Malcolm Le Grice Berlin Horse UK, 1970, 8 mins, 16mm

Marie Menken Hurry! Hurry! USA, 1957, 3 mins, 16mm

Bruce Baillie Castro Street USA, 1966, 10 mins, 16mm.

This list includes many of the most important early experimental films in the archive, many of which directly inspired later artists. It includes works from the first film avant-gardes of the 1920s (Marcel Duchamp, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman), through the important experiments of the '40s and '50s (the Themersons, Maya Deren, Harry Smith), up to the explosion of avant-garde work in the 1960s in the US and Britain.

See also:
EARLY VIDEO

BRUCE BAILLIE
CASTRO STREET
USA, 1966, sound, colour, 10 mins, 16mm.
Inspired by a lesson from Eric Satie, a film in the form of a street - Castro Street running by the Standard Oil Refinery in Richmond, California... switch engines on one side and refinery tanks, stacks and buildings on the other - the street and the film ending at a red lumber company. All visual and sound elements from the street, progressing from the beginning to the end of the street is black and white (secondary), and one is colour like male and female elements. The emergence of a long switch engineer shot (black and white solo) is to the film-maker the essential image of consciousness. - B.B.

STAN BRAKHAGE
THE WONDER RING
1955, colour, silent, 6 mins, 16mm.
'On a theme suggested by Joseph Cornell. A sharp change in Brakhage's work, we see New York's Third Avenue El (since demolished) as though through the eyes of a child on a merry-go-round.' - Cinema 16.

STAN BRAKHAGE
WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING
1959, silent, colour, 12 mins, 16mm.
'... 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 civilisation in its acceptance that it becomes an experience like few in the history of the movies.' - Archer Winston, NY Post.

STAN BRAKHAGE
MOTHLIGHT
1963, silent, colour, 4 mins, 16mm.
'Brakhage made Mothlight without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine.' - Jonas Mekas.

BRUCE CHECEFSKY
A WOMAN AND CIRCLES
USA, 2004, sound, B&W, 10 mins, 35mm
Bruce Checefsky’s latest film is an adaptation of an unrealised film script by Jan Brzekowski (1903-1983), a poet and member of the Polish avant-garde a.r. group, which flourished between 1929 and 1936 in Lodz.
What attracted Brzekowski to the techniques of film were the effect of accumulation and the simultaneity of facts, impressions, experiences, and emotions. The critic Janusz Slawinski points out the kinship among film, poetry, and dreams in Brzekowski's work: "The simultaneity of many realities means, in film, the parallelism of several actions, and in poetry, ambiguity. Multiplication of meanings, and with it, multiplication of images."

In his theoretical writing, Brzekowski called his concept of poetry integral and metareal, referring to two different aspects of his poetics. While the first identified him as a member of the Cracow Avantgarde, the second brought him close to surrealism.
In 1930, while living in Paris, Brzekowski published a short film script titled "A Woman and Circles" in the French magazine Cercle et Carree. The script was later translated and published in the Polish magazine Linia. Illustrating his film theories, the script seems to have much in common with surrealistic imagery; but Brzekowski himself never realised the film.
Seventy years later, Checefsky has reconstructed it, showing the same meticulous attention to detail as his earlier Pharmacy.

SHIRLEY CLARKE
BRIDGES GO ROUND
USA, 1958, sound, 7 mins, 16mm
'Shirley Clarke was a founding figure of independent film and video movements in North America. In the classic avant-garde film, Bridges Go Round, she captures the eerie atmosphere of metropolitan bridges. They are transformed through panning camera movements, colour tinting, layering and texturing into an abstract and magical dance. This extraordinary and sensual creation had two different originally commissioned scores. The film is repeated on this print with the jazz and electronic soundtracks respectively.' - Film and Video Umbrella.

BEVERLY & TONY CONRAD
STRAIGHT AND NARROW
USA, 1970, sound mag stripe, B&W, (with subjective colour), 10 mins, 16mm
'A stroboscopic film of unusual intensity, by the maker of the classic strobe film The Flicker. - Whitney Museum of America Art Announcement.

Straight and Narrow is a study of subjective colour and visual rhythm, although it is printed on black and white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause most viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory colour effects. Through the intermediary of rhythm, the maximal impact is drawn from the simplest of universal human images: straight horizontal and vertical lines.

'Set to a strong percussive musical background, rapidly alternating images of black and white straight lines are juxtaposed in precise rhythmic patterns to create specific colours... if you can watch without becoming hypnotised...' - NY Daily News.
'[...] I love 'Straight and Narrow'... as a pure abstraction of feeling, in a Mondrian-mood structured hypnotically mind-changing, at the same time attacking our visual sensibilities and our optic nerves. And we see colours of the MIND exploding and dissolving in straight and narrow fleeting pictures, cubes, lines, rectangles, overcuttings, dissolves, pannings, flickering happenings...'Lil Picard, 'Inter-VIEW'.

JOSEPH CORNELL & LAWRENCE JORDAN
THE MIDNIGHT PARTY & COTILLION
USA, 1969, silent, B&W, 12 mins, 16mm
Two films given to Larry Jordan to finish by Joseph Cornell before he died.

'I have not changed the editing structure. I have made the films printable. They are the first known fully collaged films, i.e., films made from found footage, and were done sometime in the '40s. Cornell combines Vaudeville jugglers, animal acts, circus performers, children eating and dancing, science demonstrations, mythical excerpts, and crucial freeze-frames of faces into a timeless structure, totally unconcerned with our usual expectations of "montage" or cinematic progression. He collects images and preserves them in some kind of cinematic suspension that is hard - impossible - to describe. But it's a delight to anyone whose soul has not been squashed by the heavy dictates of Art.' - L.J

STORM DE HIRSCH
PEYOTE QUEEN
USA, 1965, sound, colour, 8 mins, 16mm.
'A journey through the underground of sensory derangement, where the mysteries are enacted in the theatre of the soul.'
'Among my favourite...beauty and excitement.'- Jonas Mekas

'Like a ritual of incantation with its drum punctuated visual changes.' - Sheldon Renan.

'A very beautiful work...the abstractions drawn directly on film are like the paintings of Miro moving at full speed to the rhythm of an African beat.'- Dominique Noguez.

MAYA DEREN
A STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR THE CAMERA OUTTAKES
USA, 1945, silent, B&W, 16 mins, 16mm.
All of the rejected material from Maya Deren's simplest and purest film offers the student of cinema and those interested in Maya Deren a vivid lesson in how she constructed a film. When shown together with a completed film it provides a model for economy in editing. - Anthology Film Archives.

MARCEL DUCHAMP
ANEMIC CINEMA
France, 1926, silent, B&W, 7 mins, 16mm
A series of rotating, spiral-like images are intercut with spinning discs of words strung together in elaborate, nonsensical puns, presented like graphics in spiral form, setting up a tension between perception of text as two-dimensional and the illusion of three dimensionality in the spiral form. A key work of the early avant-garde.

"Marcel Duchamp combined in his Anemic Cinema the expansion of at least two art forms simultaneously: sculpture and literature/poetry. His rotating spiralled discs were a result of studying physiological and psychological optical perception experiments." - Siegfried Zielinski

VIKING EGGELING
DIAGONAL SYMPHONY
USA, 1921-1924, silent, B&W,7 mins, 16mm.
One of the first totally abstract films related to his work with scrolls, a search for a precise visual language of motion. A forerunner of modern abstract and concrete film direction. One of the most beautiful films, and one of the most important ones, from that period.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON
NOSTALGIA
USA, 1971, sound, B&W, 36 mins, 16mm
As its name suggests, Nostalgia is autobiographical. Its maker, Hollis Frampton, is recognised as one of the leading figures of the New American Cinema, a contemporary of Michael Snow, Paul Sharits and George Landow. This film, made in 1971 and itself part of a larger work called Hapax Legomena relates to a period between 1958 and 1966- before Frampton was known as a film-maker and was working mainly in still photography. Twelve photographs are presented as 'documents' of that period. A number are of friends in the New York art world, others are images that were of aesthetic interest. The tone throughout is dry and ironic. Each photograph is presented to the camera and a voice, speaking in the first person, describes the content of the image, the personal circumstances that surround it and the memories it evokes. After a minute or so when the commentary has ceased, each photograph gradually curls up and burns, transformed into black ash by the hotplate on which each in turn is placed. The structure of the film is complicated by the fact that the commentary for each image is 'out of synch': each commentary fits the photograph to follow not the one before our eyes. The spectator himself is thus caught up in the process of memory and prediction that are the subject of the film.

BIRGIT & WILHELM HEIN
UND SIE?
Germany, 1967, sound mag stripe, B&W, 11 mins, 16mm
"In Und Sie one image is maintained for the eleven minutes of the film, only being changed through minimal shifts in focus, the image being mostly in soft focus throughout. The technique of continual exposure to a still image is closely related to Warhol's us of the freeze-frame in Sleep, and Snow's later use in One Second In Montreal. However in the Heins' film attention is continually encouraged by minimal changes of the surface and focus of the image, and continually discouraged by inability to clearly identify the picture. Durational experience in this case is seen to be a function of perceptual attention." - Malcolm LeGrice, Abstract Film and Beyond.

TAKAHIKO IIMURA
LOVE ("AI")
Japan, 1962, sound, B&W, 12 mins, 16mm
"I have seen a number of Japanese avant-garde films at the Brussels International Experimental Film Festival, at Cannes, and at other places. Of all those films, Iimura's Love stands out in its beauty and originality, a film poem, with an usual pseudo surrealist imagery. Closest comparison would be Brakhage's Loving or Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures...a poetic and sensuous exploration of the body...fluid, direct, beautiful." -Jonas Mekas, Film Culture 1966.

KEN JACOBS
LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS
USA, 1963, sound, colour, 18 mins, 16mm
Featuring Jack Smith
'Down' and person to person, cinema officially gets grabbed back from the professionals here. Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100' rolls were used, the timings fitted well with music on old 78's. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialised with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement. And breaking out of step. - K.J.

LARRY JORDAN
VISIONS OF A CITY
USA, 1957-1978, sepia, sound, 8 mins, 16mm
The protagonist, poet Michael McClure, emerges from the all-reflection imagery of glass shop and car windows, bottles, mirrors etc in scenes which are also accurate portraits of both McClure and the City of San Francisco in 1957. At the same time it is a lyrical and mystical film, building to a crescendo of rhythmically intercut shots of McClure's face, seemingly trapped on the glazed surface of the city. Music by William Moraldo. I don't think of this as an 'early film' anymore, since it never came together until '78. Now it's tight.

JEFF KEEN
MARVO MOVIE
UK, 1967, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm
Movie wizard initiates shatter brain experiment Eeeow! - the fastest movie firm alive - at 24 or 16 f.p.s. even the mind trembles-splice up sequence 2-flix unlimited, an inside yr very head the imagess explode-last years models new houses and such terrific death scenes while the time and space operator attacks the brain via the optic nerve-will the operation succeed-will the white saint reach in time the staircase now alive with blood-only time will tell says the movie master-meanwhile deep inside the space museum. - Ray Durgnat.

Keen is indebted to the surrealist tradition for many of his central concerns: his passion for instability, his sense of 'le merveilleux', his fondness for analogies and puns, his preference for 'lowbrow' art over aestheticism of any kind, his dedication to collage and 'le hasard objectif'. But this 'continental' facet of his work-virtually unique in this country-co-exists with various typically English characteristics, which betray other roots. The tacky glamour/True Beauty of his Family Star productions is at least as close to the end of Brighton Pier as it is to Hollywood B-Movies. - Tony Rayns, Afterimage no. 6, Summer '76.

KURT KREN
REEL ONE
Austria, 1957-62, sound, B&W & colour, 22 mins, 16mm

1/57: VERSUCH MIT SYNTHETISCHEM TON (sound)
2/60: 48 KOPFE AUS DEM SZONDI-TEST (silent)
3/60: BAUME IM HERBST (sound)
4/61: MAUERN-POSITIV-NEGATIV UND WEG (silent)
5/62: FENSTERGUCKER, ABFALL, ETC. (silent)
ETC. (silent)

"With thirty-one 16mm works to date, Kren's historical role in Europe is comparable to that of Brakhage in America, as is the way in which each historically represent some aspect of the transition from the existential to the structural within their work. Though Kren's work chiefly initiates and contributes to this formal/structural axis...it is very complex at the imagist/associative level." - Malcolm Le Grice, 'Kurt Kren,' Studio International, Nov/Dec 1975.

All of his film titles are methodically pre-fixed by the number of the work in complete chronology, followed by the year of realisation.

PETER KUBELKA
MOSAIK IN VERTRAEN
Austria, 1955, sound, colour, 17 mins, 16mm
"Peter Kubelka's films move with the rhapsody of precision. Nowhere else in cinema have I been so struck to a sense of everything being JUST RIGHT, a unique pleasure to say the least. There are a multiplying number of films at present which use techniques similar to Kubelka's, and which attempt similar effects, but for all the experiment rampant now, his visions of absolute time transcend and show up all that is merely modern." - Kent Kelman.

GEORGE & MIKE KUCHAR
PUSSY ON A HOT TIN ROOF
USA, 1960's, 9 mins, video
Violent, apocalyptic endings were common to most of the early 8mm films of the Kuchar Brothers, like the all-consuming fire at the end of Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof. 'All these movies end in fire' recalls George. '...horror pictires...the house collapses. We tried to make big spectacular endings.'

DAVID LAMELAS
A STUDY OF RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN INNER AND OUTER SPACE
UK, 1969, sound, B&W, 20 mins, 16mm
David Lamelas’ first film, A Study of Relationships between Inner and Outer Space analyzes the architectural, social, climatic, or sociological data that make up the exhibition’s spatial environment, that of the institution and its geographical location. Beginning with the empty exhibition hall, the description is neutral and analytical. It progresses in ever larger circles, placing emphasis on all the important functional elements, from the electronic devices in the exhibition space, to the city’s traffic regulation to the communication and information media and finally, to the climatic conditions of the London environment. The film concludes with six interviews regarding the big news item of the day: the future "landing" of the first men on the moon.

JOHN LATHAM
SPEAK
UK, 1968-69, sound, colour, 11 mins, 16mm
Is his second attack on the cinema. Not since Len Lye's films in the thirties has England produced such a brilliant example of animated abstraction. Speak burns its way directly into the brain. It is one of the few films about which it can truly be said, "it will live in your mind". - Ray Durgnat.

MALCOLM LE GRICE
BERLIN HORSE
UK, 1970, sound, colour, 8 mins, 16mm
This film is largely filmed with an exploration of the film medium in certain aspects. It is also concerned with making certain conceptions about time in a more illusory way than I have been inclined to explore in many other of my films. It attempts to deal with some of the paradoxes of the relationships of the "real" time which exists when the film was being shot, with the "real" time which exists when the film is being screened, and how this can be modulated by technical manipulation of the images and sequences. The film is in two parts joined by a central superimposition of the material from both parts. The first part is made from a small section of film shot by me in 8mm colour, and later refilmed in various ways from the screen in 16mm b/w. The b/w material was then printed in a negative positive superimposition through colour filters creating a continually changing 'solarization' image, which works in its own time abstractly from the image. The second part is made by treating very early b/w newsreel of a similar subject in the same way. As a two screen film the second screen has a b/w version of the whole film.
Part of SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT.

ALFRED LESLIE
PULL MY DAISY
USA, 1959, 27 mins, 16mm & video
"Caught between the socio-historical cult of itself and its Beatnik players, and the excitement of its discreet yet radical formalism, Pull My Daisy has been pawed over by the watchdogs and self-appointed guardians of avant-garde film since its first double-bill showings with John Cassavete's 'Shadows' in the late 1950's.

It was awarded the Second Independent Film Award by 'Film Culture' magazine in 1960 and attacked in the same publication by Parker Tyler two years later.

Based around Jack Kerouac's narration from the last section of his unproduced play 'The Beat Generation' (itself based on an incident between Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn), it's as much a document of its own unravelling as it is footage of some of the most acclaimed writers and painters of its generation at play...

If Alfred Leslie's 2001 film The Cedar Bar finds its cornerstone in his 1964 letter to Frank O'Hara describing an unprecedented 'parallelism' where 'the spectator will be in two places or more simultaneously' then both find a nascent correlate in the discretion of 'Pull My Daisy'. With its bawdy gags and caustic, iconoclastic humour, 'Pull My Daisy' is actually predicated on the delicacy of a subtly shifting interplay between modes of 'depiction', between record and fiction, self-awareness and dubious, wilfull naivete, debunking the ordinarily stable registers its surface (and our own viewing habits) would otherwise invoke." - Ian White

LEN LYE
TUSALAVA
New Zealand, 1929, silent, B&W, 9 mins, 16mm
Tusalava, Len Lye's first film, is a pioneer example of experimental animation. It is a unique combination of modern art and tribal art. After its first screening in 1929, art critic Roger Fry warmly praised Tusalava for its originality and strong feeling for motion.

For two years between 1926-8, Len Lye completed more than 9.500 drawings for this nine-minute animated film. He had interested the newly-formed London Film Society in his project, and they provided him with some money. The film was screened, once, at the Society, in 1929. Until it was screened again in 1967, Tusalava had become a forgotten part of film history.

CHRISTOPHER MACLAINE
THE END
USA, 1953, sound, colour, 35 mins, 16mm
Narrated by Christopher Maclaine. Photographed by Jordan Belson.

'The End is a remarkable apocalyptic post-war saga of impending doom, which follows the last day on earth for six of 'our friends' living in the shadow of the A-bomb. Composed of six discreet episodes, the film builds an atmosphere of doom, infused with what seems now to be dark, ironic humour. Maclaine's virtuoso, past-tense narration is a bewildering and incoherent rant against the impending holocaust, directly addressing the viewer, who is forced to become and active participant in the story. His fractured montage works against narrative logic, a self-destructive trait that mirrors the 'grand suicide of the human race'.
The End is partly acted, with additional observational footage. These fleeting glimpses of the world around show normal lives continuing oblivious to the nuclear threat. Disjointed cutting, subverted narratives and cryptic camerawork fuse banality with purpose. This is a truly poetic use of cinema in the way it is able to transmit unspoken thoughts through an apparently random successions of images.

Dating from 1953, this may in fact be the first genuine 'beat' film, profoundly inventive and advanced for its time. Maclaine's outlook is bleak and his techniques are crude, creating a film which is deliciously inept, but glorious. One of cinema's starkest evocations of the Cold War period and its effect on creative thought, situated in the beat milieu of 1950s San Francisco but speaking in direct terms to generations of lost souls.' – Mark Webber

'Christopher MacLaine's The End (1953) terminated the highly productive period of film-making in San Francisco that had begun with The Potted Psalm… The film itself burst with the rhetoric of finality; it is a deliberately conclusive work. Jordan Belson, who reluctantly photographed the film under MacLaine's direction, provides one link to the immediate cinematic past. The film leaves no room for the future. It forecasts the destruction of the world by atomic holocaust as the direct sequel to its projection.' – P. Adams Sitney

JONAS MEKAS
NOTES ON THE CIRCUS
USA, 1966, sound, colour, 12 mins, 16mm
"Ringling Bros., filmed in 1966, in three sessions (three ringed circus), colours, motions and memories of a circus. Edited in camera (an exercise in instantaneous structuring). Sound by Jim Kweski's jug band (can be watched also silently). Dedicated to Kenneth Anger who provided the Ektachrome film stock, in one of my many dry periods." - J.M.

MARIE MENKEN
HURRY! HURRY!
USA, 1957, 3 min, 16mm
Experimental soundtrack: continuous bombardment.
' A daring film ballet danced by human spermatozoa under powerful magnification ... a dance of death made from scientific footage, printed over murky fire.' -- Cinema 16

MARIE MENKEN
NOTEBOOK
USA, 1962, silent, colour, 10 mins, 16mm
"...these are too tiny or too obvious for comment, but one or two are my dearest children." - M.M.

"It is a very personal film which she keeps adding to ... a masterpiece of filmic fragments, only shown once, but wow!" - P. Adams Sitney.

WERNER NEKES
DAS SEMINAR (WITH BAZON BROCK)
Germany, 1967, sound, B&W, 32 mins, 16mm
1) A social document by Werner Nekes and Bazon Brock
A) History Lesson: Contraction of time at a fixed point.
B) Literature Lesson: Sum of Passion.
C) "One should begin at the beginning once more."

Falsification of a statement in a pornographic style.

"Nekes' films (one whole plus two half films, but one of the halves was actually three stuck together - ?) displayed a light hearted disregard for everything. He manages to make extremes comic, and hence obvious...he sneaks up, confuses, surprises, and then with Delphic gest, enlightens." - Simon Hartog, Cinim 3, 1969.

"Come on show your films in America, that would be nice." - Jonas Mekas.

"One of the best film-makers around" - Birgit Hein, Film In Underground Book

ANNABEL NICOLSON
SHAPES
UK, 1970, silent, colour, 16 fps, 7 mins, 16mm.
Abstract exploration from the textural and plastic sources. The colours, shapes and rhythms of the original elements have been developed into a lyrical abstract vision by means of refilming from the screen, superimposition, stop-frame projection, editing and by an exploration of the incidental tactile process of the film i.e. dust particles.
Part of SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT

DORE O
ALASKA
Germany, 1968, sound, colour, 18 mins, 16mm
Music Dore O.
Sound: Violin, blowdrier, several sounds from the "Concord Sonata" by Charles Ives.

"An emigration film: a dream of myself, the consequences of the act with society." (Dore O.)
Alaska by Dore O. is a beautiful film, which makes it at first glance a bit suspect. But the beauty has a catch to it - it exists only on the surface, beneath it hide horror and fear.

For Dore O., beauty is a part of reality. For her there exists a beauty in fear in the same way that for Genet there exists a beauty in murder. Alaska is a filmed dream, but devoid of the simplistic metaphors taken from psychoanalysis, metaphors which rationalise dreams and thus mistakenly facilitate their interpretation. Alaska is a film which cannot be interpreted, it can be experienced. - Klaus Baderkerl, FILMKRITIK, 1969.

Taking this film is more difficult. On the other hand, as the "taking in" of this film is limited to the very pleasure of recognising structures, techniques, or principles of form, the experience becomes a multi-sided, differentiated, incredible process. What happens in this film cannot be put into words. While both conventional and formalistic films can be equally pinned down by the film critic (exposition of either the storyline or the structure), about an imagist film such as Alaska one can only say that it is located in the ante-chamber of language, even of consciousness. Dore O. communicates something substantial, something concrete: images, forms, movements, whose interplay presages something yet to be comprehended, something yet to come. Still more is communicated: a utopian impetus, a sense of expectation. The beauty of this film thus cannot be consumed, it can only be experienced in expectations of the pre-conscious. - Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, FILMKRITIK.

PAT O'NEILL
EASYOUT
USA, 1965-67, sound, colour, 6 mins, 16mm
Sound: Stan Levine; Mix: Don Worthen.
Has to do with a consideration of one possible conceptual model for human existence: that of a primitive form of yardchair, upon which sits The Creator, impassively observing the inexorable flow of His mountains. The name "Easyout" is derived from a commercially available bolt and stud-extracting tool, whose function seemed strangely parallel to that of the film.
Awards: First Prize, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Film Festival, 1972; First Prize, Yale Film Festival, 1972.

Exhibition: Cannes Film Festival, 1974

Easy Out includes found material (i.e. film made by others), original footage and cell animation in a form that cannot be adequately described. It is a quite exceptional film.

RON RICE
CHUMLUM
USA, 1964, sound, colour , 28 mins, 16mm
With Jack Smith, Beverly Grant, Mario Montez, Gerard Malanga. Music by Angus McLise.

Sound technician: Tony Conrad.

'It's not unlike a bizarre dream, in riotous colour...' - N.Y Herald Tribune

'A baroque-rococo dream space, people (actors, visions, people) weaving in and out of one-another's spaces, minds, and bodies. One of the Underground's best and most influential films.' - P.G.

WALTER RUTTMAN
OPUS IV
USA, 1923, silent, colour, 16 fps, 4 mins, 16mm
'Ruttman's Opus films, to judge by the surviving fragments, express a dynamic, romantic unfolding of pictorial non-objective drama... Opus IV seems made primarily with cut-outs and drawn hard-edged images that produce sharp, Op-art effects ... in which expanding horizontals imply twisting Venetian blinds, and the flickering shapes produce colour after-images on their edges, and positive/negative matting presses the role of the filmmaker as manipulator to the fore.' - William Moritz, Film As Film.

WALTER RUTTMAN
EXCELSIOR REIFEN
USA, 1925-26, silent, colour, 18 fps, 4 mins, 16mm
Short advertising film for a tyre company. Using similar visual devices to the Opus series for commercial uses, the tyre becomes the abstract motif.

PAUL SHARITS
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G
USA, 1968, sound, colour, 12 mins, 16mm
'starring poet david frank whose voice appears on the soundtrack / an uncutting and unscratching mandala.' - P.S.

'merges violence with purity.' - P. Adams Sitney.

'Surrealist tour de force' - Parker Tyler.

On the '10 best films of 1969'

HARRY E SMITH
EARLY ABSTRACTIONS #1-5, 7, 10
USA,1939/56, 23 mins, 16mm
The seven films that make up Early Abstractions are spliced together to be projected as a unit. "My movies are made by God; I am just the medium for them." Harry Smith "Smith's films can be watched for pure color enjoyment, or for motion - Harry Smith's films never stop moving - or you can watch them for hidden and symbolic meanings, alchemical signs." - Jonas Mekas

"My cinematic excreta is of four varieties: - batiked abstractions made directly on film between 1939 and 1946, optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950, semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962, and chronologically superimposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organised in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will live forever- - they made me gray." - H.S.

MICHAEL SNOW
WAVELENGTH
Canada, 1966-67, sound, colour, 45 mins, 16mm
Winner of the Grand Prix 4th International Experimental Film Festival. Knokke.

'One of the few truly original works of the current avant-garde, a perfect example of the cinema of stillness and poetic contemplation weaving its hypnotic charms so deviously that many who come to scoff remain transfixed. Wavelength is one of those few films that compel the viewer regardless of his personal reactions to speculate on the very essence of the medium and inevitably of reality.' - Amos Vogel.

'Wavelength was not only by far the best film at the Brussels Festival but opened a whole new area and dimension for the avant-garde cinema.' - Shirley Clarke.

'Described by its creator as a 'continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field' Wavelength is at once one of the simplest and most complex films ever conceived. Literally oscillating between the conceptual and the immediately real, its four human occurrences interrupt yet remain in to the flow of continually metamorphosing variations on the unrelenting crescendo of its 'one shot' toward and into the four windows of a Canal Street Loft.' - Film Quarterly.

JOHN STEHURA
CIBERNETIK 5.3
USA, 1961-65, sound, colour, 8 mins, 16mm
Starring Jan Wolf and Ron Hughes.
Perhaps the 1st digital computer animated movie ever made and probably the only example of an 'Artificial Intelligence' used to simulate a filmmaker: (an IBM 7094 computer, after being instructed in genetics and graphics, generated approximately 50 billion machine instructions to design the first 2/3's of the film - I finished the last 1/3 to get it out of a warp.) The film was first shown at UCLA`1066, J.Hendrix Concerts, Brussels, Tours, 7th International Animation Festival, 1st L.A. FILMEX '71 etc.
The film should be shown only around midnight and good luck to human embryo implantation in England. - J.S.

CHICK STRAND
KULU SE MAMA/WATERFALL/ANSELMO & ANGEL BLUE SWEET WINGS
?, 1966-1967, sound, colour, four films on one reel, 15 mins, 16mm

KULU SE MAMA
1966, 3 mins.
'In celebration of movement.' - C.S.

WATERFALL
1967, 3 mins.

ANSELMO
1967, 4 mins.
'Shot on Mexico, celebration of magic and tubes.' - C.S.

ANGEL BLUE SWEET WINGS
1967, 4 mins.
'A film in celebration of life.' - C.S.

'These short films, simple and sensuous as Haiku poems, are early works of this pioneer West Coast film-maker who was the co-founder with Bruce Baillie of Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and later, after her marriage with cartoon artist Neon Park, moved to Los Angeles to help form the film-makers' Co-operative there. Although trained as an anthropologist and ethnographer (c.f. Anselmo's folk dance documentation) her interest in cinema is primarily in the abstract and kinetic visual phenomena that are inherent in film, such as positive-negative juxtapositions, chirality, flickers, etc...' - William Moritz.

FRANCISZKA & STEFAN THEMERSON
THE ADVENTURES OF A GOOD CITIZEN
(Przygoda Czlowieka Poczciwego)
Poland, 1937, sound, B&W, 10 mins, 16mm
This film was lost during the war. One print was found somewhere near Moscow and sent to Film Archive in Warsaw. The print was old and badly battered. Hence the quality of the present reduction from the original 35mm to 16mm is not perfect. But it could have been worse.

There are two sentences spoken in Polish. At the beginning the CARPENTER shouts to one of the two men with a wardrobe: 'The skies won't fall if you try and go backwards!' This is overheard (over the telephone) by THE GOOD CITIZEN (a civil servant) who also decides to try and walk backwards. In the street, he collides with TWO MEN WITH THE WARDROBE, and now it is he and one of the other two who carry the wardrobe backwards out of the town and the forest. A group of people (representing a cross-section of society) march with banners to demonstrate against the walking backwards. Inscriptions on the banners read: DOWN WITH WALKING BACKWARDS! THE SKIES WILL FALL! EVERYBODY FORWARD MARCH! &c. The Polish words heard by the end of the film mean: ONE MUST UNDERSTAND THE METAPHOR, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. - S.T.

FRANCISZKA & STEFAN THEMERSON
THE EYE AND THE EAR
UK, 1944-45, sound, B&W, 10 mins, 35mm & 16mm
Music: Karol Szymanowski, 'Slopiewnie' Opus 46.
Orchestra conducted by Ronald Biggs.
Sophie Wyss (Soprano)
Commentry by Bruce Graeme spoken by J. McKehnie.
Four types of visual interpretation of four songs by Karol Szymanowski, Polish words by Julian Tuwin, English translation by Jan Sliwinski. - S.T.

FRANCISZKA & STEFAN THEMERSON
CALLING MR SMITH
UK, 1943, sound, colour, 10 mins, 35 & 16mm
'In 1938 Stefan and Fraciszka Themerson, leading figures in Polish avant-garde cinema, fled from Poland. In 1942 they came to England and worked for the rest of the war in the Film Unit of the Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation in London. Calling Mr Smith, made in 1943, calls on 'Mr Smith' to support the war effort as an anti-fascist struggle, illustrating its appeal with examples of Nazi oppression in Poland.

The film is experimental in technique, using anamorphic lenses, still and moving images and vivid colour (the Dufaycolor process). While the spoken soundtrack employs a rhetoric heard elsewhere in wartime propaganda, the overall tone of the film is unusually urgent and authentic and in some sequences images combine with music (Chopin, Shimanovski) to convey a real feeling of loss.' - David Finch.

STAN VANDERBEEK
A LA MODE
USA, 1958, sound, B&W, 5 mins, 16mm.
A montage of women and appearances, a fantasy about beauty and the female, a homage, a mirage. An attire satire. - S.V.

JAMES WHITNEY
YANTRA
USA, 1950-57, sound, colour, 10 mins, 16mm
Complex animated film by the maker of Lapis designed as an instrument of Hindu contemplation and worship.

JAMES & JOHN WHITNEY
FILM EXERCISES 1-4
USA, 1943-1944, sound, ?, 12 mins, 16mm
' ...one of the most radically original audio-visual manifestations ever devised... The sounds were composed with an elaborate pendulum mechanism invented especially to 'write' out in a controlled fashion synthetic sounds, which we have now come to recognize as electronic music, but which at that time, before the perfection of recording tape, seemed revolutionary and shocking. The visual images were equally astounding, for they recorded, for the first time, pure direct light (regulated, formed and transformed by mattes and masks) rather than the reflected light usually photographed from drawings or other objects... The visual composition, like serial music, is constructed of themes and variations, inversions and clusters, but the nature of the optical phenomena - flickers, alternating figures and reversing colour balances etc. allow unexpected (for the viewer!) subtleties and dynamics, so that a shrinking object may once evoke a deep-space perspective and a few moments later aggressively refuse to be perceived as anything but a shape decreasing in size on a flat pictorial surface. The soundtrack is equally complex and subtle, while the rapport between music and visual image is marvelously involved and continually intriguing - sometimes pulling into precise synchronization and other times interacting in dramatic counterpoint.' - William Moritz, Film As Film.

JOYCE WIELAND
SAILBOAT
Canada, 1967, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm
Sailboat goes very loudly from left to right - sea blue horizon unclear scratches frayed edge-a splice-sailboat goes very loudly from left to right sea and sky blue-figure goes very loudly from middle to right...

When these films were shown recently in New York, Jonas Mekas wrote in the Village Voice: 'I am happy to report here that avant-garde film has gained one more artist whose work I have no doubt will take a permanent place in the avant garde film repertory.' - J.M.

'Joyce Wieland surpasses philosophy. She has achieved a capacity for whimsy, and become divine. She cannot help but laugh, also I recommend her knockers' - Ken Jacobs.