Where Empty Shells Hide (2021)

In two blank rooms, two figures battle using stagnant movements and mouthless words.

In this anxious and hectic time, Happy Life explores those unusual outlets that soothe the turmoil of the body and mind. In a meditative journey through these analgesic places, this documentary essay paints a portrait of a society in seek of meaning and relief.

Digital TV Dinner is a video art clip from 1979 created using the Bally Astrocade console game to generate unusual patterns. The Bally Astrocade was unique among cartridge games in that it was designed to allow users to change game cartridges with power-on. When pressing the reset button, it was possible to remove the cartridge from the system and induce various memory dump pattern sequences. DIgital TV Dinner is a collection of these curious states of silicon epilepsy set to music composed and generated upon this same platform.

A compilation of four Mother Goose stories "photographed in three-dimensional animation" and unified by a prologue and an epilogue with Mother Goose herself magically setting up a projector to show the films. The familiar nursery rhymes are "Little Miss Muffet," "Old Mother Hubbard," "The Queen of Hearts," and "Humpty Dumpty."

Odds & Ends is a sly comment on the collage film and Beat culture. To discarded travel and advertising footage found at a local film laboratory, Belson Shimane added a mélange of animation—assemblages, cutouts, color fields, and line drawings—and faux hipster narration by Jacobs (credited via the anagram Rheny Bojacs) punctuated by a bongo backing. Strung together with doublespeak and non sequiturs, the monologue skirts the edge of nonsense as Jacobs waxes on about poetry, jazz, “reaching the public,” “having a good time,” and—although “money doesn’t count”—the “possibility of subsidy” through grants. Footage of champagne, tropical beaches, and exotic peoples intermingle with rhythmic drawings and stop-motion flights of fancy. The visuals race on through dazzling transformations, both amplifying and undercutting the patter. —National Film Preservation Foundation

"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 shifting, abstract color imagery of Jordan Belson's "Cosmos," which unfurls to electronic sound, is attributed in the program notes to the artist's insight from experience with drugs and yoga. - The New York Times

A hand animated film that is a precursor for Belson’s later work

A video sketch at Hayama's bed, situated in Bangkok.

Short film by Takashi Makino

Old Bellousinni hates Christmas above all things. Living alone in his great mansion with his butler, his evil has no limits. But on Christmas night, the visit of an old friend and three ghosts that teach him the true meaning of parties and happiness ... or at least what they try. Black and scary comedy based on Dickens's "Christmas Story."

Song written and produced by Sokif Vocals by Calu (Matryoshka)

Scroll paintings prepared like film strips with successive images.

Things were going fine for the chickens, but evolution took a scary turn and the future is now uncertain.

"Light from the Mesa" from Barn Owl's album Ancestral Star.

Two Warlpiri boys grow up together in a small remote indigenous community. They find strength in family and culture when troubles turn up on a trip into town.

Short film by Patricia Marx.

Estonian/Soviet animation short from 1980