Visions in Meditation #2: Mesa Verde

The Game

January 1962 •

In this child's game, a live-action boy and girl draw characters and compete who is better. The girl draws a flower and the boy draws a car that runs it over. Then a drawn lion chases a drawn girl, until it all becomes frightfully serious.

Carnet de identidad

May 1970 •Spanish

Persian Series #4

April 1999 •English

Elaborate petal-like and multicolored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly-swift mixtures of every conceivable previous shape from the Persian Series. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

Thlípsi

December 2018 •English

A man who is paranoid and deluded by his own conspiracies that someone out there is after him must come to terms with the root of his suffering.

Something New to Die for

August 1993 •English

Portrait of The Church of the SubGenius in scratch, which means high speed cutting, media manipulation. Contains clips from the Arise, the Church's own film about itself (recrutment video), the SubGenius MTV productions, and TV interviews with sacred scribe Rev. Ivan Stang, intercut with a barrage of weird clips from movies and television.

Spectres of Shortwave

September 2016 •English

A mysterious web of international shortwave radio towers once dominated the Tantramar marshlands near Sackville, New Brunswick. For almost 70 years the RCI shortwave towers broadcast around the world. Due to budget cuts, the site was decommissioned in 2012 and dismantled in 2014. Examining themes of identity and memory, the film captures images of the towers over four seasons in various weather conditions, accompanied by the voices of residents and technicians narrating accounts of hearing radio broadcasts emanate from their household appliances.

The Monster

February 2020 •Portuguese

A man is been filled with responsibilities and problems with his family. With time, he starts to go mad.

Berlin Horse

November 1970 •English

Two fragments of 8mm home-movie footage shot by the artist near Berlin weave together in repeating cycles of action, temporal manipulation, and colour distortion, heightening the viewer’s awareness of film-time and the film-image, and perception of colour in motion.

Threshold

January 1972 •English

Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity… With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating “richness” of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image. - Deke Dusinberre

La cité des neuf portes

August 1977 •French

Filmmaker and teacher, Stéphane Marti has been researching experimental cinema as an art form liberated of aesthetic codes and the economics of big budget cinema. His work is primarily focused on the themes of the sacred and the human body. An avid supporter of the Super-8 format, he has been fighting for its merits as a tool. He has used this format film after film and has been sharing his experiences with new filmmakers during his workshops at the Sorbonne’s College of the Arts (Paris I).

Black Trip

November 1965 •English

Through the uses of kinescope, video, multimedia, and direct painting on film, an impression is gained of the frantic action of protoplasm under a microscope where an imaginative viewer may see the genesis of it all. – Grove Press Film Catalog

The Tiny Ventriloquist

November 2012 •English

"In the first shot of Reinke’s new feature length video, we see the desert landscape of the American Southwest from a car window. Though shaky and handheld, it is an immediately recognizable and iconic image: the great vistas of Hollywood westerns, of American westward expansion, of monumental modernist land art from the late 20th century. On the soundtrack, Reinke’s unmistakable voice apologizes for beginning the film with a shot of a landscape from a moving car, but what is he to do? The camera is already rolling. This moment encapsulates much of what transpires in the scenes that follow: presenting us with an image, dismissing that image and wryly suggesting he is doing nothing here, that the footage is just unreeling. Reinke’s collection and organization of images and sounds seem casual at first, but ultimately reveal themselves to be heavily mediated and orchestrated."

Expiration

July 1976 •

Short experimental film.

Closed Beaches

Invalid date •

Beaches are closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the middle class must survive the tropicals.

Chelsea Girls

September 1966 •English

Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

July 1987 •English

The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.

Begotten

June 1991 •English

Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.

Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head

January 1991 •French

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.

A Fan

January 1968 •English

A man in drag sits on a couch holding a fan. The wallpaper behind him is floral patterned. Although the man does little more than looking around and waving his fan, Zwartjes created enormous tension.

The Human Surge

March 2017 •Spanish

Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town, where he too has a miserable job.