Cinema Archive
UWM Golda Meier Multimedia Library Collection
Diane Kitchen, Peck School of the Arts – Film Department
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The Cinema Archive is a joint project of the Film Department and the Golda Meir Library at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with the goal of creating a growing collection to chart the
development of independent expression in film and to provide a resource for teachers and
students of the medium. The Archive now contains over 300 essential works (in 16mm, some in
35mm) from the history of experimental cinema including Soviet classics such as Dziga Vertov’s
MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, ground-breaking works like Robert Nelson’s OH DEM WATERMELONS
and Anthony McCall’s LINE DESCRIBING A CONE, and early cinema of the Lumiere Brothers and
Georges Melies. While the primary focus is on experimental work, the Archive also includes
independent African American films such as ILLUSIONS by Julie Dash and Charles Burnett’s KILLER
OF SHEEP as well as a collection of films made by Timothy Asch with the Yanomamo people of
Venezuela.
ABSTRONIC
Mary Ellen Bute, 1952, 7 minutes, color, sound
Free-wheeling patterns painted on the screen of an oscilloscope -- an instrument which converts
electronic impulses into ever-moving patterns. Mary Ellen Bute, a long-time experimenter in musical
abstract films, juggled dials while recordings of works by Aaron Copland and Don Gillis were played on
the oscilloscope. The results are complex rhythmic ribbons of light.
ARC-189
-1350
ACE OF LIGHT
Sky David , a.k.a. Dennis Pies, 1984, 8 minutes, color, sound
Animated directly in light using multi-plane animation. A film in which the human form is seen in a
cosmos of light.
ARC-317
-1123
ACROSS THE RAPPAHANNOCK
Brian Frye, 2002, 12 minutes, color, silent
“In November 2001 I attended a small and relatively informal reenactment of the battle of
Fredericksburg. About a hundred men and women did their best to illustrate the actions of the
thousands of young men who offered their lives a century earlier. An air of absurd theater suffused the
entire event, which provided the ground for its peculiar truth.”
--B.F.
ARC-390
ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES, THE
Stan Brakhage, 1971, 32 minutes, color, silent
Filmed in the Allegheny Coroner's Office in Pittsburgh. According to the research of the filmmaker,
the term "autopsy" comes from the Greek, meaning: "the act of seeing with one's own eyes". Of this
work, filmmaker Hollis Frampton wrote, "What was to be done in that room, Stan? And then later with
the footage? I think it must have been mostly to stand aside: to 'clear out,' as much as possible, with
the baggage of your own expectations, even as to what a work of art must look like; and to see, with
your own eyes, what coherence might arise within a universe for which you could decree only the
boundaries."
ARC-012
ADEBAR
Peter Kubelka, 1956-57, (1.5 minutes x 2) = 3 minutes, B&W, sound, 35mm
(Reel contains two prints.)
“In ADEBAR, only certain shot lengths are used – 13, 26 and 52 frames...there is a consistent
alternation between positive and negative. The film’s images are extremely high contrast black-andwhite shots of dancing figures; the images are stripped down to their black-and-white essentials.”
-Fred Camper
“These are metric films. You know what I mean by metric? It’s the German expression ’Metrisches
System.’ The classical music, for instance, has whole notes, and half notes, and three-quarter notes.
Not frames as notes, but the time sections I have in my films...it’s a metric rhythm. For example,
people always feel that my films are very even and have no edges, and do not break apart, and are
equally heavy at the beginning and at the end. This is because the harmony spreads out of the unit of
the frame, of the 1/24th of the second, and I depart from this ground rhythm, from the 24 frames.”
--P.K.
ARC-384
AFRICAN VIOLET #1
Renato Umali, 1999, 3 minutes, color, sound
"A time-lapse film documenting a blooming African violet, a 'breathing' basil plant, and a stoic potato.
The smooth, placid movements of the plants are frequently interrupted to foreground other elements
of the film: the passing of time, the rhythmic movement of light, ad the nature of the film medium
itself. The soundtrack alludes to both the cyclical and unpredictable nature of life." --R.U.
ARC-291
-3655
AGIT-FILM
Aldis Strazdins, 1992, 2 minutes, B&W, silent
One of a series of short agitational films made as footnotes to the longer TREATISE ON MEMBRANES.
Each is silent and briefly explores a broad linguistic concept or dilemma.
ARC-224
-2622
A HARD PASSAGE
Sky David a.k.a. Dennis Pies, 1981, 7 minutes, color, sound
An early computer-animated work recorded onto 16mm, done at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the
Arts. A rather heavy-handed mystical search for meaning. Based on a short story by Herman Hesse,
"Derschwere Wey."
ARC-324
-4251
ALAYA
Nathanial Dorsky, 1976-1987, 28 minutes, color, silent
A beautiful color, silent film meditation on granular qualities of existence punning particularly on
motion picture filmstock emulsion. The filmmaker's description simply reads, "Sand, wind and light
intermingle with the emulsions. The viewer is the star."
ARC-101
-1199
ALEXEIEFF AT THE PINBOARD
Jean Mineur, 1960, 8 minutes, B&W, sound
In their Paris studio, the Russian-born artist-filmmaker Alexander Alexeieff and his American wife,
Claire Parker, demonstrate and explain the "pinboard" -- an elaborate method they used for creating
still and animated film images.
ARC-307
-3822
ALL MY LIFE
Bruce Baillie, 1966, 3 minutes, color, sound
Filmed in Caspar, California, an old fence with red roses, and Ella Fitzgerald singing "All My Life'.
ARC-212
-2415
ALTAIR
Lewis Klahr, 1994, 8 minutes, color, sound
“ALTAIR offers a cutout animation version of color noir. The images were culled from six late ‘40s
issues of Cosmopolitan magazine and set to an almost four-minute section of Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird’
(looped twice) to create a sinister, perfumed world...The viewer is encouraged to speculate on the
nature and details of the woman’s battle with large, malevolent societal forces and her descent into an
alcoholic swoon. However, I feel it is important to add that what interested me in making this film was
very little of what is described above but instead a fascination with the color blue and some intangible
association it has for me with the late 1940s.” --L.K.
ARC-340
-4492
ANEMIC CINEMA
Marcel Duchamp, 1926, 7 minutes @ 18fps, B&W, silent
Assisted by Man Ray and Marc Allegret.
The only film by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. It consists of a series of rotating, spiral-like images
intercut with spinning disks of words strung together in elaborate and nonsensical puns. (Duchamp
links ecchymoses [welts], esquimaux [Eskimos], and mots exquis [exquisite words], in one sentence.)
In the title itself, "anemic" is an anagram of "cinema".
ARC-245
-2891
ANGUS MUSTANG
Stephanie Barber, 1996, 4 minutes, color, sound
A densely collaged hand-painted poem.
ARC-258
-3063
ANNABELLE DANCES
The Edison Company, 1897, 5 minutes, B&W with hand-tinting, silent
Female dancers dressed with butterfly wings; a dancer with voluminous skirts.
The performing and shooting is somewhat perfunctory. The hand-tinting is rather sloppy.
ARC-311
-3844
APERATURE OF GHOSTINGS, THE by Lewis Klahr
A triology of three films. See:
ELSA KIRK, 1999, 5 minutes, color, sound
CATHERINE STREET, 2001, 3 minutes, color, sound
CREASED ROBE SMILE, 2001, 4.5 minutes, color, sound
A PROPOS DE NICE
Jean Vigo, 1929-30, 23 minutes, B&W, silent
"Speaking of Nice" is a slow, dreamy portrait on the city of Nice. Exposure, under- and over-cranking
are all elements employed to accentuate the film.
ARC-082
-0572
ARNULF RAINER
Peter Kubelka, 1958-60, 6.5 minutes, B&W, sound, 35mm
Ostensibly a black-and-white flicker film, ARNULF RAINER began as a portrait of the Austrian painter,
printmaker and photographer Arnulf Rainer. In the film, Kubelka takes the format of cinema to its
essence: solid black frames (absence of light), clear frames (presence of light), sound (white noise),
and silence (the absence of sound).
“In his third graphic film Kubelka reached the extreme of his reductiveness. ARNULF RAINER is a
montage of black-and-white leader with white sound (a mixture of all audible frequencies) and silence.
For the filmmaker it is an evocation of the dawn, of day and night, of thunder and lightning...The
composition of ARNULF RAINER is so complicated that none of its formal operations can be discovered
by watching the film during a normal projection. Instead, one perceives an intricate pattern of
synchronous clusters of flashes and explosions of sounds mixed with asynchronous patterns which
evolve, recall, or anticipate other patterns on one of the two levels of sound and picture.”
-P.A. Sitney
ARC-387
A TALK WITH CARMEN D'AVINO
Cecile Starr, 1972, 8 minutes, color, sound
Artist-animator Carmen D'Avino talks with Cecile Starr about his scroll-like color animations and his
film THE ROOM in which he painted walls, ceiling, radiator, and other surfaces in his Greenwich Village
apartment.
ARC-304
-3821
ATOMIC CAFE, THE
Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader & Pierce Rafferty, 1982, 88 minutes, color, B&W, sound
"Profoundly shocking, very funny and should be a lesson to all of us with respect to official
propaganda. This compilation of U.S. propaganda, from the mid-40's to the late 50's, seems to become
a comic spectacle of...us--average Americans who learn how to scurry under tabletops in the event of a
nuclear attack. The film is the result of five years of research; the filmmakers picking through the
Library of Congress, the National Archives, and countless military record banks in search of footage.
The footage is essentially in chronological order, beginning with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings
and works through the 50's with the coming of the cold war, the Korean War, and McCarthyism.
ARC-231, 232, 233
-2641
ATOZ
Robert Breer, 2000, 5 minutes, color, sound
“ATOZ is an animated alphabet. The illustrations for each letter of the alphabet seem to be
arbitrarily chosen in most dictionaries. It is dedicated to my first grandchild Zoe.” --R.B.
“Each film by Robert Breer is a cinematic jewel, and his animated stroll through thee alphabet is no
exception.” --Mark Webber, London Film Festival
ARC-345
-4494
AUTOMATIC WRITING 2
Fred Worden, 2000, 11 minutes, B&W, silent
“Continued explorations of automatism as a practical guide to negotiating the mysterious zone where
light and no-light flutter in a fecund equipoise.”
--F.W.
“In Fred Worden’s AUTOMATIC WRITING flickering shapes sometimes suggest gylphs; his austere black
and white focuses one’s attention on their rhythms.”
--Fred Camper
ARC-372
AVAILABLE LIGHT: BLUE-VIOLET
Luis Recoder, 2000, 12 minutes, color, silent
“A 400’ roll of color negative film exposed directly to a light source. Two long exposures, one on
each side of the roll wound tightly on its core. The action of light ‘fogs’ the film; it is a controlled and
precise absorption of the light through the narrow aperture of the edge, for the shape of the film
allows for it. That is its vulnerability.”
--L.R.
ARC-358
AVAILABLE LIGHT: SHIFT
Luis Recoder, 2001, 12 minutes, color, silent, double projection
“A two-projector film – one image inside of another. The footage was exposed by running the film
through a ‘broken’ camera, intentionally fogging the film as it moves continuously through the
camera’s mechanism. The result is an uneven distribution of light scattering across the layered microdensities of manufactured color film. Positive and negative versions of the same material are
projected in overlapped fashion so as to further ‘fog’ the screening experience.”
--James Kreul
ARC-356, 357
AWFUL BACKLASH, THE
Robert Nelson and William Allan, 1967, 14 minutes, B&W, sound
"Probably the 'purest' movie ever made. A pair of hands patiently disentangles a knotted fishing reel.
Little triumphs, little setbacks, a drama of human endurance. Some remarks on the track." --Anon.
ARC-251
-2934
BABOBILICONS
Daina Krumins, 1983, 17 minutes, color, sound
Made by using many techniques: stop-motion animation, time-lapse photography, drawn animation
and many types of optical printing including bluescreen matting. It took seven years to complete, two
for optical printing alone. The title refers to the crab-clawed conical creatures which are seen in the
film. There are also slime molds moving in time-lapse, mushrooms growing, fish jumping in water, mud
curls curling, etc.
ARC-252
-2933
BALLET MECANIQUE
Fernand Leger, 1924, 10 minutes, B&W, silent
Photographed by Dudley Murphy.
This film remains one of the more influential experimental works in the history of cinema. The only
film made directly by the artist Leger, it demonstrates his concern during this period -- shared with
other artists of the 1920s -- with the mechanical world. Repetition, movement, and multiple imagery
combine to animate and give an aesthetic raison d'etre to the clockwork structure of everyday life.
The visual pleasures of kitchenware -- wire whisks and funnels, copper pots and lids, baking pans -- are
combined with images of a woman carrying a heavy sack on her shoulder, condemned to climb and reclimb a steep flight of stairs on a Paris street.
Shot originally in 35mm.
ARC-105
-1201
BEAR GARDEN, THE
Andrea Leuteneker, 2000, 17 minutes, color, sound
"A hand-manipulated, painted and optically re-printed film; a meditation on historical trauma; the
furnaces of Dachau and the Kristallnacht; a materialist essay on the spiritual in art; a landscape of
sulfur and dye, the mental detritus of post-war Germany." --A.L.
ARC-323
-4221
BEFORE NEED
Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley, 1979, 75 minutes, color, sound
A picture-web about time and death and language and dreams. "Because it had been so many years
since we had worked together on a film, we were wondering if it was still possible to collaborate. We
started with some dream images, a few actors, friends and relatives. Slowly the film evolved into
sequences or images that expressed the emotional discoveries of an aging woman. The snow had
melted and it was impossible to repeat. Standards of perfection applied to all the selves, the
relationships, the layers of memory. Where are the tables for one?" --G.N. & D.W.
ARC-174, 175
-1883
BEFORE WE KNEW NOTHING
Diane Kitchen, 1988, 62 minutes, color, sound
A portrait of the life and culture of the Ashaninka (also known as the Campa) who inhabit the Amazon
rainforest of eastern Peru, as well as a reflection on the experience of living and filming among people
who continue to resist acculturation into the standards of the modern world.
ARC-109, 110
-1204
BEGONE DULL CARE
Norman McLaren & Evelyn Lambardt, 1949, 9 minutes, color, sound
One of McLaren's most famous abstract works, the film is an example of the cameraless, frameless
animation he is known for. Fluid lines and brilliant colors create a restless movement and shapes which
converge, change, multiply, and work with an original composition by jazz musician Oscar Peterson.
Produced through the National Film Board of Canada.
ARC-193
-1967
BEHOLDER, THE
Chris Sullivan, 1983, 9 minutes, color, sound
A wild, animated look at the sounds and images of an urban lunch-counter. The brief psychotic
episodes appear to be inspired by the ranting of a sidewalk preacher.
ARC-058
-0786
BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY
Walter Ruttman, 1927, 50 minutes, B&W, silent
"A cross section of life and rhythm from dawn to mid-night in a late spring day in Berlin. Some of the
sequences are metaphorical and based on the variety of energies of a big city in 1927.
ARC-168, 169
BEST OF MELIES, THE
George Melies
Includes 3 shorts: THE MONSTER - 2 minutes
THE TERRIBLE TURKISH EXECUTIONER - 1 1/2 min.
THE MAGIC LANTERN - 3 1/2 minutes
ARC-248
-2931
BETTY IN BLUNDERLAND
Fleischer Studios, animation by Grim Natwick, 1934, 9 min., B&W, sound
Begins with Betty Boop singing while putting together a puzzle. The puzzle pieces come alive. She
follows a rabbit piece into the looking glass and has curious occurrences loosely based on aspects found
in Alice in Wonderland.
“This inimitable charmer first appeared as a minor, dog-eared character in the Talkartoon series,
soon after the introduction of sound at the Fleischer Studios. She was created by animator Grim
Natwick as a sort of love interest for the popular cartoon dog character, Bimbo. She soon evolved into
the form of a sexy, baby-voiced doll whose popularity lasted until screen censorship toned down the
treatment of her films.” --Glenn Photo Supply
ARC-353
-4529
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Barry Greenwald, 1990, 58 minutes, color, sound
Using interviews, scenes of modern Inuit life and some amazing archival footage, the film documents
the human cost of progress to a First Nations culture as increasingly more education, religion, and
commerce was funneled north to help civilize the Inuit.
The film centers on Joseph Idlout, an Inuit hunter who, at first, seemed to easily adapt to this
unfamiliar world and attained celebrity status in the 1950s as a "model" Eskimo.
ARC-264, 265
-3037
BITTER MELONS
John Marshall, 1955, 30 minutes, color, sound
Documentary on the music and life of a tribe of African hunter-gatherers and their communal
economy.
(The print is a little faded, scratched.)
ARC-044
-0592
BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS
Billy Woodberry, 1983, 85 minutes, --?, sound
A chronicle of the lives of a black working-class couple struggling to keep their family together while
dealing with long term unemployment, infidelity and social indifference. The film captures their
efforts to maintain moral and spiritual balance as they attempt to avoid economic catastrophe.
ARC-066, 067, 068
-0472
BLEU SHUT
Robert Nelson, 1970, 33 minutes, color, sound
"Nelson's extraordinary film BLEU SHUT is a comic statement on the absurdities of the bourgeois
pursuit of pleasure. The film's prismatic style has remarkable depth and is engaging on all levels." -San Francisco Examiner
Using the format of a television gameshow, Nelson and William Wiley off-camera guess at a list of
names for each yacht that is pictured on the screen. Segmented between the duo's humorous and offthe-cuff remarks are sections that at times seem dreamlike and travel into other regions of the
filmmaker's musings.
ARC-238
-2672
BLONDE COBRA,
Ken Jacobs, 1959-1963, 30 minutes, B&W, color, sound
Images for the film were gathered by Bob Fleischner and the sound-film was composed by Ken Jacobs.
New York filmmaker and performance artist, Jack Smith, started making this film with Fleischner as a
"light monster-movie-comedy" in 1959. Jacobs is said to have prompted Smith to record the monologues
and songs for the film by playing the first moments of music from Jacob's 78 record collection. "Its a
look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable lower East Side
deprivation and consumed with America's 1950s, 40s, 30s, disgust. " Notes for the film include
instructions for a loud, live radio to interject twice during its screening.
ARC-065
-0457
BLOOD OF A POET
Jean Cocteau, 1933, 60 minutes, B&W, sound
A surreal, brooding work dealing heavily in death imagery, this film is a classic example of light/dark
contrasts for visual narrative. In French.
ARC-091, 092
-0581
BODY POLITIC (GOD MELTS BAD MEAT)
Betzy Bromberg, 1988, 40 minutes, color, sound
"Travels through a realm of modern moral dilemma as it examines the relationship between high
technology medicine, religion, politics and the American family. With her typical serious-humor,
Bromberg explores the claims of science that we can improve the quality of human life.
ARC-151
-1730
BOULDER BLUES AND PEARLS AND...
Stan Brakhage, 1992, 24 minutes, color, sound
Peripheral envisionment of daily life as the mind has it -- i.e., a terrifying ecstasy of (hand-painted)
synapting nerve ends back-firing from thought's grip of life intercut with moments of daily life. Music
by Rick Corrigan.
ARC-199
-2189
BOUQUETS 1-10
Rose Lowder, 1994-95, 11.5 minutes, color, silent
“BOUQUETS 1-10 consists of ten one-minute films covering a variety of subjects. The procedure is too
intricate to describe briefly but basically it entails using the film strip as a canvas with the freedom to
film frames on any part of the strip in any order, running the film through the camera as many times as
needed.” --R.L “...in sections of BOUQUETS 1-10...our field of vision is created by Lowder’s planting –
on our retinas – images made by moving along the furrow of the film and exposing individual frames to
light...In any particular BOUQUET, Lowder explores a range of visual possibilities of working one frame
at a time...sometimes creating powerful, strobelike flicker effects...The series of mini-films, as the
title suggests, is conceived as a bouquet: a bouquet of BOUQUETS.” --Scott MacDonald
ARC-349
-4496
BOY WHO SAW THROUGH, THE
Mary Ellen Bute, 1956, 25 minutes, B&W, sound
Based on a short story, by John Pudney, about a boy with the ability to see through walls who soon
learns that it is better not to tell other people about this special gift. This is Mary Ellen Bute's first liveaction film and embodies her philosophy that it is best not to reveal insights to people who cannot
accept the truth.
ARC-192
-0890
BRIDGES GO 'ROUND
Shirley Clarke, 1958, 8 minutes, color, sound
The stark elegance of the New York City bridge system, paired with an evocative period jazz
soundtrack, creates a set of intricate sound-image relationships.
ARC-026
-0628
BURDEN OF DREAMS
Les Blank, 1982, 94 minutes, color, sound
BURDEN OF DREAMS is a chilling but finely balanced account of what might ordinarily be considered
artistic folly. Les Blank documents the making of Werner Herzog's FITZCARRALDO while filming in
Peru's Amazon Basin.
ARC-164, 165
-1614
BUSH MAMA
Haile Gerima, 1976, 97 minutes, B&W, sound
BUSH MAMA is the story of Dorthy, a woman living on welfare in Watts and trying to raise her daughter
in a negative, violent environment. Dorthy herself is sexually attacked by a police officer.
ARC-113, 114, 115, 116
-1208
BUT THEN SHE'S BETTY CARTER
Michelle Parkerson, 1980, 53 minutes, color , sound
A protrait of the legendary jazz vocalist who was uncompromised by commercialism throughout her
career. Parkerson's film focuses on Carter's musical genius, her paradoxical relationship with the public
and her fierce dedication to artistic independence.
ARC-063, 064
-0456
CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, THE
Robert Weine, 1919, 53 minutes, B&W, silent
The most famous German Expressionist film ever, this is also considered the first horror movie.
Elaborate strange sets complement this disturbing story of murder and madness.
ARC-087
-0577
CABINET OF JAN SVANKMAJER, THE
The Brothers Quay, 1984, 13 minutes, color, sound
An homage to the surrealist Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, the film, is a series of dreamlike
encounters constructed with minimal linear narrative.
ARC-194
-2191
CALIPH STORK, THE
Lotte Reiniger, 1954, 11 minutes, B&W, sound
An animated "shadow film" using Reiniger's distinctive style of cut-out silhouetted figures moving
against a static background.
A caliph, or ruler, and his sidekick are turned into storks by an evil magician. With the help of an
owl, a young woman also changed by the same magician, they manage to change back to human form
and cage the magician himself as a stork.
ARC-283
CAMEL MUSIC
Owen Klatte and Lenore Rinder, 1981, 3 minutes, color, sound
An enjoyable short using metamorphosing animated sand with a cute musical soundtrack, this brief
film is a playful experiment in animation.
ARC-007
-0622
CANNIBAL TOURS
Dennis O'Rourke, 1987, 72 minutes, color, sound
Austrailian filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke's film is about rich Western tourists on a cruise along the Sepik
River in Paupa New Guinea and their interaction, or lack of it, with the local villagers. The film, which
O'Rourke describes as a "meditation on tourism" is more directly self-reflexive in style than his earlier
work. While the film presents statements and reflections by the villagers about the tourists as a
counter-discourse to the voices and images of the tourists, it is ultimately about Us, as Westerners, and
our fascination with the exotic "Primitive Other."
ARC-133, 134
CARRIAGE TRADE
Warren Sonbert, 1971, 61 minutes, color, silent
"In CARRIAGE TRADE Sonbert interweaves footage taken from his journeys throughout Europe, Africa,
Asia, and the United States, together with shots he removed from the camera originals of a number of
his earlier films. CARRIAGE TRADE was an evolving work-in-progress and this 61-minute version is the
definitive form in which Sonbert realized it, preserved intact from the camera original.
"With CARRIAGE TRADE, Sonbert began to challenge the theories espoused by the great Soviet
filmmakers of the 1920s; he particularly disliked the 'kneejerk' reaction produced by Eisenstein
montage. Sonbert described [his own style of editing] as a 'jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce
varied displaced effects.' This approach, according to Sonbert, ultimately affords the viewer multifaceted readings of the connections between shots…the gestures of figures…rhythm, spacing and
density of images."
--Jon Gartenberg
ARC-338
CASTRO STREET
Bruce Baillie, 1966, 10 minutes, color, B&W, sound
Fluidly constructed through the use of dissolves and multiple exposures, the film deals with the
dynamics of movement in this industrial ballet that was filmed by the rail yards in Richmond,
California.
ARC-027
-0621
CATHERINE STREET (Part 2 of THE APERATURE OF GHOSTINGS)
Lewis Klahr, 2001, 3 minutes, color, sound
“In the mid-1990s I unearthed photographic contact sheets of 3 different women in a thrift store in
the East Village. Only one was named and dated – Elsa Kirk, Feb. 22, 63, but all looked like they were
from the same photographer and time period. There were 12 images per sheet of these
models/actresses and I found myself quite moved by the strong sense of aspiration in their poses; a
poignant blend of fiction and reality. At first I was unable to translate these images into collage
animation. So instead, I began making xerox enlargements of the sheets which I turned into a series of
flat collages. Eventually these became storyboards for the films and led to the hieroglyphic montage
style of the completed trilogy – an approach that I had intuited when first attracted to the potential of
cutouts two decades ago, but had never been able to capture on film.” --L.K.
ARC-342
-4489
CHARTRES SERIES, THE
Stan Brakhage, 1994, 10 minutes, color silent
A year and a half ago the filmmaker Nick Dorsky, hearing I was going to France, insisted I must see the
Chartres Cathedral. I, who had studied picture books of its great stained-glass windows, sculpture and
architecture for years, having also read Henry Adjams' great book three times, willingly complied and
had an experience of several hours (in the discreet company of French filmmaker Jean-Michele
Bouhours) which surely transformed my aesthetics more than any other single experience. Then
Marilyn's sister died; and I, who could not attend the funeral, sat down alone and began painting on
film one day, this death in mind…Chartres in mind. Eight months later the painting was completed on
four little films which comprise a suite in homage to Chartres and dedicated to Wendy Jull.
(My thanks to Sam Bush, of Western Cine, who collaborated with me on this, much as if I were a
composer who handed him a painted score, so to speak, and a few instructions --a medieval
manuscript, one might say--and he were the musician who played it.)
ARC-287
CHILDREN AT REAHUMOU PLAY
Timothy Asch & Napoleon Chagnon, 1968-71, 6 minutes, color, sound
A collaboration by filmmaker Asch and anthropologist Chagnon to film the Yanomamo, the largest
Indian group in the Amazon Basin. This is one of 37 films produced from 50 hours of footage.
Children roast meat and bananas in preparation for a small feast.
ARC-262
-3064
CHILDREN IN THE RAIN
Timothy Asch & Napoleon Chagnon, 1968-71, 11 minutes, color, sound
A collaboration by filmmaker Asch and anthropologist Chagnon to film the Yanomamo, the largest
Indian group in the Amazon Basin. This is one of 37 films produced from 50 hours of footage. It shows
dozens of boys and a few girls playing in the rain.
ARC-237
-0888
CHILDREN MAKING A TOY HAMMOCK
Timothy Asch & Napoleon Chagnon, 1968-71, 7 minutes, color, sound
A collaboration by filmmaker Asch and anthropologist Chagnon to film the Yanomamo, the largest
Indian group in the Amazon Basin. This is one of 37 films produced from 50 hours of footage.
ARC-259
-3067
CINEMATIC SOUVENIRS OF AMERICA
The Lumiere Brothers, around 1897, 9 minutes, B&W, silent
A collection of four shorts by cameramen sent out by the Lumiere brothers. Beginning titles describe
early film-taking and exhibition practices of camera operators touring the world, sent out by the
Lumieres. This program is about the length of a typical early Cinematograph exhibition. This
compilation also has intertitles describing a little of what is being seen and a few details of
how early screenings were arranged. The sections include: Chicago - review of policemen, Washington
- review of the National Guard, Portraits of New York - Broadway, railways, people descending steps,
boats.
ARC-313
-3904
CINEMATOGRAPHE EN 1895
Lumiere Brothers, 1895, 8 minutes, B&W, silent
Twenty excerpts from the famous early cinema of Louis and Auguste Lumiere.
ARC-022
COFFEE COLORED CHILDREN
Ngozi Onwurah, 1988, 16 1/2 minutes, color, sound
This unsettling film conveys the experience of two children of mixed African and English heritage.
Starkly emotional and visually compelling, the film is a semi-autobiographical testimony to the
profound internalized effects of racism and the struggle for self-definition and pride.
ARC-218
-2427
COLOR RHAPSODIE
Mary Ellen Bute, 1948, 6 minutes, color, sound
Abstract images set to Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody #2. Demonstrates visual moods in music through
the use of color and design variations. The images were created by painting on glass.
ARC-186
-1337
COMEDIE ET MAGIQUE DE MELIES
George Melies
Includes two shorts: THE WITCH'S REVENGE - 3 1/2 minutes
THE INN WHERE NO MAN RESTS - 4 minutes
ARC- 257
-2976
COMPOSITION IN BLUE
Oskar Fischinger, 1935, 4 minutes, color, sound
This film by the early experimental animator is a sophisticated blend of diverse animation techniques,
including pixillation, a virtuoso exercise in the musical manipulation of marching squares, swimming
circles, and dancing cylinders.
ARC-203
CONQUEST OF THE POLE
George Melies, 1912, 7 minutes, B&W, silent
A scientific adventure in which teams of scientists race each other to the Pole in a helicopter and a
balloon. En route they meet the terrible Giant of the Snows who eats scientists for lunch. On their
return to Paris, they are greeted by the giddy chorus line that saw them off.
ARC-249
-2930
CONQUEST PIECE
Toney Merritt, 1982, 6 l/2minutes, B&W, silent
Silence conquers sound, and sound conquers silence -- another piece of whimsy made in collaboration
with my wife, Nancy.
ARC-239
-2709
COOL WORLD, THE
Shirley Clarke , 1964, 104 minutes, B&W, sound
A hauntingly bitter, savagely realistic yet not unpoetic study of the world's foremost metropolitan
jungle. Produced by the renown documentary filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman, the docu-drama is based
on a novel by Warren Miller.
ARC-141, 142, 143
CREASED ROBE SMILE (Part 3 of THE APERATURE OF GHOSTINGS)
Lewis Klahr, 2001, 4.5 minutes, color, sound
See description under CATHERINE STREET.
ARC-343
-4490
CRICKET REQUIEM
Stan Brakhage, 1998, 3 minutes, color, silent @24fps
CRICKET REQUIEM is a hand-painted and elaborately step-printed film which juxtaposes bent,
sometimes saw-tooth, scratch shapes multiply colored in pastels on a white field juxtaposed with
emerging, and sometimes retreating, bi-pack imagery of the faintest imaginable lines (solarized lines)
etched in brown-black. This interplay continues until the latter imagery begins to dominate with
increasing recurrence. Then suddenly there's a vibrant mix of thick black lines (which is "echoed" once
again near end of film) that alters the increasingly colored bent lines and their thin-stringy
accompaniment, with rhythms which suggest a stately and emphatic end.
--S.B.
ARC-297
CROSSROADS
Bruce Conner, 1976, 36 minutes, B&W, sound
Based on U.S. Government footage of the first underwater A-bomb test at the Bikini Atoll on July 25,
1946, the film is a collage of the same explosion seen 27 different times at various distances, vantage
points, and film speeds. Grandeur, destructiveness, dramatic spectacle and fearsome beauty -- the
repetition gradually moves the explosion from the realm of historic phenomena to a kind of universal
cosmic force. Original music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley.
ARC-197
CYCLES
Zeinabu Davis, 1988, 15 minutes, B&W, sound
An experimental film which focuses on a woman's determination to trick fate -- while waiting for her
period, a state of anticipation familiar to all women. Influenced by cultural antecedents of Caribbean
folklore, the film uses animation, live action and photographic processes in an attempt to discover a
film language that is unique to the daily lives of African American women. The soundtrack combines a
chorus of women voices with the music of Africa and the diaspora -- including Miriam Makeba, acapella
singers from Haiti and trumpetiste Clora Bryant.
ARC-130
-1969
DANGLING PARTICIPLE
Standish Lawder, 1970, 18 minutes, B&W, sound
Made from found footage of old classroom instructional films, DANGLING PARTICIPLE offers practical
advice on contemporary sexual hang-ups and where they come from.
--S.L.
“The funniest underground film I’ve ever seen.” --Sheldon Renan
ARC-347
-4493
DANTE QUARTET, THE
Stan Brakhage, 1987, 8 minutes, color, sound
This work, handpainted on film, took six years to create and is based on Brakhage's extensive studies
of The Divine Comedy. Each of the film's four parts is inspired by closed-eye or hypnogogic vision.
Originally painted on IMAX and rephotographed for this 16mm version by Dan Yanosky at Western Cine.
ARC-102
-1198
DARK EXODUS
Iverson White, 1985, 28 minutes, B&W, sound
A narrative concerned with the migration of Blacks from the south to the north in the 1900s and with
the impact of a lynching on one proud Black family. The family must decide whether to remain on
their land or join the exodus north.
ARC-077
-1971
DARKNESS, LIGHT, DARKNESS
Jan Svankmajer, 1989, 7 minutes, color, sound
A claymation short.
"With his body, senses and existence, a man fills an empty room, but this existence is unsteady and
temporary. He will immerse in darkness again, in the same way he has emerged from it."
ARC-154
-1732
DAYBREAK EXPRESS
D.A. Pennebaker, 1958, 5 1/2 minutes, color, sound
Music by Duke Ellington ("Take a Train").
In Pennebaker's first film, New York's Third Avenue El lives on in this colorful, dizzying film that
begins with a sunrise and moves into increasing speed with a crescendo of visual effects (bulging
skyscrapers, twirling bridges) and ends with abstract colors and flashing lights.
ARC-303
-3815
DECODINGS
Michael Wallin, 1983, 10 minutes, B&W, sound
A found-footage film drawing from older educational and scientific films, newsreels, and
documentaries for its source material.
Human behavior, rituals and customs, and learning processes are encoded in its media records---film
amongst them. Isolating gesture and incident and re-combining images can result in a decoding of
these processed, rigidified messages. Consequently, new meanings may arise, new messages emerge.
ARC-108
-1203
DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT
Dominic Angerame, 1990, 13 minutes, color, sound
"Part two of a three part film series about mankind's urge to build. Moving and still sequences, using a
variety of techniques, are used to draw the viewer away from everyday perception to a new aesthetic.
Appreciation of the double-edged nature of machines in our world." --D.A.
ARC-149
-1727
DEDEHEIWA RESTS IN HIS GARDEN
Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon, 1968-71, 6 minutes, color, sound
A collaboration by filmmaker Asch and anthropologist Chagnon to film the Yanomamo, the largest
Indian group in the Amazon Basin. This is one of 37 films produced from 50 hours of footage.
The warmth of adult-child interaction is shown as children come and play with the resting Dedeheiwa.
ARC-261
-3065
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
Nina Fonoroff, 1986, 8 1/2 minutes, B&W, sound
Employing a wide variety of inexpensive special effects like superimpositions, negative printing and
bi-packing, Fonoroff crafts a haunting psychological winter landscape of suburban parking lots and
apartment houses.
ARC-129
DESISTFILM
Stan Brakhage, 1954, 7 1/2 minutes, B&W, sound
The camera joins a drunken teenage party and participates in the expression of desire and
frustration. Internationally acclaimed as the classic of its genre.
"The best film of the 1950s; breathtaking camera work; entire cinematic conception and execution is
brilliant." --Willard Maas
ARC-227
-2631
DIAGONAL SYMPHONY
Viking Eggeling, 1921 or 1924, 5 1/2 minutes, B&W, silent
This film is on the same reel as Hans Richter's RHYTHMUS 21.
Title at head of film: "Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter in 1921 made the first two experimental
films." It is elsewhere noted that DIAGONAL SYMPHONY was made in 1924 -- ?
A set of white curved and straight line shapes animated on black back-ground. The shapes have a
graphic design/touch of Art Deco/touch of Cubism look.
ARC-281
-3513
DIAGRAM FILM
Paul Glabicki, 1978, 12 minutes, color, sound
Using animation and live action, this piece breaks down the visual mechanics of motion on the screen,
displaying the basic elements of image. An extremely influential film on the popular graphic layout
trends of the early-eighties.
ARC-028
DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT (POETRY AND TRUTH)
Peter Kubelka, 2003, 13 minutes, color, silent, 35mm
Found footage of a series of takes for TV commercials (a brand of chocolates, men’s hair gel, and
wooden flooring).
“POETRY AND TRUTH supplies us with one more layer towards a portrait of the artist as archeologist –
as a hunter and gatherer of artifacts which, in some one hundred years of time, will be able to answer
questions that cannot even be thought of today...This found footage film functions in more ways than
one: as a work of art, as a demonstration object, as an ethnographic document...the footage at hand
bears witness to our own Western rituals of make-believe, you-should-have, go-and buy.”
--Nordic
Anthropological Film Assoc.
ARC-386
DIFFERENT IMAGE, A
Alile Sharon Larkin, 1982, 52 minutes, color, sound
A poetic portrait of an African-American woman attempting to escape becoming a sex object and to
discover her true heritage. Through a sensitive and humorous story about her relationship with a man,
the film makes provocative connections between racism and sexual stereotyping. First Prize, Black
American Cinema Society.
ARC-123, 124
-0989
DOMAIN OF THE MOMENT, THE
Stan Brakhage, 1977, 18 minutes, color, silent
Made at a Brakhage's small, rural Colorado house with farm animals, this film ponders the way some
animals experience events and time. According to Brakhage's notes, it is based on the memory of four
encounters with animals which prompted him to observe that the events were, "so centered upon one
moment that chronology seems almost obliterated or at least unimportant in remembrance. Most
animals seem, to me, to inhabit this eventuality as a norm."
ARC-011
DON'T LOOK BACK
D. A. Pennebaker, 1966, 96 minutes, B&W, sound
Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England.
"As film, it is pure art; as documentary of an artist it is pure poetry; and as a commentary on our
world, well, that's the way it is."
--Ralph Gleason
ARC-219, 220
-2410, 2411
DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND
Windsor McKay, 1906, 8 minutes, B&W, silent
This early trick film charts a rarebit fiend's surreal dream "flight" over New York City. It bears strong
resemblance to an earlier Pathe film that no longer exists by Gaston Velle, "Reve a la Lune.”
ARC-100
-1194
EARLY ABSTRACTIONS
Harry Smith, 1946-56, 23 minutes, color, sound
A collection of 6 of Harry Smith's shorts -- meticulous hand-painting using squares, circles, and other
vibrantly moving graphics. The last one is a collage film. All are set to early Beatles songs beginning
with "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and continuing throughout with only pauses between the songs. While
this was a common method of Smith's when he screened his films, somehow this particular addition of
sound seems lacking in finesse and in all likelihood was recently done when the new internegative was
made.
Harry Smith is credited with developing ingenious methods of animation, hand-painting directly on
film as well as collage techniques. He came into contact with other filmmakers including the Whitney
brothers, Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren. He associated extensively with abstract filmmaker
Jordan Belson, both of them consciously basing their work in the genre of the non-objective movement
of Kandinsky, Rudolph Bauer and Franz Marc.
ARC-320
-4048
EARTH: SONG OF NEW LIFE
Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930, 60 minutes, B&W, sound
It's tradition-versus-progress in this story of Russian peasants resisting the introduction of mechanized
farming. Notably missing from this print is the scene in which farmers urinate into a tractor's empty
radiator to make it run again. Russian with English subtitles.
ARC-088, 089
-0578
EARTHSONG OF THE CRICKET, THE
Stan Brakhage, 3 minutes, color, silent @24fps
“This is a hand-painted work whose shapes are scratched on black leader filled with varieties of color:
the resultant shapes tend to suggest insect-like movements, a rub of bent-lines together suggesting the
electric hind legs of the cricket, whose movements engender (thru elaborate step-printing) quick
pullbacks within frames of the film, so contrived as to create visual agitron lines within the zoom-like
effect whose rhythm approximates a cricket's repetitive sound. This effect is echoed ephemerally later
in the film as it nears its end of muted pull-down shapes and approximations of the earth-clodlikenesses and/or autumnal leaf-likenesses which begin the film.”
--S.B.
ARC-298
ECCE HOMO
Jerry Tartaglia, 1989, 7 minutes, color, sound
"A mix of optically printed footage from Jean Genet's film 'UN CHANT D'AMOUR' and scenes from allmale movies. Provokes questions about medical voyeurism and a call for positive sexual attitudes."
ARC-155
-1731
EDISON COLLECTION 1895-97
The Edison Company, 1895-97, 8 1/2 minutes, B&W, silent
A collection of 12 early shorts filmed by Edison's company with their early motion picture camera.
Most are staged set-ups, each lasting one minute or less. Examples are: man getting a shave and his
hair combed and then a person in white (ghost?) appears which makes the shavers disappear; man
serving wine to three ladies all dressed up, they drink and the ladies dance around.
The imaginative aspects are not very well realized in these shorts. It makes one appreciate the films
of Georges Melies all the more.
ARC- 308
-3843
11 X 14
James Benning, 1976, 83 minutes, color, sound
“James Benning’s 1976 feature is a laconic mosaic of single-shot sequences, each ffering some sort of
sound/image pun or paradox. At once a crypto-narrative with an abstract, peekaboo storyline and
fractured, painterly study of the Midwestern landscape.” James Hoberman
ARC-362, 363, 364
ELSA KIRK (Part 1 of THE APERATURE OF GHOSTINGS)
Lewis Klahr, 1999, 5 minutes, color, sound
See description under CATHERINE STREET.
ARC-341
-4488
EMAK-BAKIA
Man Ray, 1927, 18 minutes @ 18fps, B&W, sound
This print has a soundtrack, an old-timey piano with a 1978 copyright.
Man Ray, an American artist living in Paris, named this film for the Basque villa where some of the
material was shot. ("Emak-Bakia" means "Leave me alone" in Basque.) Exhibiting his early Dada
affiliations, the film juxtaposes images that evoke the elements of cinema -- a multi-eyed camera,
neon and street lights projecting into darkness, prisms reflecting light -- with Dada emblems, such as
dice, and introducing a fragmented narrative.
"A series of fragments, a cinepoem...its reasons for being are its inventions of light-forms and
movements, while the more objective parts interrupt the monotony of abstract inventions or serve as
punctuation." --M.R.
ARC-253
-2932
ENTR'ACTE
Rene Clair, 1924, 14 minutes, B&W, silent
A series of improbable adventures giving filmmaker, Rene Clair, latitude to explore the limits of the
camera-medium and special effects like reverse cranking, single-framing, high speed and
superimposition. Made as intermission entertainment for the Ballets Suedois. Actors include Erik
Satie, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Jean Borlin and Rolf de Mare.
ARC-103
-1202
ENTUZIAZM (ENTHUSIASM)
Dziga Vertov, 1930, 90 minutes, B&W, sound
This Russian-Formalist film utilizes Pudovkin's "building-block" montage strategy in its story of the
workers' revolution. Beautifully-composed images and many bizarre techniques make this film as
fascinating now as it was then.
ARC-094, 095
-0631
ESCAPE
Mary Ellen Bute, 1937, 4 minutes, color, sound
Abstract images set to Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor.” The theme of escape is illustrated by
the image of a triangle trapped behind horizontal and vertical lines.
On same reel as Bute’s IMAGINATION.
ARC-187
-1333
EYE MUSIC IN RED MAJOR
Marie Menken, 1961, 5 1/2 minutes, color, silent
"A study in light based on persistence of vision and enhancement from eye fatigue."
ARC-162
FABULOUS FORTY-HORSE HITCH, THE
Mary Ellen Bute, 1973, 10 minutes, color, sound
A commercial film Bute did for the Schlitz Brewery in Milwaukee. Shows the creation and history of
the forty-horse hitch and wagon that Schlitz Brewery used in their Circus Parade.
ARC-191
-1352
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
Watson & Webber, 1928, --? minutes, B&W, sound
This independently produced work gained great attention for exceptional special effects.
ARC-031
FANNIE'S FILM
Fronza Woods, 1981, 14 minutes, B&W, sound
A profile of Mrs. Fannie Drayton, a widowed, 65-year-old woman who cleans an exercise studio whose
clients are primarily white. The film's visuals checkerboard her work against theirs as Fannie
reminisces with pride and humor about her life, finding strength in the past, satisfaction in the
present, and hope in the future.
ARC-131
-1458
FELIX GETS THE CAN
Otto Messmer, 1924, 9 minutes, B&W, silent
Felix, hungry for salmon, ends up in Alaska.
Otto Messmer was one of the first animators to use inner thoughts and physical movement to develop
a character's personality, and his Felix was among the most original and well-loved cartoon characters
until Mickey Mouse came along.
ARC-290
-3653
FELIX WOOS WHOOPEE
Otto Messmer, 1927, 10 minutes, B&W, sound
Felix goes into a saloon. Drinking and dancing. Various antics and hallucinations as he stumbles
home.
ARC-273
-3312
FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO
Yvonne Rainer, 1974, 1 hr 45 minutes, B&W, sound
Rainer's lengthy work examines the politics and conventions of relationships. The woman in question
cannot "reconcile her desires with her image of perfection," says the film, which is practically a
textbook of experimental technique.
ARC-032, 033, 034
-0619
FILTER BEDS
Guy Sherwin, 1998, 9 minutes, B&W, sound
Made at the site of the disused Middlesex Filter Beds in east London. Images of grasses and reeds,
subtle shifts of focal point, the appearance of a vapor trail.
"…a delicate…study of a tangle of scrub and trees. A very shallow depth of field causes branches and
stalks of wild grasses to emerge and disappear as Sherwin racks focus, settling on the jet planes
sweeping across an impossibly distant sky. The soft rich grain of the muted image lends it a dreamlike
timelessness."
--Brian Frye
ARC-322
-4222
FIRESIDE
Konrad Steiner, 1983, 8 minutes, color, silent
Inspired by enjoyment of looking into a bonfire or hearth, seeing shapes coalesce and disperse
fleetingly, or by feeling the mind's desire work with the forms of flame that dance. The cinema is a
similar form to that. Made without a camera by etching unexposed film with sandpaper, chemicals and
light.
ARC-269
-3317
FIRST PROGRAMS 1895-96
Lumiere Brothers, 1895, 20 minutes, B&W, silent
A collection of 14 shorts produce by the Lumiere brothers, among the first recorded "moving" images
on emulsion. Beginning titles mention early work being done with moving images in the US, England
and France. The sections include: employees leaving Lumiere factory, arrival of express at Lyons,
friendly party in the Lumiere garden, feeding the baby, boys sailing boats in Tuilleries Gardens, the
falling wall, baths at Milan (people diving), French dragoons, gondola party (people disembarking from
gondola), sack race, military review - Hungary, German hussars jumping, feeding the swans, and boiler
loading.
The condition of this print is not the best -- somewhat soft on right side of screen, light does not
cover the frame evenly.
ARC-315
-3905
FISTFIGHT
Robert Breer, 1964, 11 minutes, color, sound
Frame by frame collage of everything imaginable. First shown in New York production of K.H.
Stockhausen’s Originale. Soundtrack is from these performances.
ARC- 346
-4495
FIVE ISLAND BOAT TOTEM
Rob Yeo, 1978, 48 minutes, color, B&W, silent
Using the restoration process of a wooden skiff as the point of departure, the filmmaker presents a
complex visual model for the dream process and selective memory.
ARC-171
FLOWER, THE BOY, THE LIBRARIAN
Stephanie Barber, 1996, 3 1/2 minutes, color, sound
A brief journey into the sublimation of a boy's sexual awakening.
"A love story in three parts." --S.B.
ARC-254
-2992
FLUX FILM pts. 1-4
Compiled by George Maciunas, 1966, 2 hrs 30 minutes
This series of vignettes explores the formal elements of film. A variety of artists use a variety of
approaches to the medium, ranging from locked-off long takes to pseudo-pornographic comic
blackouts.
Part 1 - B&W, silent and sound, Arc-059
#10 - (Entrance to exit) - George Brecht
# 9 - (Eyeblink) - (Anonymous)
# 4 - Disappearing Music for Face - Chieko Shiomi
# 7 -10 Feet - George Maciunas
#13 - Trace #24 - Robert Watts
#18 - Smoking - Joe Jones
# 6 - 9 Minutes - James Riddle
#12 - Trace #23 - Robert Watts
#23 - Sun in your Head - Wolf Vostell
#25 - The Evil Faerie - George Landow
Part 2 - B&W, silent and sound, ARC-060
#36 - (
) - Peter Kennedy & Mike Parr
#20 - Artype - George Maciunas
#26 - Sears Catalogue (1-3) - Paul Sharits
#27 - Dots 1 & 2 - Paul Sharits
#28 - Wrist Trick - Paul Sharits
#16 - Four - Yoko Ono
#37 - (
) - Peter Kennedy & Mike Parr
#30 - (
)"
#11 - Trace #22 - Robert Watts
#17 - 5 o'clock in the Morning - Peter Vanderbeck
# 5-(
) - John Cavanaugh
#14 - One - Yoko Ono
(
) - Shout - Jeff Perkins
# 1 - Zen for Film - Nam June Paik
# 3 - End after Nine - (Anonymous)
Part 3 - color, silent, ARC-061
#31 - Police Car - John Cale
#24 - (Readymade) - Albert Fine
#19 - Opus 74, Version 2 - Eric Andersen
# 2 - (Invocations) - Dick Higgins
Part 4 - color, sound, ARC-062
#29 - Word Movie - Paul Sharits
ARC-059/060/061/062
-0623,0624,0630
FOGLINE
Larry Gottheim, 1970, 11 minutes, color, silent
"The metaphor in FOG LINE is so delicately positioned that I find myself receding in many directions to
discover its source: The Raw and the Cooked? Analytic vs. Synthetic? Town & Country? Ridiculous and
Sublime? One line is scarcely adequate to the bounty which hangs from fog and line conjoined.
"The line is the edge of the fog, tread upon and permeated by the blood-line of dimly visible beasts,
intersected in the mind's eye of the cinema window by these drawstrings of power, perhaps the very
energy which drives Larry's camera. The way in which space is occupied by color, with the time,
describes how the art of painting faces a present in our natural surroundings, with their surprises of
timing. The line is a dissection of the frame, the reduction of dimensionality to interconnection. As a
sectoring of space and a metaphor on the time-line of the film, FOG LINE is an idea made flesh.
Inscrutably, the sense of changes, emerging from time to problematic circumstance most urgently
requiring comprehension, is constant and sustained throughout."
--Tony Conrad
ARC-244
THE FOURTH WATCH
Janie Geiser, 2000, 11 minutes, color, sound
“The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last section before morning was called
the fourth watch. In the film, in these hours before dawn, an endless succession of rooms is inhabited
by silent film figures occupying flickering space in a midcentury house made of printed tin...It is not
clear who is watching and who is trespassing in this nocturnal drama of lost souls.” --J.G.
ARC-374
FORTY-EIGHT HEADS FROM THE SZONDI-TEST
Kurt Kren, 1960, 4 minutes, B&W, silent
"A ruthless cinematic execution of the philosophical notion that no one is his/her self; that everyone
is everyone and possibly nothing". K.K.
ARC-163
-1773
FRAGRANCE
Gay Abel-Bey, 1986, 40 minutes, color, B&W, sound
A family drama whose main protagonist, George Trenton, a young Black army private, is on a week
liberty before his unit is sent to Vietnam. The visit home introduces George to a tense situation in
which his brother has been thrown out for involvement with the Black Panthers.
ARC- 181
-1953
FREE RADICALS
Len Lye, 1958-1979, 4 minutes, B&W, sound
"In modern physics, 'free radicals' are particles of energy; the film is a celebration of energy expressed
by movement. An award-winning film at the International Experimental Film
Competition, Brussels."
ARC-161
FRIGHTFUL SPIDER, THE
Tate Bunker, 2000, 6 minutes, color, sound
"Based simply on the rhyme of Miss Muffet, I wanted to explore movement within the frame through
camera movements and editing. I wanted the film to be as close to dance as a film could be -- not to
depict dance but be dance itself. The goal still seems elusive." --T.B.
Narrative: The rooftop Prankster is up to her tricks again with a spider and string in hand. She
searches out her next victim, a tardy Violinist rushing to meet the Dancer who is impatiently waiting to
start her rehearsal.
ARC-332
-4261
FUJI
Robert Breer, 1974, 8 1/2 minutes, color, sound
An animated train ride around Japan's Fujiyama provides the basic material for this film which
reduces the image of the mountain to its abstracted elements of visual pattern.
ARC-014
-0627
FUSES
Carolee Schneemann, 1964-67, 20 minutes, color, silent
Schneemann’s self-shot erotic film remains a controversial classic. With awards at Cannes (1968), the
Yale Film Festival (1992), and showings at museums and universities internationally, FUSES has
nevertheless encountered censorship over the years.
“The notorious masterpiece...as silent celebration in color of heterosexual lovemaking. The film
unifies erotic energies within a domestic environment through cutting, superimposition and layering of
abstract impressions scratched into the celluloid itself...FUSES succeeds perhaps more than any other
film in objectifying the sexual streamings of the body’s mind.” --The Guardian, London
“...Schneemann spent some three years marking on the film, baking it in the oven, even hanging it
out the window during rainstorms on the off chance it might be struck by lightning. Much as human
beings carry the physical traces of their experiences, so this film testifies to what it has been through
and communicates the spirit of its maker. The red heat baked into the emulsion suffuses the film, a
concrete emblem of erotic power.”
--B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Art Institute
ARC-355
-4701
GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, THE
Stan Brakhage, 1981, 3 minutes, color, silent @ 18fps
This film (related to MOTHLIGHT) is a collage composed entirely of montane zone vegetation. As the
title suggests it is an homage to (but also argument with) Hieronymous Bosch. It pays tribute as well,
and more naturally, to "The Tangled Garden" of J.E.H. MacDonald and the flower paintings of Emil
Nolde.
--S.B.
ARC- 296
GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM
Su Friedrich, 1980, 14 minutes @ 18fps, B&W, silent
"The text is a succession of fourteen dreams taken from eight years of my journals. The text is
scratched onto the film so that you hear any voice but that of a recorded narrator. The images were
chosen for their indirect but potent correspondence to the dream content." --S.F.
ARC-234
-0620
GERTIE THE DINOSAUR
Winsor McCay, 1914, 14 minutes, B&W, silent
McCay is considered to be the father of modern animation as he was the first in this country to
produce an animated cartoon. Some of his films were based on his newspaper comic strips while
others were based on current events of the time.
GERTIE is considered to be the first "classic" cartoon and was used for a number of years by McCay in
a vaudeville act. He would give Gertie (on-screen) orders which she would then carry out. The film
ends with McCay apparently climbing into the picture to be carried off by Gertie.
This is the complete version in which the story line is based on a bet between McCay and his friend
George McManus (the creator of "Bringing up Father") that he could animate Gertie.
ARC-276
-3337
GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST
Hans Richter, 1928, 9 minutes @ 18fps; 6:45 minutes @24fps, B&W, silent
Opening title: "The Nazis destroyed the sound version of this film as degenerate art. It shows that
even objects revolt against regimentation."
A playful, absurdist Dada comedy meant to defy all conventions, social and cinematic alike. Pixillated
derbies fly through the air, pistols are fired - no one dies, bearded men lose their hair, etc. Originally
created for the 1928 Baden-Baden music festival with a Hindemith score now lost
ARC-280
-3512
GLACIER BLUES, THE
Michael Rosas-Walsh, 1997, 14 1/2 minutes, color, sound
A spiritual perception of Alaskan rhythms, images and sounds, alive and well and living in the tundra,
at sea, in the sky and in this state of mind.
ARC-271
-3354
GLASS
Leighton Pierce, 1998, 7 minutes, color, sound
A not-so-still life in the backyard with children, water, fire and a few other basic elements. This is
another contemplative painterly piece in Leighton Pierce's ongoing "Memories of Water" series. While
the ultimate effect is intended to be poetic (and maybe even transformative), it is simultaneously a
study in the laws of optics -- an exploration of refraction, diffraction, diffusion, reflection and
absorption.
--L.P.
ARC-314
GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN
Marie Menken, 1957, 6 minutes, color, sound
This simple piece is literally a glimpse of a garden. Close-ups, traveling camera, and bird sound
create a peaceful, pleasant set-piece.
ARC-053
-0626
GLORIA
Hollis Frampton, 1979, 11 minutes, color, sound
An autobiographical work using footage from an old silent comedy, this work takes an almostanthropological approach to its subject, the Irish.
ARC-079
-0561
GOLD IS WHERE YOU FIND IT
Dawn Wiedemann, 1988, 86 minutes, color, sound
A documentary about the lives of a few old gold miners who live and still mine with their old
equipment and handmade processors in a ghost town in central Nevada. Taking the filmmaker into old
mine shafts and the remote mountains, they tell tales of fortune and disaster.
ARC-195, 196
-2188
GREAT BLONDINO, THE
Robert Nelson, 1967, 40 minutes, color, sound
An experimental film containing dream sequences, what appears to be a detective story, and a
variety of interesting discrete segments. Dedicated "to tight-rope walkers everywhere."
ARC-056
-0629
GREAT PUMPKIN RACE, THE
Emil Cohl, 1910, 5:15 minutes, B&W, silent
The film begins with titles: "Emil Cohl, the father of the animated cartoon, also brought inanimate
objects to life with stop motion photography and gave a new freedom of movement to farce. Cohl died
in poverty."
In this film, very large flat-shaped pumpkins (like car tires) roll off a cart and around the streets. The
rolling pumpkins are chased by a group of men and women (men in drag?), including a man pulling the
donkey from the cart, through an inconceivable obstacle course throughout the city.
ARC-330
-4256
GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, THE
Edwin S. Porter, 1903, 11 minutes, B&W, silent
A film hearlded as the most popular film of early cinema. It was advertised as "a Faithful duplication
of the genuine Hold-ups made famous by various outlaw bands in the West."
ARC-126
THE GROUND
Robert Beavers, 2001, 20 minutes, color, sound, 35mm
“What lives in the space between my hand and my chest? Filmmaker/stonemason. A tower or ruin of
remembrance. With each swing of the hammer I cut into the image, and the sound rises from the
chisel. A rhythm, marked by repetition and animated by variation; strokes, of hammer and fish,
resounding in dialogue. In this space, which the film creates, emptiness gains a contour strong enough
for the spectator to see more than image – a space permitting vision in addition to sight.”
--R.B.
ARC-389
HAIR PIECE
Ayoka Chenzira, 1985, 10 minutes, color, sound
This film humorously examines the ways "nappy headed" people attempted to straighten their hair to
fit into predominantly-white standards of beauty. In cutout animation resembling the "jazz" work of
Henri Matisse.
ARC-093
-0593
HAMFAT ASAR
Larry Jordan, 1965, 15 minutes, B&W, sound
“The strangeness of this [animated] 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.”
--L.J.
“A figure on stilts crosses [a tightrope] repeatedly while creatures and objects float by in the
background, manifest themselves, and...perch upon a tightrope. In the course of his crossings, he will
become a bird, a train, a floating balloon.”
--P.A.Sitney
ARC-394
HAULING TOTO BIG
Robert Nelson, 1997, 43 minutes, B&W, sound
Completed in December, 1997 (1st Answer Print) the film is a distillation of a 25-year collection of
various (film) parts and pieces and project starts filmed or directed by Nelson. Much of the work was
done with the students and facilities at UWM, some at Cornell University and some without affiliation
of any kind.
The project/problem became that of finding an organizing principle that could integrate the disparate
material and create interrelationships. The liberal use of text throughout the film opened possibilities
(...language being able to bridge any two shots). Robert Service's poem The Cremation of Sam McGee
was already in some of the parts and pieces because of Nelson's childhood impression of that
poem...and it provided further armature.
Finally, what could be imagined that was already there but hidden within the material? "Dreaming in
slow motion while using your hands and remaining awake...doesn't quite describe it," says Nelson.
Winner Grand Prize 36th Annual Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1998.
ARC-278
-3352
HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED
George Kuchar, 1966, 15 minutes, color, sound
This parody of melodrama features its own director struggling with the problems of filmmaking.
Kuchar's film has been cited by John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble) as a great influence.
ARC-57
-0591
HURRY, HURRY
Marie Menken, 1957, 12 minutes, color, sound
A flame superimposed over a microscopic shot of sperm cells is accompanied by a rhythmic, grating
soundtrack to create an unusual analogy to masculine sexuality.
ARC-052
-0625
I, AN ACTRESS
George Kuchar, 1977, 10 minutes, B&W, sound
"This film was to be a screen-test for a girl in the class at the San Francisco Art Institute. She wanted
something to show producers of theatrical productions as she was interested in an acting career. By
the time all the heavy equipment was set up the class was just about over; all we had was ten minutes.
Since 400 feet of film takes ten minutes to run through the camera…that was the answer: just start if
and don't stop till it runs out. I had to get into the act to speed things up so, in a way, this film gives
an insight into my directing techniques while under pressure." --G.K.
ARC-333
-4264
I BE DONE BEEN WAS IS
Debra J. Robinson, 1984, 60 minutes, color, sound
This documentary on black woman comediennes combines performance footage with interviews.
Humor, sadness, and the hard work behind the laughs come through in the combination.
ARC-083/084
-0573
I'LL WALK WITH GOD
Scott Stark, 1994, 8 minutes, color, sound
Using emergency information cards surreptitiously lifted from the backs of airline seats, the film
pictorially charts an airline flight attendant's stoic transcendence through and beyond worldly
adversity. Through an elaborate system of posturing and nuance that evokes an almost ritualistic
synergy, the female protagonists(s) are shuttled toward a higher spiritual plane, carried aloft on the
shimmering winds of Mario Lanza's soaring tremolo.
ARC-293
-3683
ILLUSIONS
Julie Dash, 1982, 34 minutes,
A reconstruction of early sound film, this piece examines the racial politics of the Hollywood of the
1940s. A consistently beautiful and challenging film.
ARC-078
-0588
IMAGINATION
Mary Ellen Bute, 1948, 3 minutes, color, sound
Abstract images set to music. (Music source is unknown).
Bute’s film ESCAPE also on the reel.
ARC-187
-1333
IN MEMORY
Abraham Ravett, 1993, 13 minutes, B&W, sound
"IN MEMORY is a tribute, a projected memorial to members of my family and ALL those who died
under Nazi occupation." --A.R.
ARC-213
INN WHERE NO MAN RESTS
George Melies, 1903, 4 minutes, B&W, silent
Second film on two-film reel titled: Comedie et Magique de Melies.
Drunk man at an inn harassing the inn keeper. Removes his coat, hat and boots, stumbles round the
room while various hallucinations take place.
ARC-257
-2976
INTERIEUR, INTERIORS (to A.K.)
Vincent Grenier, 1978, 15 minutes, B&W, silent
In this film the viewer is confronted by an indeterminate space which even as recognizable objects
and motions come and go, remains ambiguous. Filmmaker Martha Haslanger has written of the film,
"...what Grenier leave us with is finally not the realization that lines and shapes become objects, not
that objects deliquesce into abstraction, but that both object and abstraction can be accessible at the
same moment." Made with special assistance of Ann Knutson.
ARC-010
INTRODUCTION TO THE SECRET SOCIETY
Fred Worden, 1991, 7 minutes, color, sound
An abstracted experimental, narrative based on three images: face, figure and crowd. A collage film
of representational images of the human figure without it being portraiture or performance.
ARC-153
-1733
JUDE
Drew Klausner, 1982, 14 minutes, B&W, sound
The subject of the film is the Holocaust. Using documentary footage of the Warsaw Ghetto, the film
moves through the original footage in five cycles, becoming increasingly intermixed with rotoscoped
images of the footage and with the soundtrack compounding itself to produce an eventual cacaphony.
The filmmaker's intent is to address the passage of time and its effect on our minds; that, as time
passes our minds continually change our perceptions of the past, forgetting details and inventing new
ones.
The narration is by Samuel Oliner reading from his book Restless Memories-Recollections of the
Holocaust Years.
ARC-318
-0694
JAMA MASJID
Mira Nair, 1979, 20 minutes, B&W, sound
Mira Nair's personal record of street life around the Jama Masjid (pronounced "masood"), or Great
Mosque, in the old city of Delhi, India.
ARC-222
-2600
JEFFERSON CIRCUS SONGS
Suzan Pitt, 1973, 20 minutes,
A grotesque stop-motion animated film in which a variety of peculiar characters go about the business
of a day. At times reminiscent of Terry (Brazil) Gilliam's Monty Python work, this is an oddly
disturbing, always entertaining film.
ARC-036
-0647
JERRY'S
Tom Palazzolo, 1967, 10 minutes, color, sound
For 29 years Jerry Meyers has screamed and yelled at the customers who came into his deli -- the film
attempts to explain why people keep coming back for more.
"To have captured the essence of Jerry and his deli-in-action proves this filmmaker one of the few
who can make the documentary a high art form, comparable to the best portraiture painting; and
taking it, possibly, one step farther." --Larry Jordan, Judge
ARC-223
-2621
JIDYLL
Dick Blau, 1990, 31 minutes, color, sound
A playful series of performance activities, jokes and provocations based on occurrences of the
wandering Jew after he shows up in Milwaukee and wanders through Western History. This
collaboration between Blau and composer Yehuda Yannay features a dense score by Yannay and
elaborate sets and costumes by Jerry Fortier. Of JIDYLL, sociologist Charles Keil observed, "Every lost
tribe deserves such a film."
ARC-122
-0537
JOE'S BED-STUY BARBERSHOP
Spike Lee, 1983, 60 minutes,
The story of Joe, forced by economics and threats to open his barbershop to a local numbers game.
Lee has gone on to produce the 80s' most popular and controversial work in black cinema.
ARC-085
-0574
JUNGLE GIRL, Part 1, 2 & 3
Richard Myers, 1984, 100 minutes,
The dream-like, feature-length black and white films of Ohio-based Richard Myers are known for their
stream of consciousness imagery. As with previous works, the cast of JUNGLE GIRL, is made almost
entirely of Myers' family. Critic Sheila Benson describes Myers's intensely personal tribute to Frances
Gifford, star of the Republic Pictures serial of the 40s as, "...a gentle dream/memory work of haunting
visual beauty... and as original as Cocteau."
ARC-071/072
-0480
KILLER OF SHEEP, Part 1, 2, & 3
Charles Burnett, 1978, 87 minutes, B&W, sound
This film is a moving portrait of Stan, a young black man employed in a Los Angeles slaughter-house.
His grueling work, gutting and cleaning the carcasses of dead sheep, infects his whole life, including his
wife, children and friends. Burnett unfolds Stan's story with compassion and honesty.
ARC-074/075/076
-0481
LA JETEE
Chris Marker, 1963, 29 minutes, B&W, sound
Chris Marker's science fiction film of love and terror after the holocaust. This is a story of a band of
survivors after nearly total destruction following World War III. Living underground, they are
marshalling their remaining scientific resources to find a way out of the radioactive impasse. Dealing
with topics such as time, memory, nuclear disaster, the film is open to several interpretations.
ARC-221
LAMBETH WALK NAZI STYLE
Len Lye, 1944, 2 1/2 minutes, B&W, sound
This early found-footage film is a good example of the Situationist strategy of "Detournement," the
turning-back of cultural artifacts to reveal their constructed ideological underpinnings. Scenes from
Nazi parades are manipulated in time to a cartoonish score, ridiculing the pomp and ceremony.
ARC-080
-0562
LANDSCAPE (FOR MANON)
Peter Hutton, 1986-87, 18 minutes, B&W , silent
First section of an extended study of the weather and landscape in the Hudson River Valley.
ARC-179
-1951
LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF ICARUS
Chris Sullivan, 1994, 25 minutes, color, sound
This animated film is about the disenfranchisement of the elderly in our society. It is also about the
multitude of strangers that pass out of the corner of our eyes, and following them home. --C.S.
ARC- 319
-0688
LEAD SHOES, THE
Sidney Peterson, 1949, 18 minutes, B&W, sound
Using an anamorphic projection lens in front of his camera, filmmaker Sidney Peterson collaborates
with art students to create a haunting, nonsensical tale in the tradition surrealist cinema.
ARC-029
LEADA AND THE SWAN-- MATERIALACTION OTTO MUHL
Kurt Kren, 1964, 3 minutes, color, silent
Quickly edited document of an action with the same title by Austrian artist Otto Muhl in 1964.
ARC-160
LEMON
Hollis Frampton, 1969, 8 minutes, color, silent
“This film...focuses on lighting and the movement of light, and humor-ously refers to the processes of
other visual arts, using the mechanics of film to create, first, a sculptural entity, and, then, after
allowing the light to devour it, to transform it into a flat graphic sign. ‘Its image passes from the
spatial rhetoric of illusion into the spatial grammar of the graphic arts.’ (H.F.)”
--MOMA catalog
ARC-365
LEN LYE INTERVIEW
Made by a TV station in the 1950s or 60s, 10 minutes, color, sound
This is an excerpt from an interview originally filmed for television. Len Lye, in his 60s, discusses
large kinetic/sound sculptures that he is designing. He also demonstrates his technique for drawing
and scratching directly onto film that produced such well-known works as FREE RADICALS and
PARTICLES IN SPACE.
te: the soundtrack was put down at an extremely low level.
ARC-305
-3819
LE PEINTRE NEO-IMPRESSIONIST
Emil Cohl, 1910, 5 1/2 minutes, B&W, silent
Early animator Emil Cohl combines live-action and animation in this short film skit.
A painter in his studio is working from a live model when a prospective buyer arrives. Each canvas the
buyer is shown turns into an animated sequence based on the title that the painter provides him.
ARC-329
-4257
LES JOYEUX MICROBES
Emil Cohl, 1910, 3:45 minutes, B&W, silent
Early animator Emil Cohl combines live-action and animation in this short film skit.
Professorial-looking man in his study draws blood from another man and puts it under the microscope.
Microbes appear and each type of microbe turns into a short animated sequence.
ARC-328
-4273
LES MAITRES FOUS
Jean Rouche, 1954, 30 minutes
"The Mad Masters," or "The Masters of Madness," is a documentary on an African ritual in which, in a
trance, members of the group take on the spirits of the "civilized" European colonists.
ARC-090
-0580
L'ETOILE DE MER
Man Ray, 1928, 12 1/2 minutes, B&W, silent
Seemingly a narrative line begins with a couple walking down a country road…interspersed with titles
(in French, from poem) …images that shift in and out without obvious narrative links. A variety of
locations and objects, particularly a star fish (from the title), the couple reappearing in different
locations, with camera effects often used to lend distortive quality to the frame.
ARC-310
-3846
LIGHT/FORM STUDIES FROM ANAXAGORAS' STONE
Rob Danielson, 1975-76, 18 minutes, color, silent
Anaxagoras is credited as the first person to recognize the moon's luminance to be reflected sunlight
(c. 430 BC). He formulated a theory which defined light as a separate entity and the primary agent of
vision. L/FSFAS is a series of scene tableaus in which camera variables (primarily exposure and
temporality) are employed to dramatize the event of light reflection.
ARC-132
-1457
LIMN IV
Konrad Steiner, 1988, 10 minutes, color, silent
“The culmination of the expressive aspect of the work on the previous LIMN films, struggling with
sexual tension and release, attempting to give the viewer experience transcending that realm (by
beginning in it and finding a way beyond cyclic satisfactions).”
--K.S.
ARC-270
-3318
LINE DESCRIBING A CONE
Anthony McCall, 1973, 30 minutes, B&W, silent
"LINE DESCRIBING A CONE is what I term a solid light film. It is dealing with the projected light-beam
itself, rather than treating the light-beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded
when it strikes a flat surface (the screen).
"This film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real
time…It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary; i.e.: the space is real, not
referential; the time is real, not referential.
"For this film, every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore, has a
participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can, indeed needs to, move around, relative to
the emerging light-form." --A.M.
"…LINE DESCRIBING A CONE…represents a genuine innovation. The concept of the piece is extremely
simple. It is not necessary to have any kind of screen or surface on which to 'catch' the image, and it
may be better that there is none, like projecting out into infinity in a landscape…. The real surprise
was the sensuality of the experience. The image is formed on the dust particles in the air, or on the
smoke from cigarettes, which somehow seems substantial but resists touch."
--Malcolm LeGrice
ARC-321
-not applicable
THE LIVING AND DEAD TEST
Diana Barrie, 1979, 5.5 minutes, color, sound
A semi-structural collage that incorporates a series of SMPTE countdown leaders and moments from
found footage interspersed between each repeating SMPTE.
ARC-377
LONESOME COWBOY
Toney Merritt, 1979, 39 seconds, B&W, sound
A 39-second self-portrait of my "cowboy" phase, tongue firmly planted in cheek.
ARC-235
-2650
LOSING GROUND
Kathleen Collins, 1982, 90 minutes
This highly-regarded film concerns a relationship between a black professor and her artistic
boyfriend's bohemian dalliances. Very nicely shot, and seriously-conceived, this is a film about midlifecrisis.
ARC-097/098/099
-0705
LOVE’S REFRAIN
Nathaniel Dorsky, 2001, 22.5 minutes @18fps, color, silent
“Perhaps the most delicately tactile in this series, LOVE’S REFRAIN rests moment to moment on its
own surface. It is a coda in twilight, a soft-spoken conclusion to a set of four cinematic songs.” -N.D.
ARC-361
LUMINOUS ZONE
Barry Gerson, 1973, 21 minutes,
An experimental film that explores compositional relationships with various frame sizes and shapes,
this film is a study in the effects of light on shape.
(Print is slightly shrunken and jumpy, image is clean.)
ARC-48
-0650
MAGIC BOXES
Ariana Gerstein, 1993, 5 minutes, color, silent
By interrupting film in the developing stage, the film offers an exploration of the chemical properties
of the medium.
ARC-268
-3353
MAGIC LANTERN, THE
Georges Melies, 1903, 3 1/2 minutes, B&W, silent
Third film on 3-film reel titled THE BEST OF MELIES.
Jester and clown make a large "camera" and have it project a film. Dancing girls and ballerinas jump
out of the camera. Soldiers arrive and the jester and clown jump into the camera to hide.
ARC-248
-2931
MAGIC LANTERN MOVIE
Maxine Haleff, 1976, 9 minutes, color, sound
Narration written by Cecile Starr.
In documentary fashion, the film traces the development of the magic lantern, a popular 19 th century
precursor of moving pictures. Sequences from Georges Melies' 1903 film THE MAGIC LANTERN brings
the technique of moving images up to the invention of filmmaking.
ARC-306
-3818
MAKE ME PSYCHIC
Sally Cruikshank, 1978, 8 minutes, color, sound
A trip with Anita and Quasi into places where cartoon
characters have never gone before. The film explores a range of fantasy styles from fin de siecle Coney
Island and twenties movie palaces to the futurama deco of Hollywood cabaret scenes to the Day Glo
gaudiness of thirties popular music. The narratives are suggestive of the Sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick.
ARC-013
MAKING FRIENDS
Fleischer Studios, animation by Grim Natwick, 1934, 9 min., B&W, sound
Betty Boop sings to her little dog, Pudgy, to go out into the world and make some friends. Pudgy goes
out and encounters various woodland creatures which follow him home.
ARC-351
-4526
MANHATTA
Scheeler and Paul Strand, 1921, 12 minutes, B&W, silent
An impressionistic view of Manhattan Island.
ARC-228
-2624
MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
Dziga Vertov, 1929, 45 minutes,
This Russian documentary is the most famous example of the "Kino-Eye" style of documentary, in
which the camera is as important as the material before it. Gorgeously shot, occasionally-dizzying
images of factories and daring cinematographers more than make up for its silence.
ARC-046/047
-0649
MARQUETTE PARK II
Tom Palazzolo, 1978, 35 minutes, color, sound
This is a documentary on an Illinois Nazi rally. A variety of oddball characters bumblingly organize a
rally to predictably-mixed public response. This is a fascinating look at an extremely strange, ugly
subculture.
ARC-035
-0646
MASQUERADE
Larry Jordan, 1981, 3 minutes
"For the first time I am animating hand-painted engraved cut-outs on a full-colored background. The
film is mood-filled: A duel scene in a snowy forest, obviously the morning after a Masquerade ball.
Harlequin lies dying, while Red Indian walks away with the wings of victory. The woman between them
appears, cat-masked. The mask dissolves away. Her spirit passes into the faces of the sum upon the
sunflower. But Harlequin cannot escape death. The blue world engulfs him." --L.J.
ARC-128
-1970
MASTER OF CEREMONIES
Chris Sullivan, 1987, 9 minutes, color, sound
A rich animation about the Gothic visions still alive in contemporary society. The realities of expiring
in the 20th Century.
ARC-180
-1952
MATCH THAT STARTED MY FIRE, THE
Cathy Cook, 1991, 19 minutes, color, sound
This unconventional comedy explores women's sexuality through candid stories of sexual discoveries,
fantasies, and pleasures. Visually stunning, yet unnerving, the film is a visual montage of foundindustrial films and original footage of swirling skirts, monumental machinery, ocean life, and
befuddled reaction shots. The phone rings and the girl-talk begins: secrets emerge and confessions
build as the audience is taken on an adventure of sensual humor.
ARC-170
-1782
MEMO BOOK, THE (AUS DER FERNE)
Matthias Muller, 1989, 28 minutes, color, sound
"…Muller's lyric opus, a compendium of a decade's work in super-8. It gathers his rigorous
compositions and exquisite framings and summons them in the service of a resolutely first person
cinema. Occasioned by a former lover's death of AIDS, Aus Der Ferne is suffused with images of
mourning and melancholy, haunted throughout by a keen sense of the maker's own mortality."
-Mike Hoolboom, Millennium Film Journal
ARC-292
-3654
MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
Tomas Guiterrez, 1968, 97 minutes, B&W, sound
The first film from post-revolutionary Cuba to be released in the U.S. Set in the 1930s, the film
centers in a Europeanized Cuban intellectual, too idealistic (or lazy) to leave for Miami, but too
decadent to fit the new Cuban society. The film offers both a critique of Revolutionary society (the
"underdevelopment" referred to on many levels), and a critique of that critique.
ARC-138-139-140
MERRY FROLICS OF SATAN, THE
Georges Melies, 1906, 11 1/2 minutes, color (tinted print), silent
Description: One of Melies' most elaborate efforts, in two parts: 1) "Satan's Laboratory" and 2) "The
Haunted Kitchen." Two Englishmen buy some pellets from the Devil which can turn into very strange
objects. they soon find themselves on a wild journey, first on a weird train, then in a carriage being
drawn through outer space by a skeletal horse.
Film: Three guys leave a cluttered room and go into room with a large telescope. Immediately
various things happen. Then a magician-type figure makes various figures appear. In another room
women are put into trunks that turn into little car-like wagons. A lot of quick quirky antics take place.
People changing personas instantly (& costume). Each room they go into takes on a different tinted
color. The devil's workers cause little problems wherever they go. Falling down a volcano in a carriage
with skeleton horse. The carriage riding among the stars. Plot not at all clear, but this is hardly the
point.
ARC-250
-2929
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
Maya Deren, 1943, 15 minutes, B&W, sound
A disturbing, nightmarish film dealing with a conflation of sexuality and death, Deren's psychodrama
continues to influence experimental film to this day.
ARC-096
-0632
METAL DOGS OF INDIA
Chel White, 1985, 3 1/2 minutes,
This entertaining animated film uses the direct-to-film style of production as its form in the tradition
of Len Lye. A lively electronic score keeps this film, which was created without a camera, hopping
along.
ARC-055
-0683
MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET
Jim Jennings, 1999, 13 minutes, B&W, silent @24fps
A study in black shadows with hints of light falling on people or through small cracks between the
crowds walking on a New York sidewalk.
ARC-334
-4262
MONSTER, THE
George Melies, 1903, 2 minutes, B&W, silent
First of three films on reel titled The Best of Melies.
Egyptian-flavored stage set. Performer removes a skeleton from a box, covers it with veils and has it
dance around and perform tricks.
ARC-248
-2931
MOOD CONSTRASTS
Mary Ellen Bute, 1953, 7 minutes, color, sound
Abstract images set to the music “Hymn to the Sun” by Rimsky-Korsakov and “Dance of the Jugglers”
by Shostakovich. The electronic images were created by Bute on the cathode ray oscilloscope and
hand-colored.
ARC-190
-1358
MOSAIK IM VERTRAUEN
Peter Kubelka, 1954-55, 16.5 minutes, B&W, sound, 35mm
Kubelka’s first film, made after attending the Centro Sperimentale de Cinematographia in Rome. His
ideas of the image-sound “sync-event” are present here (as in later films). “A number of isolated
events are spread through, sometimes as parallel montage and at other times with illusions of
sequential and logical connects...The film weaves among these fragmented scenes mixing prolepses,
flashbacks, ellipses, and synecdoches with illusions of temporal and spatial interconnections.”
-P.A. Sitney
ARC-388
MOSORI MONIKA
Chick Strand, 1970, 20 minutes, color, sound
An expressive documentary about women in the Third World. This is an ethnographic film about two
cultures that have encountered one another. The Spanish Franciscan Missionaries went to Venezuela in
1945 to "civilize" the Warao Indians, who live in the swamps on the Orinoco River Delta. Before the
missionaries came, the Waraos lived in relative isolation and were little affected by the outside world.
The relationship between the Indians and the missionaries is simple on the surface, but it is manifested
in a complex change of techniques, values and life style which have indelibly altered the Warao vision
of life. The acculturation is presented from two viewpoints. A nun tells how the Indians lived when the
missionaries arrived and what the nuns have done to "improve" conditions, both spiritually and
materially. An old Warao Indian woman tells that she feels has been the important experiences in her
life. The two viewpoints are structured in counterpoint so that the deeper aspects of the juxtaposition
of the modern culture over the old becomes apparent through the revelations of the two women.
ARC-295
-3651
MOTHLIGHT
Stan Brakhage, 1963, 4 minutes, color, silent
A film made with the simplest of materials: wings and flowers pasted on clear film. The strategy and
resulting imagery captured the fascinations of many experimental film audiences and won prizes at the
Brussels International and Spoleto Film Festivals.
ARC-156
-1741
MOUTH WRESTLING
Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon, 1968-71, 5 minutes, color, sound
A collaboration by filmmaker Asch and anthropologist Chagnon to film the Yanomamo, the largest
Indian group in the Amazon Basin. This is one of 37 films made from 50 hours of footage. It shows
teenagers fighting over a wad of tobacco.
ARC-236
-2798
MR. HAYASHI
Bruce Baillie, 1961, 3 minutes, B&W, sound
A portrait of a gardener.
ARC-205
-2436
MUJER DE MIL FUEGOS
Chick Strand, 1975, 15 minutes, color, sound
An expressionistic, surrealistic portrait of a Latin American woman. Not a personal portrait so much
as an evocation of the consciousness of women in rural parts of such countries as Spain, Greece and
Mexico; women who wear black from the age 15 and spend their entire lives giving birth, preparing
food and tending to household and farm responsibilities. The film depicts in poetic, almost abstract
terms, their daily repetitive tasks as a form of obsessive ritual.
ARC-018
-0684
MY VERSION OF THE FALL
Diana Barrie, 1978, 9 minutes, color, silent
In Barrie’s version, Woman creates Man. The film is hand-colored which has the sky, the dress, the
view changing constantly lending a magical sensation to the procession of events. The film then plays
itself in reverse including tail leader and “The End,” up through opening countdown leader.
ARC-375
NATURAL FEATURES
Gunvor Nelson, 1990, 30 minutes, color, sound
"The fifth film in a series of collage films I call 'field studies'. Here I used cut-outs, photographs,
mirrors, toys, paint, ink, in many different combinations. The central theme is faces. A dark delicacy
lingers"
--G.N.
ARC-177
-1884
A NAVAJO WEAVER
Susie Benally, 1966, 22 minutes, B&W, silent @24fps
Susie Benally depicts her mother weaving at the loom and includes all of the necessary steps prior to
the actual weaving.
“In 1966 Sol Worth and Jon Adair conducted an experiment in Pine Springs, Arizona, ‘to determine
whether it is possible to teach people with a technically simple culture to make motion pictures
depicting their culture and themselves as they see fit.’ ...[This film was] made by the Navajo as part of
this project.”
--MOMA catalog
ARC-378
NEW YORK PORTRAIT II
Peter Hutton, 1982, 15 minutes, B&W, silent
This is a sedate, quietly-shot look at New York City, using the architecture and space of the city as
representations of its unique, powerful character.
Print Condition: Good
ARC-041
-0687
NIGHT CRIES
Tracey Moffatt, 1990, 19 minutes, color, sound
On a isolated surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her dying white
mother. The adopted daughter's attentive gestures mask an almost palpable hostility. Their story
alludes to the assimilation policy that forced Aboriginal children to be raised in white families.
ARC-166
NIGHT MAIL
Basil Wright, 1936, 23 minutes, B&W, sound
One of the famous documentaries produced by John Grierson for the General Post Office. The story
of the nightly mail train from London to Edinburgh, with highly imaginative use of picture and sound.
ARC-275
-3309
NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN
Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, 1933, 8 minutes, B&W, sound
The first film made on the pinboard, invented by Alexeieff and Parker, and an animation classic,
creating a fantasy world of witches, demons, and skeletons.
ARC-326
-4249
NOCTURNE
Philip Solomon, 1980, 10 minutes, B&W, sound
“Finding similarities in the pulses and shapes between my own experiments in night photography,
lightning storms, and night bombing in World War II, I constructed the war at home.” --P.S.
“[NOCTURNE’S] setting is a suburban neighborhood populated by kids at play and indistinct but
ominous parental figures A submerged narrative rehearses a type of young boy’s nighttime game in
which a flashlight is wielded in a darkened room to produce effects of aerial combat and
bombardment...Fantasy merges with nightmare, a war of dimly suppressed emotions rages beneath a
veneer of household calm.” --Paul Arthur
ARC-279
-3430
NOSE, THE
Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, 1963, 11 minutes, B&W, sound
Gogol's short story is animated on the pinboard, without words, capturing the scene and spirit of 19 th
century Russia.
An incredible thing happened in St. Petersburg on March 25 th, the Gogol story begins. At breakfast,
the barber B. found a nose in the loaf of bread his wife had just baked; and on the same morning the
barber's customer, Major K., woke and discovered that his nose was gone. The story is followed
through in the rich vein of fantasy so characteristic of the writer, Nikolai Gogol.
ARC-325
-4250
NOSTALGIA
Hollis Frampton, 1971, 37 minutes, B&W, sound
Frampton uses still photographs to deal with issues truth and autobiography as its thematic material,
and with the conventions of the sound/image counterpoint as its formal problem.
ARC-003
-0685
NOTES ON THE CIRCUS
Jonas Mekas, 1966, 13 minutes, color, sound
For this film, writer and poet, Jonas Mekas, filmed the three rings of the Ringling Brothers Circus in
three, separate sessions. By rewinding the filmstock and superimposing all three rings, the final film
was edited by splicing five camera rolls together. The music for the film was composed and performed
by Jim Kweskin's Jug Band
ARC-006
NOTHING HURT BUT MY PRIDE
John Marshall, 1971, 15 minutes,
A harrowing, revealing look at police work, this documentary transfigures the violence that is so much
a part of police work into a darkly beautiful dance.
ARC-020
-068
NOW PRETEND
Leah Gilliam, 1992, 10 minutes, B&W, sound
An experimental investigation into the use of race as an arbitrary signifier. Drawing upon Lacan's
account of identity formation, black hair/style politics and John Griffin's 1959 text Black Like Me, NOW
PRETEND explores misrecognition as an integral part of identity production.
ARC-230
-2648
O TANNENBAUM--MATERIALACTION OTTO MUHL
Kurt Kren, 1964, 3 minutes, color, silent
Document of an action with the same title by Austrian artist Otto Muhl in 1964.
ARC-159
OFF-HANDED JAPE, THE
Robert Nelson, 1967, 9 minutes, color, sound
A primitive, near direct, recording of performed, vaudevillian gestures from the everyday. A
collaboration between Nelson and Bill Wiley.
ARC-125
-1976
OFF/ON
Scott Bartlett, 1968, 10 minutes, color, sound
"The language of this film is evocation. Iconic forms with the drawing power of fire & water fundamental realities below the surface of normal perception."
ARC-159
OH DEM WATERMELONS
Robert Nelson, 1965, 10 minutes, color, sound
Originally shown as part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's production, "A Minstrel Show, or Civil
Rights in a Cracker Barrel", this now- classic of '60s West Coast experimental filmmaking lampoons one
of the most derisive Negro stereotypes in the book -- the watermelon.
ARC-204
-2407
OLD DIGS
Gunvor Nelson, 1993, 20 minutes, color, sound
This film is the second part of a two film series made from images collected in Kristinehamn, Nelson's
birthplace. The images were reworked with collage, painting and animation to portray an inner
journey through the sights and sounds around Kristinehamn and reflections on the Swedish past found
in the town's central river.
ARC-198
-2190
OLYMPIA - DIVING SEQUENCE
Leni Riefenstahl, 1936, 8 minutes, B&W, sound
"Leni Riefenstahl shot more than 1,500,00 feet of film at the Berlin 1936 Olympics. This excerpt is
from the diving sequence among the finest works of lyrical editing in cinema."
ARC-152
-1734
ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE
George Landow, 1978, 20 minutes,
This is an eclectic, extremely humorous piece confronting the often bizarre world of film and literary
criticism. Many of the techniques of image construction and tone have been freely lifted by MTV.
ARC-019
-0708
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
Sarah Gomez, 1974, 78 minutes, color, sound
Forceful, dialectical, fusion of deeply-felt romance, labor, drama and political analysis.
ARC-144, 145, 146
OPTIC NERVE
Barbara Hammer, 1985, 16 minutes, color, sound
"A personal reflection on family and aging. Footage from a visit to her grandmother in a nursing home
is layered and manipulated to create a compelling meditation."
ARC-150
-1729
THE OR CLOUD
Fred Worden, 2001, 6 minutes, B&W, silent
A fast-paced film putting into motion a series of abstract still images made from individual India-inkon-acetate drawings.
ARC-370
OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE
Larry Jordan, 1969, 10 minutes, color, sound
“Perhaps Jordan’s most exquisitely perfect [animated] creation – is a color collage of rococo imagery
juxtaposed with symbols of the space age. The images metamorphose, transmute, interpenetrate and
otherwise change with the fluid effervescence of bubbles rising out of water punctuated by sudden
flashes of light, alarm buzzers and abrupt visual surprises. It is a mystical, jewel-like creation, like a
Joseph Cornell box come to life.”
--Thomas Albright, S.F. Chronicle
ARC-392
-
PARABOLA
Mary Ellen Bute, 1937, 9 minutes, B&W, sound
Abstract images set to the music “La Creation du Monde” by Milhaud. Includes a parabolic sculpture
by Rutherford Boyd. A parabola is “nature’s poetry of motion, written with a single line.”
ARC-183
-1345
PARTICLES IN SPACE
Len Lye, 1957-1979, 4 minutes, B&W, sound
Drum music by the Bahamans, Yoruba of Nigeria and sound
effects creates what Len Lye described as “the most compact ZIZZ of energy I ever got on film.”
ARC-158
PATHE NEWSREEL #2
The Pathe News Co., 1928, 8 minutes, B&W, silent
A collection of seven short newsreels, each with intertitles which elaborate on the scenes.
Sections include: 1) Sault Ste. Marie, MI - ships caught in the St. Mary River by a blizzard, tugs moving
through ice to save the large cargo ships and people. 2) Rio de Janiero, Inauguration - parade for new
Brazilian President Washington Luis through the streets. He arrives for his swearing in. 3) San Antonio,
TX - Early flight simulator gives a passenger the sense of flying without leaving the ground. 4) In the
Limelight - ex-Secretary of Navy testifies about contested government oil leases. Aerial views of
Teapot Dome oilfield. 5) Chicago, IL - announced that Senator McKinley dies after a long illness. 6)
Naples, Italy - fire and lava 6 feet deep pours from Mt. Vesuvius. 7) Pikin, China - Manchurian Chang
Tso-lin reviews his troops. Marching lines of soldiers, camels and horses. Field maneuvers, soldiers
firing.
ARC-312
-3845
PASSAGE A'L'ACTE
Martin Arnold, 1993, 12 minutes, B&W, sound
A short sequence from "To Kill A Mockingbird" of a family at the breakfast table is reproduced and
altered on the optical printer. The result is a hammering rhythm of what perhaps lies deep under the
surface of the family ideal.
ARC-201
-2212
PASTORAL
Mary Ellen Bute, 1950, 6 minutes, color, sound
Abstract images set Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” Includes scenes of Leopold Stokowsky
conducting through the abstract images.
ARC-188
-1353
PAUSE!
Peter Kubelka, 1977, 12 minutes, color, sound
“Arnulf Rainer himself is an artist of unique originality and intensity. His face art, which constitutes
the source of imagery in PAUSE1 is a chapter of modern art itself.”
--Jonas Mekas
ARC-380
PEGGY AND FRED IN HELL
Leslie Thornton, 1984, 21 minutes,
One episode of an on-going series of films set in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by two odd
children who are the sole inheritors of the fragments of late 20th Century rth-American culture. Left
to their own resources to fashion a teetering subsistence, Peggy and Fred live in an arbitrary
assortment of houses, travel aimlessly through landscapes and watch television. Thornton collaborated
with performers Janis and Fred Reading throughout their childhood in the making of the series.
ARC-120
-1242
PERFECT FILM
Ken Jacobs, 1986, 22 minutes, B&W, sound
TV newscast discards relating to the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. The film is presented exactly as
Jacobs pulled it out of a barrel of 16mm discards being sold on Canal Street in New York.
"'Perfect film,' were the first words I said after viewing it, deciding then and there to never tamper
with the evidence and its lively exposition." --K.J.
ARC-214
-2435
PHENOMENA
Jordan Belson, 1965, 6 minutes, color, sound
A kinetic painting of the history of creation on earth: light, brilliant patterns of color and light.
Upon the "Diamond Sutra's" theme of contrast and interplay between matter and awareness, Belson
employs a number of visual effects and lumia displays.
"A description cannot hope to call up the uncanny emotions the film arouses, which are those of some
kind of mystical experience."
--Film Quarterly
Belson began his career as an abstract painter and animator. By the 1960s he was using an optical
bench set up with rotating tables, variable speed motors and variable intensity lights. Beyond this, he
does not reveal his working method.
ARC-301
-3816
PIECE TOUCHEE
Martin Arnold, 1989, 16 minutes, B&W, sound
An 18-second sequence originally from a 50's "B" movie is reproduced frame by frame, intricately and
elaborately altered on the optical printer. Given factors: her and him, the scenographic space and the
time spent in that scenographic space.
ARC-202
-2213
PLASTIC HAIRCUT
Robert Nelson, 1963, 15 minutes, B&W, sound
“PLASTIC HAIRCUT, a strange and irrational film that invokes the spirit of Dada, arose from
discussions between Nelson, Robert Hudson, William Wiley and Ron Davis, and was a truly collaborative
effort... Hudson and Wiley built elaborate sets of geometric forms...as Nelson operated the camera.
Steve Reich created one of his first tape pieces for the soundtrack.”
--Mark Weber
“None of us knew anything about making movies at that time, but we all knew about art (namely,
that it had something to do with having a good time).”
--R.N.
ARC-393
PLASTIC COMPROMISE HAIRCUT
Robert Nelson, 2005, 4 minutes, B&W, sound
PLASTIC COMPROMISE HAIRCUT is an addendum added forty-some years after the film was completed,
something Nelson said he has “long itched to do.”
ARC-391
PRELUDE: DOG STAR MAN
Stan Brakhage, 1961, 25 minutes, color, silent
"PRELUDE is a declaration both of the unity of the world (and Brakhage's lyrical feeling of
identification with it) and love for woman, expressed in transcendent, cosmic terms. His images here
include both the microscopic and telescopic, and range from solar explosions to brief glimpses of the
beloved's body…the degree of spiritual, cosmic feeling is remarkable. Brakhage has gone further than
any of his fellows whose work I have seen.” --Paul Beckley, N.Y. Herald-Tribune
"Four basic visual themes dominate PRELUDE: 1) the four elements, air, earth, fire and water; 2) the
cosmos represented in stock footage of the sun, the moon, and the stars; 3) Brakhage's household--
himself, his dog and cat, his baby and particularly his wife's nude body; and 4) artificial, yet purely
filmic devices such as painting or scratching on film, distorting lenses, double exposure and clear
leader."
ARC-289
--P. Adams Sitney
POLKA GRAPH
Mary Ellen Bute, 1947, 4 minutes, color, sound
Abstract images set to polka music from the ballet suite “The Age of Gold” by Shostakovich.
ARC-185
-1357
PSALM II: WALKING DISTANCE
Phil Solomon, 1999, 23.5 minutes, color, sound
“Imagine one of those rusted medieval film cans having survived centuries...from, say, the Bronze
Age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken... [This} is a simple Golden
Book tale of horizontals and verticals, a cinema of either and ore...”
--P.S.
ARC-373
PUSS IN BOOTS
Lotte Reiniger, 1934, 13 minutes, B&W, sound
An animated "shadow film" using Reiniger's distinctive style of cut-out silhouetted figures moving
against a static background. Adapted from the fairy tale of the same name by Peter Gellhorn. A
miller's son is left only the man's cat when he passes. The son fits the cat with boots, a jacket and hat.
The cat gets the wish of being able to speak and proceeds to wangle his master into ownership of a
castle and the good graces of the king of the realm.
ARC-282
RADIO DYNAMICS
Oskar Fischinger, 1942?, 4 minutes, color, silent
Prepared by the experimental animator as a tool for meditation. William Moritz wrote in Film Culture
(1974), "I believe this to be Fischinger's best film, the work in which he most perfectly joined his
craftsmanship with his spiritual ideas into a meaningful and relatively faultless whole. No music
distracts from the visual imagery which moves with grace and power of its own."
ARC-208
RAINBOW DANCE
Len Lye, 1936, 6 minutes, color, sound
Experimentation with B&W footage colored by manipulating the three (red, green and blue) matrices of
the Gasparclor 3-color separation system. Dancer Rupert Doone appears as a silhouette performing
various actions against stylized backgrounds. Music by Rico’s Creole Band.
ARC-274
-3311
RAINDANCE
Standish Lawder, 1972, 16 minutes, color, sound
RAINDANCE plays directly on the mind through programmatic stimulation of the central nervous system.
Individual frames of the film are imprinted on the retina of the eye in a rhythm, sequence, and
intensity that corresponds to Alpha-Wave frequencies of the brain... Images fuse with their
afterimages, colors arise from retinal release of exhausted nerve endings, forms dance across shortcircuited synapses of the mind. Made entirely from a scrap of found footage taken from an old
animated cartoon representing a sheet of falling rain. The cartoon was called, ‘The History of
Cinema.’ --S.L.
ARC-348
-4497
RAT LIFE AND DIET IN NORTH AMERICA
Joyce Wieland, 1968, 20 minutes,
Coupling footage of "rats" (which look more like gerbils) with an abrasive soundtrack, this film -"against the corporate military structure in the global village" -- is a political allegory that still packs a
punch.
ARC-025
-0707
REAL ITALIAN PIZZA
David Rimmer, 1971, 8 minutes, color, sound
From a loft window in New York, Rimmer turns the camera onto the patrons of an Italian pizza and
sandwich shop, their rhythms of coming an going, and just hanging out on the sidewalk. Collapsing
nine months into thirteen minutes the film was shot from September 1970 to May 1971) Rimmer's stepprinting, looping, and editing exaggerate the rhythms and patterns of the routines of daily life. The
film is an unusual example of ethnographic poetics in experimental film.
ARC-240
-2696
REASSEMBLAGE
Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982, 40 minutes, color, sound
Women are the focus but not the object of this first film by Vietnamese-born filmmaker, Trinh T.
Minh-ha. A complex visual study of the women of rural Senegal, REASSEMBLAGE reflects on
documentary filmmaking and the ethnographic representation of cultures.
ARC-001
-3611
RE-ENTRY
Jordan Belson, 6 minutes, color, sound
Using hypnotic, archetypal visual images, Belson recreates the experience of mystical reincarnation.
RE-ENTRY uses as its specific sources television transmissions of the first American space trip and the
re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.
Belson began his career as an abstract painter and animator. By the 1960s he was using an optical
bench set up with rotating tables, variable speed motors and variable intensity lights. Beyond this, he
does not reveal his working method.
ARC- 302
-3820
REFLECTIONS ON BLACK
Stan Brakhage, 1955, 12 minutes, B&W, sound
A series of terrifying dramas of male-female relationships offset against the background of a New York
tenement.
ARC-024
REPORT
Bruce Conner, 1963-1967, 13 minutes, B&W, sound
Conner, a brilliant film-editor of the avant-garde, uses newsreel footage and radio tapes of President
Kennedy's assassination to produce a thirteen minute movie that captures unbearably, yet
exhilaratingly the tragic absurdity of that day.
ARC-021
RESURGENCE: THE MOVEMENT FOR EQUALITY VS. THE KKK
Pamela Gates & Thomas Sigel, 1981, 54 minutes, color, sound
Resurgence dramatically juxtaposes two sides of a political battle now raging in the United States:
efforts of union and civil rights activists to achieve social and economic justice with the upsurge in
activity of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The film examines the function of racism
within the context of increasing industrialization in the southern United States. The film focuses on a
lengthy strike at a chicken processing plant in Laurel, Mississippi where two hundred people, led by
black women employees, have taken on a powerful company, including a plant manager who is a known
Klansman.
ARC-137
RETOUR A LA RAISON (RETURN TO REASON)
Man Ray, 1923, 4 minutes, B&W, silent
Man Ray, an avant-garde artist known for his innovative work in photography, with this film made a
series of visual and kinetic experiments. He weaves abstract and concrete images, positive and
negative exposures, static and moving objects, as well as his own "rayographs," cameraless contact
prints of objects on paper and film.
ARC-081
-0563
RICHTER ON FILM
Cecile Starr, 1972, 12 minutes, color, sound Cecile Starr interviewed Hans Richter at his Connecticut
home when he was 83 years old. He talks about his early interests in drawing and painting, becoming
an "action painter," making RHYTHMUS 21, the making of and ideas behind GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST,
and his ideas about filmmaking vis-à-vis painting. He is filmed out in his yard and in his studio where
he works on collages.
ARC-316
-934
RHYTHMUS 21
Hans Richter, 1921, 2.5 minutes @ 24fps, B&W, silent
In Richter’s first film, squares appear in simple to complex compositions. The effect is a subversion of
the cinematic illusion of depth. Richter wrote in 1952, “...by accepting the rectangle of the ‘movie
canvas’...I found a new sensation: rhythm—which is, I still think, the chief sensation of any expression
of movement.”
ARC-281
-3513
RIDDLE OF LUMEN, THE
Stan Brakhage, 1972, 15 minutes, color, silent.
Experimenting with the effects produced by changing exposure, focus, and color on the 'readability' of
an image, this film explores the figurative application of the film.
ARC-045
-0704
ROMAN NUMERAL III
Stan Brakhage, 1979-80, 2 1/2 minutes, color, silent
One of a series of films which would ordinarily be called "abstract," "non-objective," "nonrepresentational," etc. The third of this series of Imagnostic Films seems particularly magic to me in as
much as I cannot even remember the photographic source of these images, or, thus, of having taken
them.
--S.B.
ARC-285
ROMAN NUMERAL IV
Stan Brakhage, 1980, 3 minutes, color, silent
One of a series of films which would ordinarily be called "abstract, " "non-objective," "nonrepresentational," etc.
It was while studying this film that I decided to group these "romans" under the title ROMAN NUMERAL
SERIES and to give up on the term "Imagnostic" altogether. The term "déjà vu" comes to mind each
time I view this film--this, then, somehow the "echoing" of the birth of imagery.
--S.B.
ARC-286
ROOTS, THORNS
Diane Kitchen, 1993, 23 minutes, color, sound
Filmed with the Ashaninka people of Eastern Peru, ROOTS, THORNS deals with the people’s everyday
life while contemplating their uncertainties and fears of the unknown. It shifts between the fears
found in daily living and those brought on by the country’s current political turmoil and other forces
from the outside. The underlying focus is the intimate relationship the people have with the land,
plants, animals, and weather. One of the concerns is to get in touch with this raw reality of nature
while exploring the balance of deeper allegorical moments that take place in daily “ordinary” life.
ARC-277
-3338
SAMADHI
Jordan Belson, 1967, 6 minutes, color, sound
The word SAMADHI is the Sanskrit term for "that state of consciousness in which the individual soul
merges with the universal soul." A variety of undulating patterns unify repeatedly into clearly defined
spheres, which correspond in yoga theory to Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and to the kundalini and
prana. "Certainly among the most powerful and haunting states of non-ordinary reality ever captured
on film." --Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema. Belson began his career as an abstract painter and
animator. By the 1960s he was using an optical bench set up with rotating tables, variable speed
motors and variable intensity lights. Beyond this, he does not reveal his working method.
ARC-300
-3817
SAMBIZANGA
Sarah Maldoror, 1972, 102 minutes,
Timely and powerful film of oppression in Angola realized through the story of a young woman
searching for her jailed husband. In Portuguese with English subtitles.
ARC-117/118/119
-1714
SAUGUS SERIES
Pat O'Neill, 1974, 20 minutes, color, sound
This is a moody, evocative film that uses various optical-printing techniques to achieve unexpected
juxtapositions within the frame.
ARC-016
-0706
SCARED CROWS, THE
Fleischer Studios, 1937, 6 1/2 minutes, B&W, sound
Betty Boop and her dog, Pudgy, are planting the garden. The crows come and eat the seeds. After
being scared away they invade the house and cause havoc.
ARC-354
-4528
SCHMEERGUNTZ
Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley, 1966, 15 minutes, B&W, sound
Using images from beauty pageants, advertisements, and original footage of an extremely pregnant
woman doing extremely unglamorous housework, this film sets up contrasts between culture's image
and a less-sugarcoated image of woman.
ARC-017
-0703
SCHWECHATER
Peter Kubelka, 1957-58, (1 minute x 2) = 2 minutes, color, sound, 35mm
(Reel contains two prints.)
Funded by the Austrian beer company Schwechater, Kubelka filmed one short roll with a camera that
had no viewfinder. After the film ran out he continued “shooting” on the set as ad agency people ran
around composing shots. The film, as an ad, was rejected by its sponsor and never shown as a
commercial. “In SCHWECHATER there are many single-frame shots. No image extends for more than
nine frames...The pouring and the drinking in SCHWECHATER become analyzed, simultaneous motions.
By intercutting them and mixing the other shots and leader with them, Kubelka pushes them toward
the condition of stasis of which the single-frame is the ultimate reduction...rapid intercutting both
flattens, slows down, and even momentarily freezes each of the illusory motions.”
--P.A. Sitney
ARC-385
SCORPIO RISING
Kenneth Anger, 1963, 29 minutes, color, sound
"A 'high' view of the Myth of the American Motorcyclist. The machine as totem, from toy to terror.
Thanatos in chrome and black leather."
ARC-030
SERENE VELOCITY
Ernie Gehr, 1970, 23 minutes (at 16 fps), color, silent
"A literal 'Shock Corridor' wherein Gehr creates a stunning head-on motion by systematically shifting
focal lengths on a static zoom lens as it stares down the center of an empty, modernistic hallway."
ARC-002
SERVING TWO MASTERS
Edward Lewis, 1987, 55 minutes,
Father Matthew is a troubled Episcopal priest who now roams the streets as a homeless monk,
preaching and wrestling with inner conflicts. Cliff Jackson is a black executive on the fast track who
accepts the difficult responsibility of publicly defending his company's policy of doing business with
South Africa. A chance encounter brings the two together.
ARC-104
SEVEN DAYS
Chris Welsby, 1974, 20 minutes, color, sound
“The location for this film is by a small stream on the northern slopes of Mount Carningly in southwest
Wales. The seven days were shot consecutively and appear in the same order. One frame was taken
every ten seconds throughout the hours of the day. The camera, mounted on an equatorial stand (a
piece of equipment used by astronomers to track the stars), rotates at the same speed as the earth.”
--C.W. “Welsby’s work makes it possible to envisage a different kind of relationship between science
and art, in which observation is separated from surveillance and technology from domination. The late
development of landscape art means that its particular history may only now be really beginning as it
enters a new post-painterly phase.” --Peter Wollen
ARC-366
SEVENTEEN
Joel DeMott & Jeff Kreines, 1982, 120 minutes, color, sound
Reminiscent of Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, brings one fully into the world of Muncie, Indiana in
1982. The story ranges from funny to banal to bleak in this familiar story of American youth.
ARC-004/005
-0709
SHADES
Jim Jennings, 1983, 6 minutes @18fps, B&W, silent @18fps
Sweeps of light or of a panning camera across grids and other architectural planes found in New York
create a geometry of patterns and intersections of light, volume, form.
ARC-335
-4294
SHUT UP BARBIE
Vincent Grenier, 1974, 14 minutes, color, sound
“The film is a reaction to the obsession a seven year old girl has with her many Barbie dolls. The world
of Barbie is pushed to its innocuous and tragic conclusions. Ann Knutson plays the role of the mother.
SHUT UP BARBIE was pixilated in Tiburon, Calif.”
--V.G.
ARC-382
DVD-0646
SIFTED EVIDENCE
Patricia Gruben, 1982, 42 minutes, color, sound
The complex interplay of verbal, linguistic, and cinematic relationships can be seen as a strategy for
challenging the conventional structures of narrative cinema and the patriarchal traditions in which that
cinema is embedded. The emphasis on the female voice and its status as voice-over narration
crystallizes that strategy.
ARC-069/070
-0479
SIGNAL-GERMANY ON AIR
Ernie Gehr, 1985, 34 minutes,
A portait in image and sounds of an intersection in Berlin at various times of day and year. It is a
place where shops, bus stops, telephone booths, bicycle racks and streets are criss-crossed by
pedestrians. A multi-lingual sign identifies one building as the former Gestapo headquarters. The
soundtrack is composed of ambient street sounds and excerpts of multi-lingual radio broadcasts
spanning 40 years. It is a film about culture shock, memory and is suggestive of ways that things
remain the same.
ARC-136
-1456
SILENT REVERSAL
Louis Hock, 1972, 12 minutes,
This film, projected twice (forward and backward) is an abstraction of the representational tradition of
film. Footage of trains creates a lateral dynamic that goes left, then right, giving the impression of a
day in the working world.
ARC-008
-0746
SILVERCUP
Jim Jennings, 1998, 11 minutes, B&W, silent @24fps
An elevated train glimpsed at various moments in the play of light and dark, with attention to graphic
designs in girders, bridges, water reflections.
ARC-327
-4252
SIMON OF THE DESERT
Luis Bunuel, 1965, 45 minutes,
Bunuel's sense of the surreal so much a part of Catholicism is in rare form in this film about Simon, the
"Blessed One" whose fast atop a column sets his mind adrift. In Spanish with hard-to-see English
subtitles.
ARC-054
-0749
SINK OR SWIM
Su Friedrich, 1990, 48 minutes, B&W, sound
"A resonant autobiographical film account of the immutable, highly-charged relationship between
father and daughter. The film is organized around twenty-six short stories read in voice-over by a
young girl which describes the events that shaped her childhood and formed her adult perceptions of
fatherhood, family, work, and play."
ARC-147
SNEEZE, THE
The Edison Company, 1893, 2 minutes, B&W, silent
Fred Ott was an Edison lab technician whose sneeze was recorded for posterity in what is generally
considered to be the first "film" on record.
In a more recent time, the original 4 seconds of film has been stretched into this rather goofy
document with facetious titles.
ARC-309
-3842
SO IS THIS
Michael Snow, 1982, 48 minutes, color, B&W, silent
"This film is timed text. The film read: 'This is the title of this film." So is this. The film is an it
between the author and you. It is a communal reading." "...full of humor and sentience, it is an odd
film, a text-film, a silent black and white talky in colour, a self-reflexive document and a fictive
construct, a non-movie..."
--Michael Brodzky, Artscanada
ARC-217
-2430
SOLARIUMAGELANI: SUMMER SOLSTICE
Hollis Frampton, 1974, 30 minutes,
This contemplative outdoor film crosscuts between grass and cows eating and fertilizing the grass to
make an observation on the cycle of nature.
ARC-50
-0748
SPIRITUAL CONSTRUCTIONS
Oskar Fischinger, ca. 1927, 8 minutes, B&W, sound
The only substantial Fischinger silhouette film which remains today. It begins with the phrase "Mir ist
so merwurdig, als sei die Welt Betrunken" ("How very strange -- as if the world were drunk!") and uses
silhouettes to transform two drunks into fantastic creatures of each other's imaginations.
ARC-207
SPOOK SPORT
Mary Ellen Bute, 1939, 8 minutes, color, sound
Abstract images set to the music “Danse Macabre” by Saint-Saens. Along with the abstract images are
a cast of characters including a spook, ghost, bat, bell, sun, and a clock. The film was hand-colored
and animated via a three-color separation process by Norman McLaren.
ARC-247
-1354
SQUARES
Oskar Fischinger, 1934, 5 minutes, color, silent
The film consists of 271 tempera drawings which Fischinger loop-printed to create colorful multiple
squares that advance and recede.
ARC-206
STRAIGHT AND NARROW
Tony and Bev Conrad, 1970, 11 minutes,
This flicker film, which doesn't translate well to video, plays tricks with persistence of vision, inducing
headaches and optical illusions through rapid cuts between bold patterns. Flicker films were an
attempt to undermine the pleasure of the gaze as set up in traditional Hollywood film.
ARC-038
-0747
STREET OF CROCODILES
Timothy and Stephen Quay, 1986, 21 minutes, color, sound
"An animation in which the puppet figure of a man is conjured into motion. The man severs the wires
from which he hangs and begins an exploration of the 'STREET OF CROCODILES', including a suite of
near-derelict rooms in which screws turn of their own volition at his approach. He observes robotic
figures in a strange workshop and eventually finds himself dissected, re-modeled and re-clothed in the
inner presses of a dubious tailoring establishment."
ARC-148
-1728
STUDIES IN CHRONOVISION
Louis Hock, 1975, 20 minutes, color, silent
A silent film that uses time-lapse cinematography to explore the movement of light through time.
Excellent compositions make the changing patterns of light, dark, and movement a real pleasure to
watch.
ARC-043
-0750
STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR THE CAMERA
Maya Deren, 1945, 3 minutes,
A dance film so related to the camera that it can exist only in this film. Of this title Deren wrote,
"The movement of the dancer creates a geography that never was. With a turn of the foot, Beatty
makes neighbors of distant places."
ARC-039
STUDY #6
Oskar Fischinger, 1930, 1 1/2 minutes, B&W, sound
One of the early experimental filmmaker's most famous black and white studies, made with thousands
of separate charcoal drawings. The film is a study of movement that interweaves a flow of flying
objects and a target-like shape that gives off waves of vibrations. Originally choreographed to Jacinto
Guerrero's "Los Verderones," but when a dispute over rights prevented the music from being transferred
onto the film, German composer Paul Hindemith and his students composed a new score for it.
ARC-209
STUDY # 7
Oskar Fischinger, 1931, 2 1/2 minutes, B&W, sound
One of Fischinger's most famous black and white studies, made with thousands of separate charcoal
drawings, and the first of his films to gain wide popular acceptance. It creates illusions of depth with
hard-edged shapes flickering, curving, and twisting through a dark space. Music from "Hungarian
Dance No. 5" by Brahms.
ARC-210
STUDY #9
Oskar Fischinger, 1931, 4 minutes, B&W, sound
The basic forms in this work of experimental animation were designed by Oskar Fischinger and later
completed by his younger brother, Hans. Set to "Hungarian Dance No. 6" by Brahms, the film is
gracefully choreographed with infinite gradations of gray.
ARC-211
SURE-LOCKED HOMES
Otto Messmer, 1926, 10 minutes, B&W, silent
Felix gets trapped in a haunted house where he undergoes some scary adventures.
ARC-272
-3319
SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM
Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989, 108 minutes,
This documentary film The role of Vietnamese women
historically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed
texts, folk poetry and the words and experiences of North
Vietnamese and South Vietnamese and U.S.-Vietnamese women, Trinh challenges official culture with
the voices of women.
ARC-111/112
-1209
SUZANNE, SUZANNE
James V. Hatch & Camille Billops, 1982, 26 minutes, B&W, sound
A poignant documentary of a young African American woman's attempts to come to terms with the
legacy of an abusive father.
ARC-135
-1718
SYNCHROMY NO. 2
Mary Ellen Bute, 1935, 5 minutes, B&W, sound
Abstract images set to the music “O Evening Star” from Wagner’s “Tannhauser.”
ARC-246
-1347
SYNTAGMA
Valie Export, 1983, 18 minutes,
Extensive image manipulation and interestingly re-contextualized
images make this film, about bodies in space, a challenging and worthwhile experience. In German,
dubbed into English.
ARC-49
-0787
TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND
Bruce Conner, 1976, 6 minutes, B&W, sound
Mysterious relationships between images are explored and the connections impress themselves upon
the unconscious. Music by Patrick Gleeson.
ARC-037
TARANTELLA
Mary Ellen Bute, 1940, 5 minutes, color, sound
Abstract images set to music. The film defines tarantella as “a rapid Neapolitan dance in trilets; so
called because it was popularly tought to be a remedy for the supposedly poisonous bite of the
tarantula.” The film was created using the three-color separation process. Features piano music
composed and played by Edwin Gershifski.
ARC-184
-1332
TERRIBLE TURKISH EXECUTIONER, THE
Georges Melies, 1904, 1 1/2 minutes, B&W, silent
Second film on 3-film reel titled The Best of Melies.
On a Turkish-looking stage set, four Turks are beheaded. The heads are thrown into a barrel. One
head returns to its body, then the others return, and they cut the executioners in two.
ARC-248
-2931
TEXT OF LIGHT, THE
Stan Brakhage, 1974, 71 minutes, color, silent
"All that is is light." --Dun Scotus Erigena
"To see a world in a grain of sand." --William Blake
"…a slow montage of iridescent splays of light and shifting landscapes of sheer color, which
acknowledges debts to Turner and American Romantic landscape painters as well as to James Davis,
the pioneer filmmaker of light projection -- is the culmination of Brakhage's exploration of
anamorphosis. THE TEXT OF LIGHT never explicitly presents the ashtray as an object; it is instead an
extension of the lens, and a considerable amount of the film's power derives from the recognition that
it is an autonomous imaginative invention, a film created within the optics of the lens itself and its
crystal extension. In blanking out the spatial configurations of the natural world, which he does more
dramatically in this film than in any earlier work, Brakhage projects, in response, an optical nature
that is fully his own."
--P. Adams Sitney
ARC-336, 337
-4293
THRENODY
Nathaniel Dorsky, 2004, 20 minutes, color silent @18fps
“THRENODY is the second of two devotional songs, the first being THE VISITATION. It is an offering to
a friend who died.”
--N.D.
ARC-359
THEY INVENTED MACHINES
Stephanie Barber, 1997, 7 1/2 minutes, color, sound
An odd array of images set against a seemingly unobtrusive soundtrack, bringing to light questions of
colonialism and entertainment.
ARC-256
-2993
THIS IS IT
James Broughton, 1971, 10 minutes, color, sound
A quaint and inoffensive retelling of the dawn of humanity in "Eden." Broughton's film uses a little
boy's discovery of the world beyond his back yard as a model for The Fall, which is presented neutrally,
as neither good nor bad.
ARC-40
-0789
THRILLER
Sally Potter, 1979, 34 minutes, B&W, sound
Sally Potter's re-writing of Puccini's opera, La Boheme has become a classic in feminist film theory: a
model for the deconstruction of the Hollywood film. This film turns the conventional role of women as
romantic victims on its head. Mimi, the seamstress heroine of the opera who must die before the
curtain goes down, decides to investigate the reasons for her death. In doing so she begins to explore
the dichotomy which separates her from the opera's other female character, the "bad girl," Mussetta.
ARC-176
THUMBELINA
Lotte Reiniger, 1955, 12 minutes, B&W, sound
An animated "shadow film" using Reiniger's distinctive style of cut-out silhouetted figures moving
against a static background.
Illustrates the fairy tale of Thumbelina. A tiny girl grows from a flower. She is so small she is called
Thumbelina. She is captured by a toad and escapes, is wooed by a mole and escapes, eventually to
turn into a flower spirit.
ARC-284
THURSDAY
Leighton Pierce, 1991, 4 1/2 minutes, color, sound
A quietly lyrical film about the small pleasures of domesticity. Studies of ordinary objects: the edge
of a coffee cup, light-filled glass in the kitchen door, etc., the film was shot in 100' segments each
Thursday, a day when the filmmaker was in the house minding the baby. (The baby does not appear.)
"...this piece has something to do with the sensory pleasure of momentary solitude in a domestic
setting." --L.P.
ARC-226
-2632
TIGER BALM
Hollis Frampton, 1972, 11 minutes,
Frampton's slow, meditative film uses his minimal approach to shooting and editing to create a piece
concerning nature, specifically, grass and water.
ARC-051
-0788
TIME BEING
Gunvor Nelson, 1991, 8 minutes, B&W, silent
"A quiet film with my old mother."
--G.N.
"This extraordinary film manages to craft a delicate portrait of her mother through time and reflected
light while unfolding in purple silence the relationship of Nelson and her mother as well."
--Crosby McCoy, San Francisco Cinematheque
ARC-172
-1880
TINTINNABULA
Dawn Wiedemann and Dick Blau, 1986, 8 minutes, color, sound
Fairy tales improvised with children in a woods around an overgrown ruin. Shot in Super-8 and
optically printed, altering the footage in time and rhythm, the tales are woven into one another, sound
and image twined together, a dense underbrush filled with little treasures.
ARC-200
-2187
TONGUES UNTIED
Marlon Riggs, 1989, 55 minutes, color, sound
An acclaimed account of Black gay life by Emmy Award-winning director Marlon Riggs. Using poetry,
personal testimony, rap and performance, this film describes the homophobia and racism that confront
Black gay men. Some of the tales are troublesome: the man refused entry to a gay bar because of his
color; the college student left bleeding on the sidewalk after the gay-bashing; the loneliness and
isolation of the drag queen. Yet Riggs also presents the rich flavor of Black gay male experience from
protest marches and smoky bars to the language of the "snap diva" and Vogue dancer.
ARC-178
-1885
T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G.
Paul Sharits, 1968, 12 minutes, color, sound
This is a visually-punishing flicker film, coupled with a repetitive soundtrack which dissemble the
mechanics of cinema, reducing itself literally to patterns of light, sound, and color. This abstractexpressionist approach was popular in its time.
ARC-023
-0790
TREE
Chris Welsby, 1974, 5 minutes, color, silent
“Shot on a windy day in an open forest; expanses of long sun-bleached grasses form clearings between
chestnut trees and spruce pines. The camera was strapped to the bough of one of the trees and moved
as the wind gusted through the forest. The camera ran continuously until all of the film was exposed,
with nature becoming an active participant in the filmmaking process.”
--C.W.
ARC-371
TRIAL BALLOONS
Robert Breer, 1982, 6 minutes
A mix of rephotographed live action and animation using hand-cut traveling mattes.
ARC-127
-1977
TRIP TO THE MOON, A
Georges Melies, 1902, 14 minutes, B&W, silent
The maestro's most famous film, loosely based on the Jules Verne story.
ARC-229
-2623
TROIS HEURES DIX
Patrick Grandow and Emily Ballou, 1989, 6 minutes, color, sound
During a quiet afternoon a woman reflects on moments from her past.
(Made to be projected with an anamorphic lens attached to the projector lens.)
Made by UWM students Grandow and Ballou in the Advanced Film class.
ARC-352
-4530
TRISTE
Nathaniel Dorsky, 1974-96, 18 1/2 minutes, color, silent @18fps
"TRISTE is an indication of the level of cinema language that I have been working towards. By
delicately shifting the weight and solidity of the images, and bringing together subject matter not
ordinarily associated, a deep sense of impermanence and mystery can open. The images are as much
pure-energy objects as representation of verbal understanding and the screen itself is transformed into
a 'speaking' character. The 'sadness' referred to in the title is more the struggle of the film itself to
become a film as such, rather than some pervasive mood.”
--N.D.
ARC-288
ULTIMA THULE
Janie Geiser, 2002, 10 minutes, color, sound
“Geiser has been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a kind
of deep ambiguous space, a suggestion of ‘the floating world.’ In ULTIMA THULE, gravity fails, land
and sky lose their historical meaning. A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over
barely-glimpsed hills, an unlikely ferry to ‘ultima Thule’: the farthest point north, the limit of any
journey. The seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, and time
loses its line.”
--J.G.
ARC-379
UN CHIEN ANDALOU
Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali, 1928, 15 minutes, B&W, sound
Said to be produced from "pure unconscious," this work by Spanish Filmmaker, Luis Bunuel, and
French Painter, Salvador Dali, emphasizes the surrealistic poetry of the image and has been a very
influential film on filmmakers.
ARC-167
UNSERE AFRIKAREISE
Peter Kubelka, 1961-66, 12.5 minutes, color, sound
Kubelka was commissioned by a group of Austrian businessmen to document their trophy-hunting
journey to Africa. What he produced from the material is an elegant and taut montage that functions
more in the realm of poetry than diary to give an unflattering view of the endeavors of his employers
while wrapping the journey in a cloak of sensuality of support for the African people and animals.
“UNSERE AFRIKAREISE...is about the richest, most articulate and most compressed film I have ever
seen...[It] is one of cinema’s few masterpieces...[and] it forces one to re-evaluate everything that one
knew about cinema...His methods of working (he learned by heart 14 hours of tapes and three hours of
film, frame by frame), and the beauty of his accomplishment makes the rest of us look like amateurs.”
--Jonas Mekas
ARC-381
UNSPOKEN CONVERSATIONS
Iman Uqdah Hameen, 1987, 25 minutes, B&W, sound
A story about change and growth in a relationship told from the perspective of Shanti, an AfricanAmerican woman who decides to return to school to study filmmaking. The story begins with this
narration, “These are the wives, or so called wives, shattered by the careless and sometimes heartless
men called musicians... The music haunts me, mocks me, makes me laugh, but this is no laughing
matter.” Lead roles played by Lisa Best and Cedric Turner. Written, Produced and Directed by Iman
Uqdah Hameen.
ARC-121
-1796
Untitled
Diana Barrie, 1980, 2.5 minutes, color, silent
Painterly dancing moments of abstract B&W from scratch effects are intercut with abstract color
moments from the chance effects of chemicals on emulsion and collaged with pauses of black leader.
ARC-376
VALSE TRISTE
Bruce Conner, 1977, 5 minutes, sepia-toned, sound
Nostalgic recreation of dreamland Kansas 1947 in Toto. Theme music from I LOVE A MYSTERY radio
programs. Meanwhile, 13-year-old boy confronts reality. Sibelius grows old in Finland and becomes a
national monument.
"VALSE TRISTE is frankly and gracefully autobiographical of Conner's Kansas boyhood. Here, the
period of the 1940s of his source material parallels his own life experiences." --Tony Reveaux
ARC-225
VAMPYR
Carl Dreyer, 1931, 66 minutes,
Sharing a main idea with DRACULA and NOSFERATU, this film tells the story of David Gray and his
adventure in vampire laden Eastern Europe. Dreyer is most known for his settings with a aura of dark
moods and heavy texture.
ARC 106, 107
-1200
VALENTIN DE LAS SIERRAS
Bruce Baillie, 1968, 11 minutes, color, sound
Here is a love song to the ways of a Mexican village. A study in location and character, the film, in
Spanish, gives the viewer a sense of the peace and tradition of this culture.
ARC-042
-0881
VARIATIONS
Nathaniel Dorsky, 1992-98, 24 minutes @18fps, color, silent
“VARIATIONS blossomed forth while shooting additional material for TRISTE. What tender chaos, what
current of luminous rhymes might cinema reveal unbridled from the daytime word? During the Bronze
Age a variety of sanctuaries were built for curative purposes. One of the principal activities was
transformative sleep. This montage speaks to that tradition.” --N.D.
“Is there a more beautiful cinematic image than a plastic shopping bag gently blown by the wind
across a stretch of pavement?...Movies like VARIATIONS...are what experimental filmmaking is all
about. For a moment you are offered the sensation of seeing the world for the first time. Depending
on the filmmaker’s temperament and esthetic, that vision can be everything from idyllic (VARIATIONS)
to sinister.” --Stephen Holden, New York Times
ARC-344
VIEWMASTER
George Griffin, 1976, 4 minutes, sound
This film is an appreciation of the early studies in motion by photographer Edward Muybridge.
Animated characters cycle merrily across the screen, each an examination of the dynamics of human
movement.
ARC-009
-0882
THE VISITATION
Nathaniel Dorsky, 2002, 18 minutes, color, silent @18fps
“THE VISITATION is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the necessity to describe an
occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in one’s psyche. The place of
articulation is not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response of the heart to
the poignancy of the cuts.” --N.D.
“...Nathaniel Dorsky, sly collector of silent, charged moments that build to an emotional tipping
point, brings his latest, THE VISITATION [to NY Film Festival]. A climax comes with a shot of a deep
blue sky seen through a pair of glasses. At that moment, one wonders which is more immense: the
physical universe, or our imagination’s single, tiny, perfect view of the same.”
--Ed Halter, The
Village Voice
ARC-360
WALLSTREET
Jim Jennings, 1980, 4 1/2 minutes, B&W, silent @18fps
A long seemingly continuous vertical pan passing by silhouettes of people walking on a NY sidewalk
and the shadows from buildings. Images are partially abstracted and become a little more so at a
faster pan speed, taking on an almost mesmerizing quality.
ARC-331
-4263
WAR IS HELL
Robert Nelson and William Allan, 1967, 28 minutes, B&W, sound
Vignettes of war (WWI) staged and filmed near San Francisco, with archival footage used to show
actual battle scenes. A number of Bay Area artists of the '60s appear in the film.
ARC-216
-2416
WATERFALL
Chick Strand, 1967, 3 minutes, color, sound
A film poem using found film and stock footage altered by printing, home development and
solarization. It is a film using visual relationships to invoke a feeling of flow and movement. Japanese
Koto music.
ARC-294
-3652
WATUNNA
Stacy Steers, 1990, 24 minutes, color, sound
An animated film, handpainted with watercolors, that depicts five stories from the creation myths of
the Yekuana Indians who inhabit the Venezuelan rainforest. These highly metaphorical myth-stories
explore the genesis of evil, night, sexuality, fire, and food.
ARC-215
-2462
WAVELENGTH
Michael Snow, 1966-67, 45 minutes, color, sound
The film is a continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes from its widest field to its smallest and final
field. This film is perhaps without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of
cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first
post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which
occupy modern painting and sculpture.
ARC-015
WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT
Jill Godmilow, 1998, 30 minutes, color, sound
A color remake of Haroun Farocki's 1969 B&W film UNAUSLOE-SCHBARES FEUER (Inextinguishable
Fire). Godmilow completely re-shot the film scene by scene, adding an introductory statement to
make sure the audience gets the point about the middle part of the film begin an accurate copy of an
already existing film and an epilogue to give for reasons for doing so.
Farocki's film, using simple sets and nonprofessional actors, deals with the production of napalm by
the Dow Chemical Company, the abuses of human labor, and the effects of the use of napalm in the
Viet Nam war.
Farocki's film has not had distribution in the US and by remaking the film Godmilow wanted to make it
impossible for an audience of today to refer to the material as "30 years old/not applicable anymore."
ARC-299
-3906
WHIFFLE PIFFLE in WHOOPS! I’M A COWBOY
Fleischer Studios, 1937, 6 1/2 minutes, B&W, sound
Betty Boop sings that she wants a cowboy for a sweetheart so Wiffle Piffle goes out to a dude ranch
to learn how to become one.
ARC-350
-4527
WINDOWMOBILE
James Broughton & Joel Singer, 1977, 8 minutes, color, sound
"The film is shot both through and at a window, superimposing and conjoining, thereby elaborating
events on both sides of the glass. Broughton's accompanying poem sounds from an Eden of the golden
passing of days: 'They were seeing the light everyday then.../They were looking and they were
seeing/They were living there in the light at the time.”
--Robert Lipman
-241
-2706
WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING
Stan Brakhage, 1959, 12 minutes, color, silent
"…Brakhage's treatment of the birth of his daughter. Here he unleashes the full power of his
technique, so apt to become abstractly unintelligible when left to his own devices, on a specific
subject. The result is a picture so forthright, so full of primitive wonder and love, so far beyond
civilization in its acceptance that it becomes an experience like few in the history of the movies."
--Arthur Winston, The New York Post
ARC-173
-1882
WINTERSHIPS
Rob Yeo, 1990, 16 minutes, B&W, sound
Filmed inside and out of several of the huge bulk cargo carriers that make up the Great Lakes Fleet.
These ships, which measure up to 1000' in length, spend the none-month shipping season hauling
taconite (processed iron ore) pellets from Duluth to Gary. For the winter these ore carriers are
tethered together in a mooring basin between Jones Island and the mainland in Milwaukee Harbor. The
winter shore crew then rebuilds the ships' boilers, installs new equipment, and paints the vast hulls and
superstructures.
The filmmaker was concerned with integrating the perception of form, mass and scale that is so
remarkable when confronting the ships in person.
ARC-242
-2788
WITCH'S REVENGE, THE
George Melies, 1903, 3 1/2 minutes, , B&W, silent
First film of two on reel titled Comedie et Magique de Melies.
The magician puts on a show for the king doing various tricks. He has the king subdued by guards and
dances with the queen.
ARC-257
-2976
WOMAN SPINS, A
Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon, 1968-71, 8 minutes, color, sound
A collaboration by filmmaker Asch and anthropologist Chagnon to film the Yanomamo, the largest
Indian group in the Amazon Basin. This is one of 37 films produced from 50 hours of footage.
A woman spins in her hammock at Patanowa-teri.
ARC-260
-3076
WOMAN STABBED TO DEATH
Stephanie Barber, 1996, 61/2 minutes, B&W, sound
Using found footage and the optical printer to examine (and re-examine and re-examine) the abuse
and exploitation of women.
ARC-255
-2994
WORKERS NEWSREEL UNEMPLOYMENT SPECIAL 1931
Leo Seltzer and Robert Del Duca, 1931, 7 minutes, B&W, silent
Filmed by the Film and Photo League in New York. Shows the first mass demonstration against
unemployment and hunger, in Union Square, New York City, on March 6, 1930. Hundreds were injured
when the crowd, estimated at 100,000, was rushed by 1000 policemen in an attempt to break up the
rally.
ARC-267
-3140
YOUNG SHAMAN
Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon, 1968-71, 10 minutes, color, sound
A collaboration by filmmaker Asch and anthropologist Chagnon to film the Yanomamo, the largest
Indian group in the Amazon Basin. This is one of 37 films produced from 50 hours of footage.
A young shaman, still an initiate, gets sick and loses control on the hallucinogen ebene.
ARC-263
-3066
ZERO DE CONDUIT (ZERO FOR CONDUCT)
Jean Vigo, 1933, 45 minutes, B&W, sound
This comedy about rebellious schoolchildren is anti-authority not only in its plot, but also in its use of
camera angles and various shutter speeds. A landmark in narrative cinema.
ARC-086
-0575
ZORNS LEMMA
Hollis Frampton, 1970, 60 minutes, B&W, color, sound & silent
“ZORNS LEMMA began as a series of 2000 B&W still photographs of the urban environment, later
reshot in color with a motion-picture camera. It has three parts. The first is imageless as a woman’s
voice reads couplets about each of the letters of the Bay State Primer, used to teach the alphabet to
children. The second part is 45 minutes long, silent, and consists of over 2500 images, each one-second
long. The longest metrical editing exercise in film history, each presents a record of a different word
appearing on a store sign, a wall mural, etc. Part three is a long take of a snowstorm in a white field,
which is gradually traversed by a couple and a dog until they disappear into the distant
woods...This...is now accompanied by a soundtrack – talkie has now emerged – which is taken from
Robert Grosseteste’s eleventh-century essay, ‘On Light or the Ingression of Form.’ Frampton wrote to
Peter Gidal: “The work is an autobiography.’ It reveals a childhood emerging from conceptual
darkness through literacy [Frampton was first a poet, and studied with Ezra Pound], and then toward
an apprehension of the world through photography [Frampton made his living as a photographer in the
late 1950s and early 1960s] and then through cinema...’”
--MOMA catalog
ARC-367, 368, 369
From DK diocs 4.2007,