New York Portrait (1990)

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.

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.

Belfast, it's a city that is changing, changing because the people are leaving? But one came back, a 10,000 year old woman who claims that she is the city itself.

"The Hart of London" is an endlessly layered tour de force. It explores life and death, the sense of place and personal displacement, and the intricate aesthetics of representation. It is a personal and spiritual film, marked inevitably by Chambers’s knowledge that he had leukemia. The late American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage said of Hart, "If I named the five greatest films [ever made], this has got to be one of them." Even this high praise falls short of hyperbole. The Hart of London is at the centre of Chambers’s extraordinary achievement.

Experimental film consisting of a single static shot of the Empire State Building from early evening until nearly 3 am the next day.

An experimental short film by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica.

8mm experimental film directed by Minoru Shinojima. Shot and edited by Kenji Onishi. For 40 years, Minoru Shinojima has been opposed to mining Mt. Buko and is striving to protect the natural environment and cultural ground that inhabit the local area. Idomu’s Testament - Sequel or IDOMU II. In Saitama prefecture Chichibu city there’s a mountain which was most loved by Tokugawa Ieyasu (founder of Tokugawa shogunate). It is Mount Buko, which rose 2 hundred million years ago when the pacific plate moved the underwater volcanoes around Hawaii. It is like the giant turtle shell where Myouken bodhisattva stood. A gentle mountain which heals people’s hearts and gives them the blessings of green and water.

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

This one is a collage of Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, filmed directly from the television set. The constantly recurring motifs of suspense and clichés of plot make it possible to move seamlessly among scenes from different films with different protagonists: uneasy sleep, getting up, listening at the door, turning on the lights, being startled, etc. In the montage, the movements and gestures of the actresses – stars like Lana Turner, Tippi Hedren, and Grace Kelly– seem choreographed and planned for each other. The soundtrack supports this effect with connecting passages of sound that imitate the stereotypes of the genre. The treatment concentrates the dramatic shift from the familiar to the eerie and shows how women become the victims of the voyeuristic glance of film.

Single frame exposures of dot-screens.

Music by Byron Westbrook, 16mm film by Paul Clipson.

An inspiring 75min DIY documentary film on new art and the young artists behind it. It was all filmed on the heat of live action of the first NOVA Contemporary Culture Festival, July and August 2010 in São Paulo, Brazil.

Ken Jacobs applies his patented Eternalism process to 3D images he took of Jackson Pollock's 1954 splatter painting.

A cinematic journey through the world. Non-verbal.

I work with the interaction of space, and being in it, and the energies associated with them. The state of rest, then tipping over from it, and then returning to it again.

Some Things Hidden (2020) is an experiment in rhythmic succession of still images to create illusions of movement through space in an altered time. The film documents a day with the artist and his parents on a hike through active bear country, beneath the Grand Tetons in Wyoming using a hand cranked 35mm movie camera.

A troubled man returns home for the last time.

A short experimental tone-poem documentary that explores three stages of the gentrification of Seattle.

In this program video artist Gary Hill uses a number of his pieces to investigate otherness and ambiguity, dislocation of the senses, the boundary between words and comprehension, the physicality of text, and figurative interactivity.