Weather Diary 3 (1988)

A lovely, poetic, humorous and crystal investigation of mankind standing, sitting and lying down. - John Wasserman

A requiem for a Russian peasant woman, Maria Semionovna Voinova. The film is in two chapters. The first chapter consists of an impression of Maria Semionovna, scenes of the colours of summer time: hay–making, bathing in a river, work in the flax fields and a holiday in the Crimea. The second chapter, set nine years later, is in black and white and deals with how Maria Semionovna's life ended. The mood is one of a sad and elegiac narration.

A peeping tom caught spying on a women's self-defense class is taken captive by the class leader. At first the class uses him as a training dummy, but his treatment at the hands of the ladies steadily becomes more dangerous and humiliating.

Two mysterious men dressed in black and with cigarettes dangling from their mouths drop a large, presumably heavy (since it takes two to carry it) package off on a doorstep and walk away. When the home’s owner returns he drags the package inside, then goes about doing a few more activities before deciding to finally open it. Upon removing the paper, he notices it’s a large steel barrel. Using a blowtorch, he gets the lid off and sees it’s full of oily water… but rising out of the water is a nude, voluptuous, smiling woman, who immediately starts to entice the man by massaging her breasts. Naturally, being in a barrel for who knows how long, she needs to get cleaned off and hops into a bubble bath. While she’s lounging in the tub, the man gets into bed, lights a cigarette and starts to remove him clothes in anticipation. We get to see fantasies from both the man and “the fairy.” —The Bloody Pit of Horror

A short film in which the story of a boy and a priest in Amsterdam is told. In fact, it consists of two films, one commenting on the other, concerning a young man with a crucifixion complex.

Short experimental film by Stephen Dwoskin.

Andy Warhol is a lyrical exploration of Warhol's creative process by filmmaker, painter, and actress Marie Menken. Using a hand-held camera, Menken captures Warhol and his assistants, including Gerard Malanga, as they work at the Factory. The result is an intimate portrait of the artist in the process of creating some of his most famous works, including the Brillo boxes, the Jackie series, and the Flowers silkscreens.

Dreamwood narrates the oniric quest of a modern argonaut in a mysterious island located somewhere on the borders of the unconscious.

An austere treatise on the military-industrial complex that produces napalm.

Jean Painlevé short film examining population explosion and decline.

The 16-minute film falls neatly into two nearly equal parts, separated by fades to and from black. Part one depicts a sunrise, a journey out to sea in a boat, then gulls flying around the boat while fish are cleaned, and finally the journey back and the reappearance of land.

A young man desperately seeks out the fleeting image of a female companion, and though he never quite catches her, he discovers much more through the surreal explorations of his own sexuality.

Close up we see pistons move up and down or side to side. Pendulums sway, the small parts of machinery move. Gears drive larger wheels. Gears within gears spin. Shafts turn some mechanism that is out of sight. Screws revolve and move other gears; a bit rotates. More subtle mechanisms move other mechanical parts for unknown purposes. Weights rise and fall. The movements, underscored by sound, are rhythmic. Circles, squares, rods, and teeth are in constant and sometimes asymmetrical motion. These human-made mechanical bits seem benign and reassuring.

A documentary of an avant-garde theatre performance, presents an orgiastic rite of sex, degradation, and bloody sacrifice, performed by Zero-Jigen.

“Freud established that jokes were structurally akin to dreams in their use of condensation, displacement, representation by opposites, punning and ‘nonsense’. All of these strategies are much in evidence in (Land’s) marvelously duplicitous ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE… [...] so clever and original a filmmaker as to make most others – not to mention his critics – seem flat-footed by comparison. ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE harks back to Bunuel’s early work. Not only is it structured like a dream and filled with sexual imagery, but like Un Chien Andalou, it smacks of being an insider’s joke played upon the avant-garde. Where Bunuel used the insights of psychoanalysis to satirize Christianity, Land– with an almost equal perversity – reverses the process and uses Christianity to send up Freud.” – J. Hoberman, American Film

Sadomasochistic images of self-mutilation.

The film travels in close-up over the mysterious terrains of nude human bodies as they touch and explore one another.

Breer's earliest experiments in animation are wonderfully dense yet lyrical abstractions based on Breer's own geometric paintings. - Harvard Film Archive

An impression of the state of the world in 1929, contrasting similarities and differences in religion, customs, art and entertainment from all over the world. The film is constructed like a symphony.

A short film documenting what was referred to as "The International Poetry Incarnation". It was billed as Great Britain's first full-scale "happening", with the world's leading Beat poets together under one roof at the Royal Albert Hall on June 11, 1965, for an evening of near-hallucinatory revelry. It came to be seen as one of the cultural high points of the Swinging Sixties.