THOM ANDERSON
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF
USA, 2003, 169 mins, video

Los Angeles Plays Itself is a video essay by Thom Anderson about how movies have portrayed the city of Los Angeles. Carefully weaving together footage from dozens of films made in or about the city, Anderson gradually builds his thesis about how Hollywood has represented, and misrepresented, its home town.

Movies about Los Angeles have been, for the most part, period films, set in the past or in the future, and they replace the public history of the city with a secret history, opaque to its citizens This urban legen is not innocent. It serves to dissuade naïve viewers from political engagement by telling them that they are condemned to ignorance and powerlessness, not matter what they do. In fact,the truth is the opposite: the public history is the real history, as the treatments of films such as Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and L.A. Confidential demonstrate.

“No film this year has given me more pleasure than Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, a 169-minute documentary on the way LA has been represented in the movies using clips from more than 100 films ranging from the very familiar Double Indemnity to the (to me unknown) 'gay porno classic' also called Los Angeles Plays Itself”– Philip French, The Observer

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KATERINA ATHANASPOULOU
SWEET SALT
UK, 2005, 5 mins, video

A love story of obsession and sharp teeth between a woman left behind in a fairy tale gone wrong and a merman trapped in a reality that drowns him. A conundrum of fate and desire where the victim longs for the murderer’s tears.
An animate! Film

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GEORGE BARBER
BEYOND LANGUAGE
UK, 2005, 5 mins, video

Beyond Language is an attempt to convey expression and emotion without words.  Two people are trying to convey feelings to each other on a city overpass.  Little camerawork is used and the piece is achieved in just one take.

The work might be thought of as 'drip painting' with the human voice. Jackson Pollack famously tried to get beyond rationality and culture, so that his whole being simply became a vehicle to express himself through paint.  He tried to disengage his mind.
In Beyond Language two women attempt to 'throw' sounds in an irrational fashion, making patterns that seem to suggest meaning but in fact are just unrecognized noises.  Like Pollock, they are attempting to use their voice and express themselves in a totally irrational, pre-cultural fashion.  To be creative in a non-word based, abstract, non pictorial or literal fashion.

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STAN BRAKHAGE
THE GOD OF DAY HAD GONE DOWN UPON HIM
USA, 2000, silent, colour, 16mm

“This film of single-strand photography begins with the "fire" of reflective light on water and on the barest inferences of a ship. Throughout, the interwoven play of light and water tell the inferred "tale" of the film through rhythm, the tempo, through visible textures and forms in gradual evolution, through resultant "moods" generated by these modes of making, and, then, by the increasingly distant boat images, birds, animals, fleeting silhouettes of people and their artifacts, flotsam and jetsam of the sea-dead, as well as (near end, and almost as at a funeral) flowers in bloom, swallowed by darkness midst the crumbling of the sand castles. These nameable objects (sometimes, at first, quite enigmatic) are the frets of Symbol; but always the symbolic content is swept back into the weave of sea and light and seen, as is the merry-go-round near the beginning of the film, or the horizontally photographed fountain mimicking incoming ocean waves, to be as if spawned in the mind during oceanic contemplation. In fact, the structure of the entire film might be characterized thus: meditation on ocean is interrupted continually by rapidly cut visual frets of (at first) irritated thought; but then gradually across the course of the film these fraughts of symbols and rapidly edited constructs become a calm ’kin to resignation, become more at-one with the diminishing light and incoming waves. The turning point of the film is near its midpoint where tall and relatively violent waves smash their cold and fearsome colors left to right across the screen, interwoven with an old man sitting in a dark blue room, followed by hints of backyard fences, grasses, distant ephemeral flowers and a hung whirling decoration. Reminders of this midpoint are accomplished through visual rhymes such as similarities of blue and a madly whirling kite against a bright sky, as well as by the (near end) entire sequence in which multiple gdfdafdasfdsaarish flowers invade the (by then) almost fully meditative sea imagery. There are visual rhymes also connecting this work with its two previous "parts" (A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea and The Mammals of Victoria), such as an orange ball attached to a boat which "rhymes" with thrown orange balls in the previous film. As the whole film is stiched with red-orange-yellow flares (indicators of light-struck sections at beginning and ending of individual 100-foot rolls (making of the film a distinctive sequential evolution), so the end of the film has a slight flare-up (or fillip of hope?) after burgeoning dark.” - Stan Brakhage, March 1, 2000

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STAN BRAKHAGE
PERSIAN SERIES #6 – 12
USA, 2000, silent, colour, 26 mins ,16mm

A series of films devoted to Persian miniatures attesting to Brakhage's masterful command of colour.

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STAN BRAKHAGE
WATER FOR MAYA
USA, 2000, silent, colour, 5 mins, 16mm

Water for Maya is a hand-painted work which came into being during a film interview with Martina Kudlacek about Maya Deren. There was a sudden recognition of Maya's intrinsic love of water and thus of all Mayan liquidity in magic conjunction, reflection, etc.

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ROBERT BREER
WHAT GOES UP
USA, 2003, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm

A volley of rapid visual associations from the mind of Robert Breer, animating collage, drawings and snapshots in a playful, but rigorous manner. What goes up must come down.

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DAMIAN GASCOIGNE
CAREFUL
UK, 2005, 6 mins, video

A series of inter-cut visual postcards, snapshots of ordinary family situations. Caring, anxious but distracted parents are teaching their children to be safe. However they are in a battle with Fate to avoid disasters – and dry cleaning bills.
An animate! Film

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NICKY HAMLYN
PANNI
UK, 2005, silent, colour, 3 mins, 16mm

Panni was shot in a rain-lashed garden in central Italy, in the last week of 2004.

It depicts the layers, veils and mattes created by washing on a line. A mix of interlaced, single-frame sequences and normal shooting was deployed to develop  ideas about translucency, opacity and looking-through.

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NICKY HAMLYN
OBJECT STUDIES
UK, 2005, silent, colour, 17 mins, 16mm

Object Studies is organised around a colour scheme based loosely on the hues of the colour temperature scale; brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white. Time-lapse, interlaced, single-frame sequences and lap-dissolves were deployed to explore density, translucency and the interactions of different kinds of cast-shadows. The space between the camera and its subject is also  explored. Space is flattened, collapsed, expanded and bridged in different ways.

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NICKY HAMLYN
TRANSIT OF VENUS
UK, 2005, silent, B&W, 2 mins, 16mm

The Transit of Venus is composed of two consecutive, partial, time-lapse records of the Transit of Venus, when Venus passed across the Sun on June 8th 2004.

Transits of Venus are rare and currently occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits 8 years apart separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. Before 2004 the last pair of transits of Venus were in December 1874 and December 1882. The second of the current pair will be on June 6th, 2012.

Although the film was shot with a very small aperture, reduced shutter opening and several layers of neutral density filter, resulting in a black sky, the sun nevertheless remains contrastingly dazzling, and Venus, consequently, is obliterated. These two short sequences are contextualized with data detailing the various technical parameters which determine the peculiarity of the image.

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BIRGIT & WILHELM HEIN
ROHFILM *NEW PRINT*
Germany, 1968, B&W, 20 mins, 16mm

"...the Heins' Grun, Rohfilm, and Reproductions include actual film collage and hand attacks upon the celluloid as well as wandering framelines and sprocket holes. Although the Heins' technique in these films is less structural, their affirmation (particularly in Rohfilm) of the film's substance and its physical presence in the projector is overwhelming, more powerful than any American film I have seen." - David Curtis, Experimental Cinema.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
TRUMPIT
USA, 1955, sound, B&W, 7 mins, 16mm

Stan Brakhage stars as the constricted love in this spoof of pseudo-erotic card play.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
HYMN IN PRAISE OF THE SUN
USA, 1960, sound, colour, 8 mins, 16mm

A celebration of the filmmaker’s daughter’s birth. The blazing garden as a metaphor for the cycle of life.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
THE SEASONS’ CHANGE
USA, 1960, silent, B&W, 7 mins, 16mm

A simple contemplation of the plum tree through a window. In rich black and white.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
JEWEL FACE
USA, 1964, sound, colour, 6 mins, 16mm

(Now) famous sculptor artist George Herms displays drawings on butcher paper as the filmmaker’s daughter plays with colours of light.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
THE DREAM MERCHANT
USA, 1965, sound, B&W, 3 mins, 16mm

A dance of eclectic objects. A play of demented dolls, wheels and geriatric clocks.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
HAMFAT ASAR
USA, 1965, sound, B&W, 15 mins, 16mm

The strangeness of this film is laced with carefully molded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death - the Elysian fields of Homer, Dante's Purgatorio, de Chirico's stitched plain. A moving single picture.

Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby I sat quietly without moving, looking at the background until the pieces began to move without my inventing things for them to do. I found that, given the chance, they really did have important business to attend to, and my job was to furnish them with the power of motion. I never deviated from this plan.

"Jordan is one of the collagists and animators of film who can produce a significant vision. He is finding a way to work seriously with animation. Jordan is starting to significantly develop animation, in Hamfat Asar, as a fine arts mode." - Carl Linder, SF Observer
Awards: First Prize, University of Wisconsin Film Festival; Kokosing Award, Kenyon Film Festival.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
ORB
USA, 1973, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm

A compact, full-color cut-out animation as ephemeral as the colors swimming on the surface of a soap bubble. The eternal round shape, the orb - sun, moon, symbol of the whole self - balloons its inimitable and joyous course through scene after scene of celestial delight, fixing at last as the mystical globe encasing the lovers whose course it has paralleled throughout the film. People who have shown Our Lady of the the Sphere over and over have now decided it's OK to book this film.

"More complex than the art work in The Yellow Submarine." - Ed Blank, Pittsburgh Press

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
ANCESTORS
USA, 1978, sound, B&W, 5 mins, 16mm

ANCESTORS is a film about spiritual forefathers and mothers in a purely fanciful sense. These are classical figures, anatomical figures, fairy tale figures and romantic figures all thrown in together - all my creative root-sources, in a kind of playful tribute. Like part 2 of Duo Concertantes, it's a moving single picture, now doubled.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
CORNELL, 1965
USA, 1978, sound, colour, 9 mins, 16mm

In 1965 I worked as Joseph Cornell's assistant on boxes and films. I filmed his work extensively, and as much as I could of him. (It is the only film footage that exists of Cornell.) Until 1978 I couldn't edit the film. When I finally learned it would be a kind of personal journalistic tribute to the man who taught me so much, it fell together. What you see are the close-up interiors of many Cornell boxes, some collages, and a few shots of Joseph. You hear the things he said to me (as I recall them) and the thoughts I think about it all. If you are a Cornell fan, there isn't any other film on him.

Award: First Prize, Documentary, Marin Film Festival.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
CARABOSSE
USA, 1980, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm

Animation, also of a new order in the recent series of short works. Mostly on black space, the figures in blue perform a very compact and jewel-like opera in surreal form, again to Satie's piano music. Ideally, the film should be projected on a 30" wide white card sitting on a music stand, center stage of a large auditorium or music hall, with sound from the projector piped into the big speaker system. The film is most effective this way, but can be shown normal-size also.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
FINDS OF THE FORTENIGHT
USA, 1980, silent, B&W, 9 mins, 16mm

This is a very different animation. A series of surreal titles are rapidly alternated with the cut-out animation movements. The titles are often simple and the words and images combine easily into an eerie flickering superimposition. But I also was interested in pressing this technique to the limit of informational overload. Sometimes the eye is lost in the flashing barrage of words and pictures. Sound would have been too much, so I left it silent. The titles are by collage artist and painter, Jess Collins.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
WINTER LIGHT
USA, 1983, sound, colour, 9 mins, 16mm

Winter Light, filmed in the dawn hours of California winter, explores the endless permutations of light and illumination as representatives of the Demeter-Persephone myth of withdrawal of life through the winter months.

Vivaldi's winter concerto. Powerful, cold, a zinging of frost. Pale fog of violet hue rolling in masses over the hills of Sonoma. The dawn hours, the colors, the animals, and the long, lingering deceptive arising of the Divine Son (Sun) through beige and purple reflections on the mist-covered pond. (An entry to the Underworld, where Geryon descended.) Impressionistic, palleted. Opaques and translucencies responding. The veil of the ancient goddess (Demeter) whose daughter had been stolen here. The land of Hades (Pluto), his cold domain, from whence She brings back life on her return (with Her daughter) to the upper world - spring as we know it. I laid out a carefully and elaborately thought-out system of light qualities and movements to represent (in wholly natural images) the retelling of this myth, which is the heart of the Eleusinian mysteries of old. There, the daughter's name is Persephone or Kore.

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LAWRENCE JORDAN
POET’S DREAM
USA, 2005, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm

The Poet dreams a maiden’s bubbles thru edifices of forest and eclectic contagion.

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PETER KUBELKA
POETRY AND TRUTH
Austria, 2003, sound, colour, 13 mins, 16mm

"Dichtung und Wahrheit contains collected pieces from publicity films with a common element: they show actors before they start and then begin to play what they are directed to represent. Repeated ready-made takes create cycles of symbolic significance, glorified glimpses of the contemporary human condition: the beauty from a hair conditioner, courting and insemination by chocolate-feeding, labourless birth onto a varnished floor, animal and inanimate companions. It was my aim not to shape the found material perfectly into an unambiguous message but to preserve the full richness of archaeological information. My point of view has changed from the contemporary artist into an observer looking into the distant past." - Peter Kubelka

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SARAH MILES
NO PLACE
UK, 2005, 33 mins, video

King's Lynn and King's Cross stand at either end of the railway line into and out of London and, provide archetypal representations of the country and the city.

No Place is a work in two parts is divided into two parts which can be shown together or separately:

No Place (Looking Back) (20 mins) set in King's Cross, London represents the point of view of a woman (Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz grown up into Judy from Hitchcock's classic Vertigo) looking back, from the apparent sanctuary of a church, contrasting her memories of the countryside with a loss of innocence, and of childhood illusions, following her arrival in the Emerald City.

An elusive collage of real and fictional characters who all live in a kind of temporary limbo a long way from home but still looking for a sense of belonging.

No Place (Looking Forward) (13 mins) set in King's Lynn reflects the point of view of a young girl watching The Wizard of Oz in a movie theatre. The fenlands surrounding Kings Lynn are reminiscent of the hillbilly flatlands of Kansas and the magic of childhood and cinema are conflated.

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MATTHEW NOEL-TOD
NAUSEA
UK, 2005, 55 mins, video

Nausea is a synthesis of text and image that draws inspiration from Impressionism, On Kawara, Barnett Newman and the existential diary of Jean-Paul Sartre from which it adopts its title. The video footage is a journal of observations shot entirely on a mobile phone. Crudely low resolution, it retains a fuzzy warmth and familiarity rather than the cold and impersonal qualities of much digital technology, challenging a 'certain end-point in cinema, wherein we only ever imagine and receive mediated images.'

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JAYNE PARKER
STATIONARY MUSIC
UK, 2005, sound, colour, 8 mins, 16mm & video

Stationary Music - music that doesn't develop/music that stands still.

Stationary Music takes its name from the first movement of Stefan Wolpe's 'Sonata 1' composed in 1925. It is introduced and performed by his daughter, pianist Katharina Wolpe. Stationary Music - music that doesn't develop/music that stands still.

  After the fire what Shall we do?
                       "firsT
                          onE step;
                            aFter
                          thAt,
                           aNother."

                            We're
                          alOne
  the music is difficuLt
                         to Play.
                          wE must work at it.

In memorial S. W. by John Cage

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MIRANDA PENNELL
YOU MADE ME LOVE YOU
UK, 2005, 4 mins, video

Twenty-one dancers are held by your gaze. Losing contact can be  traumatic.

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EMILY RICHARDSON
BLOCK
UK, 2005, sound, colour, 11 mins, 16mm & video

BLOCK looks at the incidental activity that takes places inside and outside a tower block in South London over the period of several months.

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DAVID SHRIGLEY & CHRIS SHEPHERD
WHO I AM AND WHAT I WANT
UK, 2005, 6 mins, video

A scribbled, strangely funny but highly unsettling examination of the human condition. The story of a man who bares his emotions, history, hang ups and desires in all of their dysfunctional absurdity then leaves us to assemble not only his identity but to question our own.
An animate! Film

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RUN WRAKE
RABBIT
UK, 2005, 5 mins, video

A dreamlike but dark story of lost innocence and the random justice of nature, told with curious images from a distant childhood. When an idol is found in the stomach of a rabbit, great riches follow, but for how long?
An animate! film

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