Distance

Arborescent Games: Fugue in Minor

December 1931 •French

The relationships between the stained glass rosettes and the floral forms, between the architectural geometry and that, random, of the branches of trees form a dazzling catalog of plastic obsessions of an era.

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.

Transfer

January 1966 •English

A psychiatrist and his needy patient discuss their relationship in a snow-covered field.

Weatherman '69

November 1989 •English

Featuring a cast that includes Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Mike Watt of the legendary hardcore band Minutemen, and Pettibon himself, this deadpan narrative pays dubious homage to the 1960's radical underground. In this crudely rendered home video of a commune of stoned revolutionaries, the cameras are hand-held, the edits in-camera, and the dialogue is wryly on-target. Pettibon's band of outsiders reenacts a countercultural moment defined by rock music, drugs, and ideological paradox — and in so doing, captures their own late-80's West Coast grunge milieu as well.

Atmo HorroX

July 2016 •English

Through a very surreal chase of spying and surveillance, Catafuse, a dubiously dressed "creature", hunts down specific human targets with the help of Molosstrap. But in a world completely run by the shadowy hands of the pharmaceutical industry, the lines of reality become so blurry and complex, that the mastering of insanity might just be the only way out...

Polka Graph

January 1947 •English

Short film by Mary Ellen Bute

Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung

January 1997 •

Experimental short made by Olivier Assayas for Fondation of Contemporary Art and starring Maggie Cheung.

Carnet de identidad

May 1970 •Spanish

Untitled (Pink Dot)

January 2007 •Japanese

In Untitled (Pink Dot), Murata transforms footage from the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood (1982) into a morass of seething electronic abstraction. Subjected to Murata's meticulous digital reprocessing, the action scenes decompose and are subsumed into an almost palpable, cascading digital sludge, presided over by a hypnotically pulsating pink dot.

Neverwhere

July 1968 •English

A meek office worker finds himself flung into a fantasy world as a naked muscleman. An early version of the Den character, known from the comic magazine Heavy Metal and the movie by the same name.

Evil Spirits

August 2008 •English

A fun-loving, unsuspecting woman checks into a hotel and encounters a cannibalistic mass murderer who is possessed by evil spirits.

The Killer Walks Among Us

November 2013 •English

A parking lot is haunted by the spirit of a dead killer who waits for the perfect moment to unleash spooks and thrills. Who will be next?

An Appropriated Self-Portrait

March 2014 •Spanish

An Appropriated Self-portrait is an autobiographical piece conceived through the articulation of appropriated and recycled film fragments from over 180 movies and found footage. It was assembled as a fragmentary structure that relies on a non-linear narrative.

Sunspring

June 2016 •English

Sunspring is a short film about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.

Scherzo

November 1939 •English

Norman McLaren made Scherzo early after his arrival in North America in 1939, but the film was subsequently lost. In 1984 the original materials were found and the hand-drawn images and sound were reconstituted. Picture and sound dance triple-quick in this animated version of a musical scherzo. A film without words.

Apple Pie

July 2016 •English

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Structured around the ten most significant celestial bodies of the Milky Way, Apple Pie’s inquiry begins with the furthest point in our solar system, Pluto, as a lens back towards our home planet and the ‘mechanisms by which certain aspects of scientific knowledge are digested, appropriated and subsequently manifest within the general human complex’. Christopher Francis Schiel’s dry, functional narration brings a network of ideas about our existence into focus, while Hamilton’s visual tableaux, as an extension of his multifaceted practice, veer imaginatively between psychedelic imagery and performance art.

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.

ECCE HOMO

March 2015 •Romanian

In a godforsaken landscape, filmed in transcendental black and white, as if fallen out of time, young Ada lives alone with her ill mother. Her rather lonely existence is characterized by hard work and poverty and as her mother's condition worsens there doesn't seem to be a way out anymore. Ecce homo is a parable about being human, rich in religious symbolism, which dreamily and at the same time sombrely poses existential questions without volunteering answers.

Shoot Me

September 2013 •English

The Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor, daughter of a former advisor of Ahmadinejad's, has been living in exile in Germany for four years. When she hears that the fellow Iranian rapper Shahin Najafi, who is also living in exile in Germany, faces death threats and has to hide because of one of his songs, she doesn't hesitate and has to find him. On her search she encounters fear everywhere. Narges Kalhor has to face her inconvenient memories of suppression, hatred and anger for her past in Iran.