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.
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.
Experimental film consisting of a single static shot of the Empire State Building from early evening until nearly 3 am the next day.
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."
Song written and produced by Sokif Vocals by Calu (Matryoshka)
Short film by Paul Clipson.
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
Nura is determined to live her life to the full, despite a future without her eyesight.
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
“The changing dots, ectoplasmic shapes and electronic music of L. Schwartz’s ‘Mutations’ which has been shot with the aid of computers and lasers, makes for an eye-catching view of the potentials of the new techniques.” – A. H. Weiler, N. Y. Times
A vibrant animation by Patricia Marx
For an anxious person, being trapped on a boat with someone you don't like can be the tense. Stuck for hours afloat, nothing on the line, bad conversation, and cold winds as resentment rises. Both people chained to a rod and tackle because one won't speak up and admit that they want to go home.
Music by Byron Westbrook, 16mm film by Paul Clipson.
The first step is taken inward and in silence.
A dream lament for a drowned world. Filmed in London, Zurich, San Francisco, Berkeley and Napa. Music by Grouper.
Exploration of the territory in a delirious time-space journey through the largest Megalopolis in America.
