I, AN ACTRESS
George Kuchar
USA, 1977, 9’, p&b, 16mm

This film was shot in ten minutes with four or five students of mine at the San Francisco Art Institute. It was to be a screen-test for a girl in the class. She wanted something to show producers of theatrical productions, as the girl 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 it 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.

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THE SECRET CINEMA
Paul Bartel
USA, 1966, 27’30’’, p&b, 16mm

In the program of the 1966 London Film Festival, Richard Roud describes the film as ... a terribly funny pop/ camp American film -- about the misfortunes of Jane amongst the film-makers. It's really a paranoid fantasy about a girl who thinks that all her friends are putting her on and filming her life with hidden cameras for exhibition of a secret theater. (They are, of course.) The star of the film is Amy Vane, who gives a really extraordinary performance as Jane. Also featured in the cast are Gordon Felio from What's New, Pussycat? and the sensational West Coast comedian Barry Dennen.

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Z MOJEGO OKNA / FROM MY WINDOW
Josef Robakowski
Poland, 1978/1999, 20’, p&b, video

In the film 'From my window' Joseph Robakowski shows the everyday life of the central square of the city Lodz in Poland which, for a period of 20 years, he observed from the window of his flat. The project was completed in 1999 due to the rebuilding of the hotel which closed the view on to the square for the artist. The series of videos is accompanied by commentaries by Robakowski himself about the people appearing in the shots, their habits, the changes in their lives and the gradual changes of the city itself.

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SPECTATOR
Frans Zwartjes
Holand, 1970, 11’, p&b, 16mm

Manders and Toebosch play the artist and his model. Safely hidden behind his lens, the photographer can’t get enough of what the long lashed, glamorous model has to offer.

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PERILS (IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?)
Abigail Child
USA, 1986, 3’50’’, p&b, 16mm

With Diane Torr, Sally Silvers, Plauto, Elion Sacker. Sound improvisations: Charles Noyes and Christian Marclay. An homage to silent films: the clash of ambiguous innocence and unsophisticated villainy. Seduction, revenge, jealousy, combat. The isolation and dramatization of emotions through the isolation (camera) and dramatization (editing) of gesture. I had long conceived of a film composed only of reaction shots in which all causality was erased. What would be left would be the resonant voluptuous suggestions of history and the human face. PERILS is a first translation of these ideas.

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SONG OF THE GODBODY
James Broughton
USA, 1977, 10’50’’, color, 16mm

“The film consists predominately of extreme close-ups of parts of Broughton's body. The camera slowly becomes the tool revealing the erotic beauty of the beauty of the body and the sensual pleasure in loving oneself. The ecstasy and power of sexual gratification are celebrated by the camera, as it maintains an erotic role, probing, revealing and visually caressing. Broughton's song is a praise of his body as divine androgyne, and an acceptance of this higher godly sexual power." by Richard Bartone, Millennium Film Journal
"Song Of The Goodbody is the best thing of its kind since Song of Songs and yours is better illustrated." by June Singer, Author of Androgyny
"A classic liberation film!" by Larry Kardish, Film Curator, Museum of Modern Art

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AI / LOVE
Takahiko Iimura
USA, 1962, 10’, p&b, 16mm

Sound by Yoko Ono "I have seen a number of Japanese avant-garde films at Brussels International Experimental Film Festival, at Cannes and at other places. Of all those films, Iimura's LOVE stands out in its very beauty and originality, a film poem, with no 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." By Jonas Mekas, Film Culture

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9/64: O TANNENBAUM
Kurt Kren
Austria, 1964, 3’, color, 16mm

"In 9/64: O CHRISTMAS TREE, Kren offers a more visually descriptive development of a Muehl 'action.' The images have been chosen to follow a more dramatic sequence, probably because the action itself contained a wide range of images and materials ...." by Stephen Dwoskin

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THREE FRAME STUDIES
Vito Acconci
USA, 1969/1970, 8’, p&b e color, video

In one of his earliest films, Acconci performs a series of actions — running in a circle, jumping, pushing another man — in which the physical limits of the action refer to the boundaries of the film frame itself.

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DIRTY
Stephen Dwoskin
UK, 1967, 10’, p&b, 16mm

“Dirty is remarkable for its sensuousness, created partly by the use of rephotography which enables the filmmaker a second stage of response to the two girls he was filming, partly by the caressing style of camera movement and partly by the gradual increase of dirt on the film itself, increasing the tactile connotations generated by rephotography. The spontaneity of Dwoskin's response to the girls' sensual play is matched by the spontaneity of his response to the film of their play”' by John Du Cane

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BLACK AND WHITE TAPES
Paul McCarthy
USA, 1970, 3’, p&b, video

McCarthy uses his own body as a tool to examine the process of making art.

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GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY
Willard Maas
USA, 1943, 7’, p&b, 16mm

An analogical pilgrimage evokes the terrors and splendors of the human body as the undiscovered, mysterious continent. Extreme magnification increases the ambiguity of the visuals, tongue-in-cheek commentary counteracts or reinforces their sexual implications. The method is that used by the imagist-symbolist poet.

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2 STAGE TRANSFER DRAWING
Dennis Oppenheim
USA, 1972, 10’, p&b, video

In this series of performance works, Oppenheim investigates transference and communication through the body. In the Transfer Drawing pieces, Oppenheim makes a drawing on his son's back; his son tries to copy this drawing through tactile sensation onto the wall. They then reverse roles. Writes Oppenheim, "I am drawing through him."

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UNSERE AFRIKAREISE
Peter Kubelka
Austria, 1966, 12’50’’, color, 16mm

Museum of Modern Art, 1967: "New Cinema - An International Selection" "UNSERE AFRIKAREISE is about the richest, most articulate, and most compressed film I have ever seen. I have seen it four times and I am going to see it many, many times more, and the more I see it, the more I see in it. Kubelka's film is one of cinema's few masterpieces and a work of such great perfection that it forces one to re-evaluate everything that one knew about cinema. The incredible artistry of this man, his incredible patience. (He worked on UNSERE AFRIKAREISE for five years; the film is 12 and a half minutes long.) 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." by- Jonas Mekas

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SPIRAL JETTY
Robert Smithson
USA, 1970, 34’50’’, color, 16mm

This film, made by the artist, Robert Smithson, with the assistance of Virgina Dwan, Dwan Gallery & Douglas Christmas, Director, Ace Gallery, (the aforementioned Dwan & Christmas also assisted Smithson financially with the making of the Spiral Jetty), is a poetic and process minded film depicting a "portrait" of his renouned earth work -- The Spiral Jetty, as it juts into the shallows off the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake. A voice-over by Smithson reveals the evolution of the Spiral Jetty. Sequences filmed in a natural history museum are integrated into the film featuring prehistoric relics that illustrate themes central to Smithson's work. A one minute section is filmed by Nancy Holt for inclusion in the film as Smithson wanted Holt to shoot the "earth's history". This idea came from a quote Smithson found ... "the earth's history seems at times like a story recolorded in a book each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing". Smithson and Holt drove to the Great Notch Quarry in New Jersey, where he found a facing about 20 feet high. He climbed to the top and through handfuls of ripped pages from books and magazines over the edge of the facing as Holt filmed it.

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VALENTIN DE LAS SIERRAS
Bruce Baillie
USA, 1967, 10’, color, 16mm

Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth. Old Song of Mexican hero Valentin, sung by blind Jose Santollo Nasido en Santa Cruz de la Soledad; Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico.

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SONGDELAY
Joan Jonas
USA, 1973, 18’35’’, p&b, video

This 1973 black-and-white film is a rediscovered classic. Performing with a "cast" that includes Gordon Matta-Clark, Jonas choreographs a theater of space, movement, and sound, with the urban landscape of New York in a featured role. Jonas creates a highly original if enigmatic theatrical language of gesture and sound, as she and her performers play with emblematic props, unexpected rhythms of space and scale, references to painting, and audio delays. At once delightfully improvisational and precisely choreographed, Song Delay resonates with themes and strategies that recur throughout Jonas' performance work.

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DESISTFILM
Stan Brakhage
USA, 1954, 7’, p&b, 16mm

Internationally acclaimed as the classic of its genre. The camera joins a drunken adolescent party and participates in the expression of desire and frustration.
"The best film in the 1950s; breathtaking camera work; entire cinematic conception and execution is brilliant." By Willard Maas

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VORMITTAGSSPUK / GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST
Hans Richter
USA, 1928, 7’, p&b, 16mm

Pure vintage dada. A humorous, delightful, grotesque in which ordinary objects rebel against their daily routine and, for a brief period of liberation, fallow their own laws. A bow-tie undoes itself, bowler hats float gracefully through the air, coffee cups leap from a tray to smash themselves on the ground, and so forth. At the stroke of noon, they return to their normal functional state.

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MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
Maya Deren
USA, 1943, 14’, p&b, 16mm

A large flower, the silhouette of a figure briskly walking away, a house key, a bread knife, a telephone receiver resting off the hook, and a spinning phonographic turntable define the shifting functional elements in Meshes of the Afternoon from which the film's evolving, malleable construct - the fragile and tenuously interconnected mesh of actual and perceived reality - is intriguingly (and ingenuously) mapped. A woman (Maya Deren) walking along the sidewalk near her home catches a momentary glimpse of a figure turning the colorner, unlatches the front door and, after a cursory inspection of the empty household, proceeds upstairs to rest on an armchair situated by a front-view window. From this deceptively simple introductory premise, Maya Deren modulates the mise-en-scene of seemingly mundane objects to create overlapping, yet non-intersecting planes of existential reality, using permutations of recurring images - mirrored surfaces (the apparition's face, polished metal spheres, a hand mirror), glass, duality and doppelgangers - to represent variably interlocking narrative fragments of observation, inference, deduction, and memory. Unfolding with the narrative discontinuity characteristic of nouvelle roman literature (creating an idiosyncratically dissociative filmic language that also characterizes Alain Resnais' subsequent feature films, particularly Last Year at Marienbad and Je t'aime, je t'aime), the film posits a series of subtle structural, temporal, and logical mutations, creating a sublimely recursive, mind-bending meditation on the interaction between experience and memory, domestic banality and violence, imagination and causation.

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THE END
Christopher Maclaine
USA, 1953, 34’75’’, color e p&b, 16mm

"An experimental film unique in its liberal inter-cutting of color and black-and-white sequences and in the employment by its poet-maker of sections containing sound only, to deliver what he feels to be an important message. In form the film consists of five episodes dealing with five different people, each seen on the last day of his existence. These episodes are linked by the sound-only sections, and the whole is capped by a lyric code." By Film-Maker's Cinematheque
"San Francisco beat poet Christopher Maclaine made only four films, but the longer two are among the greatest and most original I've ever seen. Rarely screened, perhaps because of their crude, homemade look, they have an emotional and spiritual authenticity few mainstream films can match. THE END, running 35 minutes, tells the stories of seven people on the last day of their lives (most of them are preparing to kill themselves, but the world is also about to be annihilated by the Bomb) with a mix of black humor and bizarre twists. The editing and Maclaine's narration are constantly veering off in unexpected directions, replicating the disordered thoughts of a person on the brink; during one particularly jumbled sequence of images, he invites us to make up the story." By Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

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