to his departure for Hollywood in 1923. The documentary is sprinkled with excerpts from Lubitsch's rarely-seen early work (both as actor and director) and offers fascinating insights into the German film industry in the silent era.

A hand-processed portrait of Jake Williams – who lives alone within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Jake always has many jobs on at any one time, rarely throws anything away, is an expert mandolin player, and has compost heaps going back many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders.

In Capitalism: Slavery, Jacobs uses a Victorian stereograph (a double-photograph) of slaves picking cotton under the watchful eye of a white overseer as the source for this wrenching silent work. Through digital manipulation, Jacobs creates a haunting illusion of depth and movement. It is as if he has "entered" the image and reactivated this historical moment; he moves among the figures and isolates individuals, creating a stuttering, pulsing effect that suggests motion even as it animates stasis.

A fifteen-year-old boy with only months to live is granted one wish from the Dreamscape Charity. But David doesn’t want to go to Disneyland or meet Gary Neville; what he really wants is an hour alone with a naked woman.

Seeking escape from his stalled relationship and unhappy place in the world, a recently pink-slipped music teacher sets out to hike Kentucky's Sheltowee Trace Trail. Among the verdant hills of Appalachia, he encounters various strange characters and becomes the reluctant companion of a gregarious father and son who ultimately help him rediscover what he's been missing.

On the trail of Tall Tales, on a tour of an American treasure, on the path of an area once inhabited by people we don’t know, people we’ve never met, on a land complete with gift shops, parking lots, and sky rides, at the foot of a tree that predates and outlasts all of this, we now insert ourselves into a fog of layers.

An experimental short by Hollis Frampton who films the female form during various activities.

On a day in early summer, two young men play squash, a lifeguard watches an indoor pool, a young woman shelves books at a store, another stages a puppet show for children in a park, an older woman cooks, and Manon gets on her bicycle to ride to a rendezvous with her boyfriend. She turns a corner. Something happens. As she lies on the asphalt, a crowd gathers around her and an ambulance arrives; we hear her voice, first confused as to what has happened, then telling us how her friends and her mother will receive word, and how her friends will gather to talk. As images move back and forth in time, she remembers recent events and expresses some small regrets.

A first love is corrupted as a man recalls his affair with a beautiful circus contortionist in this stop-motion animation of wooden mannequins.