Urs (2009)

A woman sits alone on a chair at a table in a room on one of the top floors of an asylum. Bright spot lights dot the night, sometimes shining on her window. She sharpens pencils and writes on a page in a copy book. The pencil point often breaks under her fingers' force. She places broken points outside the window on the sill. A satanic figure is somewhere nearby, animated but of straw or clay, not flesh. She finishes her writing, tears the paper from the pad, folds it, places it in an envelope, and slips it through a slot. Is she writing to her husband? "Sweetheart, come." Written by

Short animated film featuring the song "Can't Go Wrong Without You" by His Name Is Alive.

The Quays' interest in esoteric illusions finds its perfect realization in this fascinating animated lecture on the art of anamorphosis. This artistic technique, often used in the 16th- and 17th centuries, utilizes a method of visual distortion with which paintings, when viewed from different angles, mischievously revealed hidden symbols.

A porcelain doll’s explorations of a dreamer’s imagination.

Stop-motion animated short film with a white ball, a rabbit, and a girl, and a voice singing "Are We Still Married".

Near an extraordinary chair with many legs, a hand is visible gripping an edge. The hand is weathered, the fingers cracked and scarred. The end of a rifle appears and a shot fires. The bullet is visible whirling through space; it caroms and then goes through a pine cone. A long spoon emerges from a drawer in the chair and stretches toward the hand. The bullet is on the spoon. Later, the hand holds the bullet between two fingers; another shot is fired.

Stop-motion animated short film in which, among other things, a man made of wire looks malevolent.

A display at the strange and wonderful artifacts in a collection of medical curiosities.

В Праге марионетка-профессор с металлическими щипцами вместо рук и открытой книгой вместо шляпы берет мальчика в ученики. Сначала профессор убирает пух и игрушки из головы ребенка, оставляя его голову без верхушки на протяжении большей части фильма. Затем профессор учит парня иллюзиям и перспективам, исследованию объекта через изучение работ рисовальщиков, познанию объекта и миграции форм. Потом ребенок притаскивает коробку с тарантулом, а профессор засовывает в нее «руки» и описывает, что он чувствует. Когда мальчик получает последний урок анимации и создания фильма, профессор дает ему мозги и его собственную открытую книгу-шляпу.

With harpsichord music in the background, a dandy, seated at a table, plucks a quill pen from a ceiling full of them above him, dips it in ink, thinks, then draws a straight line down the page in front of him, out of which sprout six more quill pens, each held by a hand. The calligrapher moves all the hands and pens in unison, drawing an elaborate feathered wing, which comes to live, peeling off the page, and, now a quill pen, slips in to his hand. He tucks it behind his left ear.

Enigmatic, stop-motion, animated story of a man's day.

“When he shot Une seconde (4 min., 20 sec.), a video animation without computer graphics, Richard Angers tried to adapt Norman McLaren’s animation techniques to video shooting and editing. A long-term solitary task, in which images are moved by hand, centimetre by centimetre, in which one plays with the number of images per second, and in which the ± pure quest for effects is more important than the message”. BLANCHARD, Louise. “Les vidéastes sont au ‘rendez-vous’”, Le Journal de Montréal, Montreal (9 February 1992), p. 38.

Two men seek to negotiate an agreement of international significance.

Волшебная история про маленького мышонка, который гулял по лесу. На его пути встают три хищника, которые мечтают ее съесть — сова, лиса и змея. Маленькому мышонку предстоит использовать все свое остроумие и смекалку, чтобы выжить.

The Pollard family is calmly discussing their impending death by atom bomb when Mrs. Pollard recounts a dream in which she sensually bathes herself in the “Tears of Neglected Children”.

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet on a trike captures a puppet bird-man.

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

'Amy, is narrated by a model (Liisa Repo-Martell) who’s painfully uncomfortable with her own body and “old woman’s” face. Astonishing closing image is a tightly composed telephoto shot on the start of a marathon race among young schoolgirls, dashing toward and then across the screen in ultra-slo-mo, and accompanied by a girls’ chorus hauntingly singing Brian Wilson’s God Only Knows. Widely eclectic lensing and looks in various media and in color and black-and-white flow nicely from one section to the next, aided by gifted editor Mark Karbusicky.' ~ Robert Koehler, Variety

Hamdias, a producer who's set out to break new boundaries, plans to finance a film about torture. According to him, torture, the clash of two or more people, is not only what substantiates basic human relationships but also love and politics. Unfortunately Hamdias dies in a freak accident and his project is grounded. After some time, Galai (Olga Karlatos), who should have been the main actress of Hamdias movie, sets out to complete the controversial project. As soon as filming starts again, the thin line that separates reality from a nightmarish obsession begins slowly to blur.

"I was visiting Jerome Hill. Jerome loved France, especially Provence. He spent all his summers in Cassis. My window overlooked the sea. I sat in my little room, reading or writing, and looked at the sea. I decided to place my Bolex exactly at the angle of light as what Signac saw from his studio which was just behind where I was staying, and film the view from morning till after sunset, frame by frame. One day of the Cassis port filmed in one shot." -JM