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475 Park Ave South, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10016
(212) 267-5665
filmmakerscoop@gmail.com
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I Wish I Was a Rice Krispie Relaxing in My Bowl Shooting Movies
Genre: Experimental
Boston, 1966-1968. World premiered on Radio Unnameable, WBAI. --C. J.
Rental: $50.00
16mm Rental: $50.00
Opening The Nineteenth Century: 1896
Genre: Experimental
Including 50 filters; plus $5 for each additional packet of 50 filters. 3-D utilizing Pulfrich Effect (filters supplied; standard projection). Film is symmetrical and can be shown from either end. Cinematographers: Eugene Promio, Felix Mesgusch, Francis Doublier. Cinémathèque Française places originals, perhaps exposures from cameras in motion, to 1896. Shafting the screen: the projector beam maintains its angle as it meets the screen and keeps on going, introducing volume as well as light, just as the Paris, Cairo, and Venice of a century ago happen to pass. 3-D Instructions To Viewer: Passing through the tunnel mid-film, a red flash will signal you to switch your single Pulfrich filter from before your right eye to before your left (keep both eyes open). Center-seating is best: depth deepens viewing further from the screen. Handle filter by edges to preserve clarity - Either side of filter may face screen. Filter can be held at any angle, there's no "up" or "down" side. Also, two filters before an eye does not work better than one, and a filter in front of each only negates the effect. Suggestion To Film Curators: pass scotch-tape dispensers through audience - an inch of tape will hold a filter to an eyebrow.
Rental: $30.00
16mm Rental: $30.00
Whirled, The (aka Four Shorts of Jack Smith)
Genre: Experimental
The following four films include early images of Jack Smith. 1. Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice (1956) 2. Little Cobra Dance (1956) 3. Hunch Your Back (1963) 4. Death of P'Town (1961) The first two sections were shot around Jack's loft on Reade Street on two 100' 16 mm. rolls. Sunday morning, following Saturday's sacrifice, I saw there was another 50 feet left. In an impromptu way very different from my initial fastidious art-film approach, I quickly filmed Jack on the roof alongside his loft. The results had us falling onto the floor and I would never be an art-film true-believer again. After years of shooting my raging epic STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH starring Jack as The Spirit Not of Life But of Living, and after a few months of being on the outs with each other, we got together--summer of '61 in Provincetown--for one last stab at friendship and the making of a film. In 1963, a snatch of Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice was shown on TV. I had somehow been invited to participate in a TV quiz program called Back Your Hunch. (Or was it Hunch Your Back?)
Rental: $50.00 (16mm, DVD)
16mm Rental: $50.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $50.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $300.00
Ken Jacobs's Blu-Ray Compilation #1
Genre: Experimental
Blu-Ray Compilation of these Ken Jacobs titles: CAPITALISM: SLAVERY, THE SURGING SEA OF HUMANITY, CAPITALISM: CHILD LABOR, ANOTHER OCCUPATION. Search each individual title for more information.
DVD NTSC Rental: $150.00 Blu-Ray
16mm Sale: $300.00 Blu-Ray
Blonde Cobra
Genre: Experimental
Featuring Jack Smith *Images gathered by Bob Fleischner, sound-film composed by Ken Jacobs. "Jack says I made the film too heavy. It was his and Bob's intention to create light monster-movie comedy. Two comedies, actually, two separate stories that were being shot simultaneously until they had a falling-out over who should pay for the raw stock destroyed in a fire started when Jack's cat knocked over a candle: Jack claimed it was an act of God. in the winter of '59 Bob showed me the footage. Having no idea of the original story plans I was able to view the material not as the fragments of a failure, of two failures, but as the makings a new entirety. Bob gave over the footage to me and with it the freedom to develop it as I saw fit. I think it was in late 1960 that Jack and I ignored our personal animosities long enough to record his words and songs for the sound track. The phrases he repeated into the tape recorder were mostly ones I'd at some time heard him say; most were pet phrases he loved to recite, over and over, his lessons. A very few I made up in his stlye. The procedure for recording his monologues and songs. I played him selections from my 78 collection, music from the '20's and '30's, sometimes only the beginning of a record and if he liked it would restart the record and immediately record. I don't think there was a second take of anything Any lack of clarity is due to the very second-rate equipment, third-rate, fourth-rate, we were using. I play the harp for the Madame Nescience monologue. Jack supplied the Arabic music, there's also some SAFARI IN HIFI; a Villa-Lobos string quartet speeded up; a haunting section of a children's 45. . . 'Baby Wants To Sleep". A small amount of my own previous shooting was cut into the film, the short 'drowning in newscience' color sequence near the beginning. BLONDE COBRA is an erratic narrative -no, not really a narrative, it's only stretched out in time for convenience of delivery. It's a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950's, 40's, 30's disgust. Silly, self-pitying, guilt-structured and yet triumphing-on one level-over the situation with style, because he's unapologetically gifted, has a genius for courage, knows that a state of indignity can serve to show his character in sharpest relief. He carries on, states his presence for what it is. Does all he can to draw out our condemnation, testing our love for limits, . . . enticing us into an absurd moral posture the better to dismiss us with a regal 'screw-=off'." -K. J. Projected quarterly at The Anthology Film Archives of New York
Rental: $90.00
16mm Rental: $90.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $400.00
Little Stabs At Happiness
Genre: Experimental
Featuring Jack Smith. Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100' rolls timed well with music on old 78s. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement, as well as breaking out of step.
Rental: $45.00
16mm Rental: $45.00
Baud'larian Capers
Genre: Experimental
Bob Fleischner was an open and shut case. Utterly open, utterly unfathomable. It took awhile to fixate on him but then I got drawn in. --K. J.
Rental: $90.00 (16mm), 60.00 (DVD)
16mm Rental: $90.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $60.00
Window
Genre: Experimental
The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience's sense of gravity. The camera's movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice. --K. J.
Rental: $36.00
16mm Rental: $36.00
Sky Socialist, The
Genre: Experimental
The film is in sections to be shown separately; this is the central, longest "panel", within which the story can be said to be complete. It is a story of impossible love that emerges through the preoccupation with space and pattern shaping by way of camera-manipulation; my appoach to film is that of a painter (abstract-expressionist) rather than dramatist. Other sections are asides, obsessions with details, excursions. (...) --K. J.
Rental: $270.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $270.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $500.00
Winter Footage, The
Genre: Experimental
(...) The impossible gathering about the fire of irreconcilable entities... I'd heard about a peace beyond understanding and I was trying for it (in real life I want no reconciling of Nazis and Jews as such). I needed a break from what I knew. I was interested in composing film only inasmuch as it served to compose me. It was my film, my necessary respite dream. (...) --K. J.
Rental: $129.00
16mm Rental: $129.00
Airshaft
Genre: Experimental
Single fixed-camera take looking from within darkened room, (camera within a camera) out through fire-escape door into vertical space between rears of downtown N. Y. loft buildings. A potted plant, fallen sheet of white paper, cat rests on the foreground door-ledge. The flow of the image is interrupted, partially and then wholly dissolving into blackness; the picture reemerges, the objects smear, somewhat double, edges break up... and again the serene image scintillatingly looms into view. Focus shifts abruptly between foregroun and background planes, creating a strong volume-illusion. The fragile image then shines forth for one last time before dying out. --K. J.
Rental: $30.00
16mm Rental: $30.00
Soft Rain
Genre: Experimental
Three identical prints of a single 100 ft. fixed-camera take are shwon from beginning to end-roll light-flare, with a few feet of blackness preceding/bridging/following the rolls. View from the above is of a partially snow-covered low flat rooftop receding between the brick walls of two much taller downtown N. Y. loft buildings. A slightly tilted rectangular shape left of the center of the composition is the section of rain-wet Reade Street visible to us over the low rooftop. Distant trucks, cars, persons carrying packages, umbrellas sluggishly pass across this little stage-like area. A fine rain-mist is confused, visually, with the color emulsion grain. A large black rectangle following up and filing to space above the stage-area is seen as both an unlikely abyss extending in deep space behind the stage or more properly, as a two dimensional plane suspended far forward of the entire snow/rain scene. Though it clearly if slightly overlaps the two receding loft building walls the mind, while knowing better, insists on presuming it to be overlapped by them. (At one point the black plane even trembles). So this mental tugging takes place throughout. The contradiction of 2D reality versus 3D implication is asuminglyand mysteriously explicit. Filmed at 24 f. p. s. but projected at 16 the street activity is perceptively slowed down. It's become a somewhat heavy laboring. The loop repetition (the series hopefully will intrigue you to further run-throughs) automatically imparts a steadily growing rhythmic sense of the street-activities. Anticipation for familiar movement-complexes builds, and as all smaller complexities join up in our knowledge of the whole the purely accidental counter-passings of people and vehicles becomes satisfyingly cogent, seems rhythmically structured and of a piece. Becomes choreography. --K. J.
Rental: $36.00
16mm Rental: $36
Nissan Ariana Window
Genre: Experimental
NISSAN ARIANA WINDOW is 3/4's of our daughter's name. She was just kid when these pictures were taken. Some were taken before she was born: pregnant Flo together with pregnant cat China sunning themselves under the skylight. Andrew Noren likes the movie. --K. J.
Rental: $42.00
16mm Rental: $42.00
Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son
Genre: Experimental
"Cinematography ass't., Jordan Meyers. Negative-matching assistance by Judy Dauterman. Original 1905 film shot and probably directed by G. W. 'Billy' Bitzer, rescued by Kemp Niver via a paper print filed for copyright purposes with the Library of Congress. Reverently examined here, a new movie almost incidentally comes into being. Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead. The preservation of their memory ceases at the edges of the frame (a 1905 hand happened to stick into the frame. . . it's preserved, recorded in a spray of emulsion grains). One face passes 'behind' another on the two-dimensional screen. The staging and cutting is pre-Griffith. Seven infinitely complex cine-tapestries comprise the original film and the style is not primitive, not uncinematic, but an inspired indication of a path of cinematic development whose value has only recently been rediscovered. My camera closes in only to better ascertian the infinite richness (playing with fate, taking advantage of the loop-character of all movies, recalling and varying some visual complexes again and again for particular savoring), searching out incongruities in the story-telling (a person, confused, suddenly looks out of an actor's face), delighting in the whole bizarre human phenomena of story-telling itself and this within the fantasy of reading any bygone time out of the visual crudities of film: dream within a dream! And then I wanted to show the actual present of film, just begin to indicate its energy. A train of images passes like enough and different enough to imply to the mind that its eyes are seeing an arm lift, or a door close: I wanted to 'bring to the surface' that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force-areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape. . . to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself-a chemical disdispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still. . . stirred to life by a successive 16-24 f. p. s pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited ( the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowling and ironically, for form the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion. Important: this film MUST be projected BIG and BRIGHT and IN FOCUS" -K. J Projected quarterly at The Anthology Film Archives of New York
Rental: $270.00
16mm Rental: $270.00
Globe
Genre: Experimental
(previously titled: EXCERPT FROM THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION) Normal Projection. Flat image (of snowbound suburban housing tract) blossoms into 3D only when viewer places Eye Opener before the right eye. (Keeping both eyes open, of course. As with all stereo experiences, center seats are best. Space will deepen as one views further from the screen.) The found-sound is X-ratable (not for children or Nancy Reagan) but is important to the film's perfect balance (GLOBE is symmetrical) of divine and profane. --K. J.
Rental: $66.00
16mm Rental: $66.00
Urban Peasants
Genre: Experimental
Filmed by Stella Weiss and family, chanced assembled by Ken Jacobs from uncut 100-foot lengths. Alternating sound and image. Image must travel at silent speed. Sound o tape precedes and follows silent image. 40 minutes film plus ca. 12 minutes sound. My wife Flo's family as recorded by her Aunt Stella. The title is no intended put-down but a simple statement of fact, as I see it. Brooklyn was a place made up of many little villages; a near-shtetl is pictured here all in the space of a storefront. --K. J.
Rental: $90.00
16mm Rental: $90.00
Jerry Takes a Back Seat, Then Passes Out of the Picture
Genre: Experimental
In an earlier film, STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH, I demonstrated how the cosmos turns on the fact of Jerry Sims. I'd been attending his school-of-scuffed-shoes majoring in Simsism. One day scuffing midtown (or were we strolling on the capsizing Titanic?) the master was pulling choice items from pockets stuffed with obituary pages when we met his father. Popeye doesn't chance upon Pappy and let things pass. Jerry was flailing and spitting, disassociatively screaming small talk at him as the old man turned to politely aghast me: "Look at him. He had the brains of an Einstein. He could draw all the funnies. What happened?" olive Oyl might've replied, "If we knew the answer to that we'd know the answer to everything!"Later I'd veer off just as the answer was coming to me. It'd taken on the shape of The Black Hole. A Black Hole approaches in a curious way, edges dropping away until it gets to you. I got the idea and I graduated. --K. J.
Rental: $33.00
16mm Rental: $33.00
Doctor's Dream, The
Genre: Experimental
THE DOCTOR'S DREAM, not the title of the found film as originally made for television... the editing device was to count the number of shots and start the film off with numerically middle shot and then, after that, the shot that had preceded it, and the shot that had followed it, and keep fanning further and further out until you saw the first shot of the film followed by the last shot, which was of the painting the movie is based on... It's called 'The Doctor;' it's in the Tate Gallery in London... and it has an interesting subliminal image appropriate to my discovery, via this reconstruction, of the real story of the film. A powerful sexual event was hidden within its banality. Maybe without intention, but it's what was gripping in the movie, if ever the movie was gripping. And now in the painting, seen from a little distance, the doctor contemplates the sleeping girl with, you don't have to agree with me, his curled fist doubling as a penis entering his mouth (I'm sad to find myself so constrained in my speech)... Maybe this is the traditional method of smuggling forbidden information, hot stuff, through customs from unadmitting mind to unadmitting mind. --K. J.
Rental: $16mm 69.00
16mm Rental: $69.00
Perfect Film
Genre: Documentary, Experimental
Keywords: political_social_activism
TV newscast discard 1965; reprinted as found (maybe in Canal St. bin, I forget) with exception of boosting volume second half. A lot of film is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing in its un- or semi-conscious form. I wish more stuff was available in its raw state, as primary source material for anyone to consider, and to leave for others in just that way, the evidence uncontaminated by compulsive proprietary misapplied artistry, 'editing', the purposeful 'pointing things out' that cuts a road straight and narrow through the cine-jungle; we barrel through thinking we're going somewhere and miss it all. Better to just be pointed to the territory, to put in time exploring, roughing it, on our own. For the straight scoop we need the whole scoop, or no less than the clues entire and without rearrangement. O, for a Museum of Found Footage, or cable channel, library, a shit-museum of telling discards accessible to all talented viewers/auditors. A wilderness haven salvaged from Entertainment. --K. J.
Rental: $66.00
16mm Rental: $66.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $75.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $300.00
Keaton's Cop
Genre: Experimental
Some films are a joy to look at repeatedly, and also sperately in their various parts. This is the bottom quarter, or fifth of Cops. (Please project film with all of lower frame image visible on screen.)
Rental: $60.00
16mm Rental: $60.00
Disorient Express
Genre: Experimental
This is not formalist cinema; order interests me only to the extent that it can provide experience. Watch the flat screen give way to some kind of 3-D thrust, look for impossible depth inversions, for jeweled splendor, for CATscans of the brain. I'm banking on this film reviving a yen for expanded consciousness. -K. J.
Rental: $125.00
35mm Rental: $125.00
New York Street Trolley
Genre: Experimental
A nervous system demonstration.
Rental: $150.00
Tom Tom Chaser, A
Genre: Experimental
I do an electronic riff on the MOMA print in A TOM TOM CHASER, concluding the NTSC edition. I'd been supervising a new digitizing of TOM, TOM at 15 frames per second (as against the 16fps 'standard' silent-speed of the PAL transfer; in truth there was no standard fps back then) because 15 fits neatly into NTSC's 60 fields/30 picture frames per second, thus minimizing compression 'artifacts', a form of visual 'noise' I wasn't welcoming. The riff was inspired watching Scott Olive, Tape House master technician, zip forward and back on their million dollar optical film-scanner. I asked Scott if we could record some of the discarded visual phenomena incidental to film-to-digital transfer. Sure, he said. I stood cheering him on to wilder aberrations and what we got is pretty much what you have, less some judicious excisions. -K. J.
DVD NTSC Rental: $75.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $150.00
Footnote to Fact
Genre: Experimental
Rental: $25.00
16mm Rental: $25.00
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: History
A unique innovation in film technique which unfolds the treasures of Greek art against the eloquent reading of Hurd Hatfield and the music of Henry Brandt.
Rental: $40.00
16mm Rental: $40.00
Gothic Art
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Art & Artists, History
"A search for spiritual beauty in an ugly world--that is the art of Northern Europe from the late 12th to the 15th century as seen in the great cathedrals and their decoration. Emphasis is placed on determining the origins of Gothic art as manifested in St. denis and Chartres. Structural development are interwoven with iconographic, stylistic, religious and cultural aspects to provide a synthesis of the spectrum of emergin art forms in the period."--L.J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Another Time: Another Voice
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Films about Film, Media
"Regardless of country of origin, classification, or labels, one characteristic seems to pervade the creative film expression of our time. That is a growing awareness that the film medium has a formal as well as a representational aspect. That it can best communicate vision and realty when it organically exploits its own plastic means and mode of composition. And that for a film to move people deeply, the filmmaker needs not only a special way of seeing experience, but a specific way of filming it. This film tells the story of a man who has a rendezvous with memory and desire; a man who can neither ecscape from his present nor his past. Moving on two levels--the objective and subjective--the film shifts back and forth from vision to reality: from memory to desire; from the prison of obsessions to the metaphors of regression."--L.J.
Rental: $40.00
16mm Rental: $40.00
Rise of Greek Art, The
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Art & Artists, History
"An appreciation of the close relationship between Greek cultural history and the evolution of visual expression is developed through a study of the major monuments of the period and with diagrams. A coherent picture of the development of Hellenic art from the geometric 8th Century B.C. to the Classical Age of Pericles in the 5th Century. In broad scope, the rise of Greek art is followed through its various periods, cutting across art forms from architecture to sculpture to pottery with its painted decorations."--L.J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
They All Interlock/Dishing/Sugartown
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Environment & Nature, Family, Landscape & Architecture
They All Interlock (2001) color, sound, 19 min. A large Jewish family gathers for their holiday meal. THEY ALL INTERLOCK drops in to this gathering and drops out, as one's attention often does within a complex social situation. It wanders both hopefully and longingly, through the camera lens, to many places around the world, far off from this dining room, this family, to images both distant and past, and of a future, embodied by a newborn child's feet splayed out like pale tulips, his feathery eyes looking toward a vague new world which the eldest present, 90-year-old Aunt Martha, will never know. It is the cycle, uninterrupted, unchallenged, simply acknowledged in THEY ALL INTERLOCK. Dishing (2001) color, sound, 8 min. Largely a sound composition, with July 4th fireworks swaying slowed way down so every cast of flicker light can ooze to black and slowly dry on the night sky canvas; flint-stick electronics accompany, random digital sweeps, with moments of a magician's deck of cards that ascends endlessly. Humming tugboats dock at the South Street Seaport but we never can seem to get on to familiar ground. From Dishing, signals of July 4th are received from a tumultuous future space. Sugartown (2001) color, sound, 10 min. Sugartown: New York City as seen through a glazed window. Two women do an awfully good job of allowing the bridges of their noses to dissolve into their straws, jutting from Tropicana O. J. containers.
Rental: $50.00
VHS NTSC Rental: $50.00
To the People Over There
Genre: Documentary
Keywords: Biography & Autobiography, Political / Social Activism
A student travelling 14 hours from Kent University, and I stood together directly before the speakers on stage at Central Park's first anti-war protest on Oct. 6, 2002. Combined with the footage he sent, I formed a 45-min. portrait of that day and that period (scenes of Nader, Patti Smith, Phil Donohue 'Fight Corporate Crime' at Wall Street, and people stumbling for meaning before the void called 'Ground Zero'). Speakers' voices from Iraq, Afghanistan, and native activists and celeb/activists warned that day in no ambiguous terms of what the Iraq war has quickly become. Broadcast News was further down Fifth Ave. for a Disney Parade and The New York Times ran protest coverage (participants grossly under-reported) on page B3. The documentary starts with a shot of that newspaper article and page number. Jon Gartenberg helped produce copies for broad distribution to student organizations and classrooms in the Arab Emirates and Australia, until, mainstream journalists took up their responsibility for reporting our protests.
Rental: $50.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $50.00
word sand witch
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Environment & Nature
EPACTA LUNAE, A DAY AND A HALF: Epacta is Latin for the number of days which must be calculated to synchronize the lunar and solar calendars. The solar year of 365 days and the lunar year of 354 generally require 11 days to line up. I have taken sounds of the moon’s instrument, ropes and metal walkways, played by the tides tugging on docked vessels in ports, simultaneously being played upon by the moon’s gravitational pull on our water bodies. The audio of EPACTA LUNAE, A DAY AND A HALF derives from numerous layered natural field recordings within a bed of synthesized chords. EPACTA LUNAE, A DAY A HALF is the first video-sound poem which comprise a much larger project in process entitled THE MOON’S GUITAR, COLLABORATION WITH THE TIDES. --N. J. LITTLE BITS OF SKIN (WORDS): Struck by the ease of someone as articulate and expressive as my father losing their language facilities overnight with the advent of a stroke, I began filming the text of the city. The recorded audio is a montage of Peter Rose’s fabricated dialects when I recorded him reading a poem of mine mixed with synthetically altered wailing. Moments of mangled writing from various days after the stroke weave into the formal blocks of words in the environment playing between language as symbol, language as image, and language as pure experience. --N. J.
Rental: $50.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $50.00
Nothing/Moving: A Multicellular Organigram
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Art & Artists
NOTHING/MOVING was created for the exhibition of Jonas Mekas: Fragments of Paradise at the Maya Stendhal Gallery, NYC, as a single monitor multichannel installation based on Jonas Mekas’ epic film "As I was Moving Ahead Occasionally I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty," 16mm, 2000. Diary footage of twenty-five years of living in SoHo, New York City, and spontaneous voice-over commentary are used as raw material, along with fragments of soundtrack from Louie Malle’s Zazie dans le Metro, which I first saw at Mekas’ Anthology in SoHo in 1976, and exotic bird calls forming a visual/aural poem homage to Jonas Mekas.. --N. J.
Rental: $50.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $50.00
From The Horse's Mouth (I Can Produce -Pronounce- Nuclear)
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Films about Film, Media, Political / Social Activism
Commissioned by Maya Stendhal of Maya Stendhal Gallery, NYC, for the VITAL SIGNS 2005 exhibition. FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH has a second title: (I CAN PRODUCE -PRONOUNCE- NUCLEAR) which is its generative motivating core, an unscripted moment during Laura Bush’s delivery of an entirely scripted stand-up comedy routine at the 2005 White House Correspondent’s Dinner in Washington D. C. in which through a freudian slip she substitutes ‘produce’ for ‘pronounce’. The effect is staggering since it is her husband at the banquet table, smiling widely at her jokes, who has failed to produce WMD’s stated as his reason for an invasion of Iraq. The images contort and writhe through visually gagging effects intensifying the already-sick toxicity and hypocracy which engulfs the room of 2,500 politicians, journalists, and media ‘managers’ who enjoy the manufactured wit and simultaneously implicate themselves in the crimes of her husband. --N. J.
Rental: $50.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $50.00
Loop Variations #1: Sinbad and the Roc
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Structural
"Sinbad recovers the magic camp. At the same time he is carried off by the roc, an enormous two-headed bird, who drops him in her nest on trop of the mountain."--MJ "Each film is composed of a single loop which undergoes multiple transformations. They can be shown independently or in any order."--MJ
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Loop Var. #2: The Princess and the Magician
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Structural
"Shrunken to about the size of a mouse, the Princess is threatened by the towering evil magician."--M.J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Loop Var #3: Homeward Bound
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Structural
"Safe at last! The ship sails from the island."-- M.J. "Each film is composed of a single loop which undergoes multiple transformations. They can be shown independently or in any order."--MJ
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Loop Variations--From The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Structural
"Each film is composed of a single loop which undergoes multiple transformations. They can be shown independently or in any order."--MJ
Rental: $30.00
16mm Rental: $30.00
Esprit de Corps
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Dance, Environment & Nature
"Starring Saul Levine, with some of his camerawork. First part: Birth from the water; Second: in the City with Janet, mostly in darkness; third: a bridge of scratches and flashing splices; ending with his dance on the beach, the world upside down, sunset and afterimage."--M.J. "I really liked Mike Jacobson's little film called ESPRIT DE CORPS which was shown last weekend at the Gotham Art Theatre. There was a positive, life-inspiring energy locked in this little unpretentious film. Probably, it was the only life generating film playing in New York that evening-or that week."--Jonas Mekas, Village VOICE.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Burning of New York, The
Genre: Experimental
"A single walking shot of New York skyline filmed from Long Island City, fragmented with pieces turned upside down imitating negative; scratched and painted-in flames, explosions, colored chemical flooding; painted with merthiolate to heal the wounds."--M.J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Dracula's Wedding Day
Genre: Experimental
"His bride leaves her house entranced, Dracula enfolds her in his cloak, the sun sets, and he leads her into his cave. Ghostly white-out images and spider web-like cracked black ink."--M.J. ("I have a complete loop show available involving simultaneous projection of two or more 8mm prints of these loops with other loops not available for distribution. At least three non-automatic 8mm projectors are necessary--the more the better. Write me in care of the Cooperative."--M.J.)
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Sunspots
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Hand-processed
"Also painted and scratched. The globe of the setting sun disappears and reappears through the cross of a window on 2nd Street, as surely as night follows day."--M.J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
No Title
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Hand-processed
"A non-photographic hand scratched and colored film of shapes rapidly growing out of and shrinking into a central point. Color positive, negative and superimposition. Like cosmic and organic processes, and like the arising of images in the mind."--M.J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Inside Out
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Family
"Individuals, animals and events against a family grain."--N.J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Fin In A Leaden Waste
Genre: Experimental
"The network of activity in the expanse above Chicago, and our heads."--N.J.
Rental: $25.00
16mm Rental: $25.00
Practice Your Music, Socrates!
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Literature & Theater
"Performers and audience in the city theater."--N.J.
Rental: $30.00
16mm Rental: $30.00
Approach
Genre: Experimental
"The ambivalence of a home-coming."--N.J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Conversation, A
Genre: Experimental
"Let's beat around the bush, a bird in our hand."--N.J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Moon Blue Traces
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Personal / Diary / Journal
A poetic exploration of the film-maker's coming to a poetic exploration of the film-maker's coming to terms with painful childhood memories. This film leads the viewer on an emotional journey in which cinematic metaphors and manipulated images evoke forgotten feelings.
Rental: $50.00
16mm Rental: $50.00
Four Stages of Cruelty
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Science & Medicine
"An acknowledgement to all of science and its approach to film-making: a cold, hard, documenta, all fact-for-fact way of thinking. A sadistic look at man's relationship to nature."--T.J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
S1
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Films about Film, Media, Found Footage
"Composed of film footage dating from the early years of this century to the present, S1 refers to much of the history of the cinema. Shots from fictional films and documentaries are organized in a collage-like fashion around the central image of an enlarged sprocket hole. The physical aspects of light and movement, and the plastic nature of the film itself, become the central elements of the work. The pictorial qualities of the footage take on different meanings in this new context, and the relationship of images around and within the sprocket-frame provokes a new association of ideas and possible connections. Produced on a specially conceived and constructed optical printer, this film incorporates usually invisible elements, creating new meanings for common images. In this manner, Janetzko creats a new filmic event."--Parabola Arts Foundation.
Rental: $30.00
16mm Rental: $30.00
Genre: Experimental
"A unique kind of lyricism comes through and hovers over the images on the screen like the light that projects and contains them." --Ernie Gehr on Jim Jennings' films
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Edge
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Environment & Nature
A wide-angle opening gliding against the screen's four edges four edges, within a field of tree-tops against a sky of color.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Refraction
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Environment & Nature
A moving body of glass and lens filled with the filtering light of autumn leaves.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Proximity
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Environment & Nature
A frame which contains the constant fusion and divisions of naked constructions which contain the approaching waves of an ocean whose origin is unknown.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Leaves
Genre: Experimental
The writing between the leaves.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Clothesline
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Environment & Nature
Stretched across the sky until the film bursts.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Dispatch
Genre: Experimental
Overlapping schedules as harmonies collide.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Chambers
Genre: Experimental
Movements echoed in the ceiling of a public space made private.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Chinatown
Genre: Experimental
The silent language of a city in a city.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Counterpane
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Environment & Nature, Landscape & Architecture
Sky shape cut outs patterned by building frames.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Fall (aka Wall Street)
Genre: Experimental
Working masses ascending while descending in autumn shadow.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Brighton
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Landscape & Architecture
Darkness connects and disconnects moments staged in steel subway elevation stop. --J. J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Fairy Tale, A
Genre: Experimental
A fairy tale told.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
St. Cristobal
Genre: Experimental
A place foreign to me transfigured by me.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Color Blind
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Philosophical
Traffic patterns between realities.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Shades
Genre: Experimental
City structures balanced in filmic structures.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
School of Athens
Genre: Experimental
Rental: $45.00
16mm Rental: $45.00
Intrigue
Genre: Experimental
"The film was shot and edited in the camera beneath the El at Brighton, Brooklyn a.k.a. 'Little Odessa.' The film is to be experienced for what it is and at the same time suggest a spectrum of incomprehensible inner emotions. The title suggests the motivation which culminates here."--Jim Jennings
Rental: $40.00
16mm Rental: $40.00
Painting the Town
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Music
As a teenager, I started making films in the late 60's with a 16mm Keystone camera that my father's family had used to make home movies in the 30's, 40's and 50's. Since graduating from Bard College in 1973 as a Film Major, I have lived in NYC, making films on and off, while simultaneously being employed in unrelated fields. On more than one occasion I tried and failed to make a film in Times Square. A year ago while walking through there at night, I was inspired to try again. The filming was done on consecutive weekend nights. Between weekends I would have the 100-foot roll or two developed and project them once or twice. Propelled by "chords" and "melodies" that tantalized me, I would then go back for more in the editing room, after exhausting the shooting process, I freed my "Lullaby of Broadway". These two screenings of PAINTING THE TOWN are dedicated to Ken Jacobs, whose work and encouragement I am grateful for.--Jim Jennings
Rental: $35.00
16mm Rental: $35.00
Gone With The Beep
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Comedy, Technology
Character-comedy about people and answering machines.
Rental: $40.00
16mm Rental: $40.00
Know Your Enemy
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Ethnic / Multicultural, Films about Film, Media
Seeks to examine the place of African-American artistic expression in contemporary culture in the context of the mainstream media that seeks to define it... the focus is on the rap group Public Enemy and the media controversy surrounding them.
Rental: $60.00
VHS NTSC Rental: $60.00
Soul City
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Music
In Henry Jones' words, this film is intended to, "Visually counterpoint the music of a subculture." Punk rock group FLESHTONES perform the song "Soul City," as tiny black & white cut-out figures, (with hand-tinted flesh tones), against a flickering background of brilliant color. In SOUL CITY, Jones 'recycled' the same basic movements of his subjects by reconstructing totally new motions from the same severely limited amount of footage. This was done through alteration of perspective, and reversal of selected movements at varying intervals. The number of movements a subject can make, artificially created from a few basics, becomes almost limitless once an understanding of what motivates activity in that subject from the beginning is achieved." --from Bikini Girl Magazine, January, 1979)
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Destination Unknown
Keywords: Science & Medicine
In the future, spacefarers discover a habitable planet amidst the void of space, and land there to explore. They soon find themselves under attack by one of the planet's strange inhabitants. How the spacefarers react to this siege is a reflection of the nature of mankind. The film features dimensional stop-motion animation as well as live action. --W. E. J.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Pou Pou
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Children & Youth
A surrealist poem-exercise. Made at Nippon University. "A film describing some unusual acts by youths attempting to break out of the stifling patterns of culture... daydreaming that yields them nothing. A mob of children enact a burial rite; the place of the 'corpse' is taken by one of the rebellious youths... Beautiful and rare images... one of the best Japanese films." --Iimura
Rental: $50.00
16mm Rental: $50.00
Bestseller, The
Genre: Narrative
Keywords: Psychology & Mental Health
An aspiring author decides to seduce a best-selling writer in order to advance her career. She soon discovers that this accomplished author is a psychotic killer and she's about to be his next victim.
Rental: $30.00
16mm Rental: $30.00
Visions of a City
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Spiritual / Mystical
Originally shot in 1957 and edited in 1978. 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 lyric and mystical film, building to a crescendo of rhythmically intercut shots of McClure's face, seemingly trapped on the glazed surface of the city. I don't think of this as an "early film" anymore, since it never came together until '78. Now it's tight.
Rental: $30.00
16mm Rental: $30.00
Duo Concertantes
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Keywords: Spiritual / Mystical
An established classic. Steel engravings form a surrealistic dream world. P. Adams Sitney has written at length on the film in his book Visionary Film. It can be shown to any adventurous audience, young or old, and has never disappointed. The theme: resurrection, rebirth, flight into higher spheres was thought to be out-moded in this century's art. Evidently not, judging from the impact of the film on viewers. "Jordan's imagery is exquisite and eloquent, concentrating on simple, repeated use of particularly poetic symbols and figures, a conglomerative effect of old Gustave Dore drawings, 19th century whatnot memorabilia, all fused to a totally aware perception." -- Lita Eliseu, East Village
Rental: $30.00
16mm Rental: $30.00
Gymnopedies
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Keywords: Science & Medicine, Spiritual / Mystical
The theme is Weightlessness. Objects and characters are cut loose from habitual meanings, also from tensions and gravitational limitations. A lyric Eric Satie track accompanies the film. Such a portrait seems necessary from time to time to remind us that equilibrium and harmony are possible, and that we will not dissolve into a jelly if we allow ourselves to relax into them: A horseman rides through the landscape, through the town, but never arrives anywhere in particular. An acrobat swings on a rope above a canal in Venice, and is content just to swing there. Nothing threatens to disturb them. This film is a total contrast to the Kafka-like oddities of Eastern European animation. "It is impossible not to hallucinate on your own while watching it." -- Lita Eliseu, East Village Other
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Hamfat Asar
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Spiritual / Mystical
"Jordan is one of the collagists and animators of film who can produce a significant vision. He is finding a way to work seriously with animation. Jordan is starting to significantly develop animation, in HAMFAT ASAR, as a fine arts mode." -- Carl Linder, SF Observer Animation. The strangeness of this 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. A moving single picture. Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby I sat quietly without moving, looking at the background until the pieces began to move without my inventing things for them to do. I found that, given the chance, they really did have important business to attend to, and my job was to furnish them with the power of motion. I never deviated from this plan.
Rental: $45.00
16mm Rental: $45.00
Orb
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Keywords: Spiritual / Mystical
A compact, full-color cut-out animation as ephemeral as the colors swimming on the surface of a soap bubble. The eternal round shape, the orb -- sun, moon, symbol of the whole self -- balloons its inimitable and joyous course through scene after scene of celestial delight, fixing at last as the mystical globe encasing the lovers whose course it has paralleled throughout the film. People who have shown OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE over and over have now decided it's OK to book this film. "More complex than the art work in The Yellow Submarine." -- Ed Blank, Pittsburgh Press
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Once Upon A Time
Genre: Experimental
In many ways a more searching, and certainly a more complex film than OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE. We are first presented a cobweb castle, filled with the haunting doubts of the young protagonist. Spirits appear on the screen and are heard on the soundtrack. Gradually a female guide emerges and escorts the young man into an antechamber to another (and possibly higher) world. "Pulsating lights, undulating objects, combined with a rich and full color sense." -- Donald Miller, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Rental: $35.00
16mm Rental: $35.00
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Keywords: Art & Artists
Using the cut-out style of animation I tried to marry the classic engravings of Gustave Dore to the classic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge through a classic narrator: Orson Welles. It's a long opium dream of the old Mariner (Welles) who wantonly killed the albatross and suffered the pains of the damned for it. "The film, far from being a mere visual accompaniment to the poem, has an integrity of its own. Throughout the film, serpents, butterflies and other creatures from Jordan's earlier works such as DUO CONCERTANTES and GYMNOPEDIES appear, bearing the unmistakable signature of the artist, creating mysteries, subtleties and rich asides. These are the strokes of genius, the touch of the craftsman, which have turned old material into new, translating 19th century art into a totally new kind of masterpiece. The Mariner lives as he has never lived before." -- Carmen Vigil, San Francisco Cinematheque
Rental: $125.00
16mm Rental: $125.00
Ancestors
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Keywords: Literature & Theater
ANCESTORS is a film about spiritual forefathers and mothers in a purely fanciful sense. These are classical figures, anatomical figures, fairy tale figures and romantic figures all thrown in together -- all my creative root-sources, in a kind of playful tribute. Like part 2 of DUO CONCERTANTES, it's a moving single picture, now doubled.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Cornell, 1965
Genre: Documentary, Experimental
Keywords: Art & Artists, Biography & Autobiography
In 1965 I worked as Joseph Cornell's assistant on boxes and films. I filmed his work extensively, and as much as I could of him. (It is the only film footage that exists of Cornell.) Until 1978 I couldn't edit the film. When I finally learned it would be a kind of personal journalistic tribute to the man who taught me so much, it fell together. What you see are the close-up interiors of many Cornell boxes, some collages, and a few shots of Joseph. You hear the things he said to me (as I recall them) and the thoughts I think about it all. If you are a Cornell fan, there isn't any other film on him.
Rental: $30.00
16mm Rental: $30.00
Moonlight Sonata
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Keywords: Music
Animated to the rhythms of Eric Satie's Gnossienne V. The moon and moonlight are the guiding lights of this visual interpretation, and I have kept the backgrounds in soft greens and blues. Only the cosmic tumbler, whose enigma is emphasized by his red color, breaks this pattern. Satie's music simplified and refined the imagery, made it the celestial circus I have always dreamed of. SONATA begins a new phase in my animation. I am finally getting in touch with the real poetry possible here. All works of art seem to come ready-made with their own sets of rules. And in this film only very simple movements were permitted.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Carabosse
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Keywords: Music
Animation, also of a new order in the recent series of short works. Mostly on black space, the figures in blue perform a very compact and jewel-like opera in surreal form, again to Satie's piano music. Ideally, the film should be projected on a 30" wide white card sitting on a music stand, center stage of a large auditorium or music hall, with sound from the projector piped into the big speaker system. The film is most effective this way, but can be shown normal-size also.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Finds of the Fortenight
Genre: Animation
Keywords: Art & Artists
This is a very different animation. A series of surreal titles are rapidly alternated with the cut-out animation movements. The titles are often simple and the words and images combine easily into an eerie flickering superimposition. But I also was interested in pressing this technique to the limit of informational overload. Sometimes the eye is lost in the flashing barrage of words and pictures. Sound would have been too much, so I left it silent. The titles are by collage artist and painter, Jess Collins.
Rental: $35.00
16mm Rental: $35.00
Masquerade
Genre: Animation
For the first time I am animating hand-painted engraved cut-outs on a full-color 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 face of the sun upon the sun upon the sun flower. But Harlequin cannot escape death. The blue world engulfs him.
Rental: $20.00
16mm Rental: $20.00
Magenta Geryon
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Music
I have tried to combine my feeling for personal and classical mythology with the images I see when I look upon the world. (This is a live film, not animation.) There are three parts, and each part is cut to a piece music chosen in advance of the photography. Therefore I call the film a "film concert". Part 1, ADAGIO, represents an Eros and Psyche mystique. Part 2, IN A SUMMER GARDEN, concerns my passion for gardening and my feelings for the medieval garden, the mystical rose, the somber formal gardens of Audrey Beardsley. Part 3, WINTER LIGHT, is filmed in the early morning hours of California mid-winter with its delicate touches of faery light. There is a kind of statement made also, which has to do with my feeling that despite a state of human alienation inherent in the modern world, the earth and its endless permutations of light emits an illumination paralleled in the human spirit.
Rental: $50.00
16mm Rental: $50.00
Visible Compendium, The
Genre: Experimental
THE VISIBLE COMPENDIUM constructs bits of unnamed meanings, fragments of light. Photography is, to me, not about things, but about light. Light is our primary reality when we are at the movies -- light which suggests things, the secondary reality, a construct by the mind. THE VISIBLE COMPENDIUM attempts to engage the mind, and particularly what is unknown in the mind, rather than what has been seen and known a thousand times over. THE VISIBLE COMPENDIUM reaches farther than any of my other animations. It goes off in many directions, held together, hopefully, by the soundtrack, which itself goes off in a number of directions: strange sounds, some recognizable, others not. Some music. No voices, no silence. This is intentional. The film is a compendium, as indicated in the title -- a catalog of visible possible experiences, some at normal time, some speeded up or slowed down, some continuous, others broken up. Why? Tough question. Why not? Why not experiment with different modes of visible motion? (And, I might add, totally manufactured bits of motion elucidated by the light of the projector.) For instance, when the nude woman with the towel walks across the screen, the image broken up with flashes, close-ups, erratic zooms, etc. -- to express the soundtrack (which was in place before the animation), and partly to express those unspoken "meanings" I mentioned above. "Images in THE VISIBLE COMPENDIUM are just as stunningly beautiful as ever." -- Gunvor Nelson "[His] Compendium is a perfect counter part, it seems to me, to the placement of Sophia's length and breadth, in so much as this new work presents dreams of the chores and diversions of the human world -- lacerated by two meditations on War: the 1st, an almost endless rain of missiles on an ancient chariot, the 2nd, [his] wondrous clown dancing on battleship cannons -- Bravo! Nothing could be clearer on the subject (especially welcome at this time); and in-between (as suggested slightly before and slightly after) a feelsome balance spectrum of dreamed dailiness finally exposed as -- if one can but see it as [he has]--the greatest show on Earth." -- Stan Brakhage
Rental: $45.00
16mm Rental: $45.00
Speaking Directly
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Political / Social Activism
An essay film making for a kind of State of the Nation address, from the perspective of someone other than the President of the United States. This film addresses both the political and cultural situation of the US at the height of the Viet Nam war, Watergate and its aftermath, and likewise addresses the personal life, in this context, of the filmmaker. "I can think of no other film like it. As a radical critique of American in the early 70's it is as essential a document, in a way, as the collectively made Winter Soldier... although the experiences it bears witness to are distinctly different (Jost was imprisoned in Federal custody from March 1965 through June 1967 for draft resistance.)" -- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Comment "Far and away the most inspired feature by the tenacious US independent Jon Jost, Speaking Directly is a reflexive film about Jost's attempt to make a reflexive film during the Vietnam War. Despite its importance, the movie has surfaced here only rarely during the decade since it was made." -- Jim Hoberman, Village Voice "In the history of the American avant-garde, Speaking Directly stands as a remarkable achievement: between the currents of pure cinema and "committed" documentary/fiction, it asserts a deliberate primitivism, a return to the ideological roots of American radicalism. As such, it also bears comparison with Godard's Le Gai Savoir, another discourse on method which refuses to take for granted what we think we know." Ian Christie, Sight and Sound
Rental: $250.00
16mm Rental: $250.00
Angel City
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Comedy, Films about Film, Media
A mixed detective fiction and essay about Los Angeles, Hollywood and the film industry, Angel City is a comedy with serious intentions. "Jost's outsider is Frank Goya, a guy with a red shirt, a far-fucking-out-in-the-morning-man delivery, and a fist full of Polaroid snapshots. Ever-cool Goya peers into the camera, announces that he's a motel-haunting divorce-dick and from then on Angel City is kabuki Raymond Chandler. Hired by the chairman of the world's largest multi-national conglomerate to investigate the death of his wife (a former Plaything centerfold who only "came after you hit her") Goya drives around LA, interviews a bartender, is seduced by the chairman's mistress, solves the case, and gets beat up for his bother." -- Hoberman, Village Voice "Rarely has the city been used to such effect as in Angel City, a 1976 film made by the 34 year old experimental filmmaker Jon Jost. Jost woks light-years away from the movie mainstream but he clearly knows the Hollywood standards which he mocks so mercilessly in this brightly funny and extremely inventive film made for a phenomenal $6,000." -- Martha DuBose, Sydney Morning Herald "A really joyous endeavor, a blithe attempt to trash on some of our most revered institutions. As such it combines the best and sometimes the worst of Godardian political analysis, bourgeois detective stories, Sixties mind-funk, and an homage to Hollywood. It's weird, smart-ass, and totally irreverent. It's also one of the best $6,000 investments I can possibly think of, an is proof positive that some of our most exciting cinema is being put together by the people in the streets, not in the Bel Air mansions where the Hollywood honchos live. Thank God for Jon Jost and his ilk, because they're keeping the art of cinema alive and well." -- Philadelphia Drummer
Rental: $200.00
16mm Rental: $200.00
Stagefright
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Films about Film, Media, Literature & Theater
An essay-film on language and theater, on human communication -- intellectual in content, but purely poetic in terms of form: image, sound, language, cinema. STAGEFRIGHT, with the exception of one shot, was all filmed in a small puppet theater space, actors against black. "The key questions (of alternative cinema) were posed by Jon Jost's superb STAGEFRIGHT -- a dramatic meditation on cinema, theater, performance and politics which was too complex and too rich for one screening to be satisfactory. The ending gave the most devastating example I have ever seen to cinema's power to jolt and audience out of its complacency. Extraordinary!" -- Meaghan Morris, Sydney Financial Times "... One of the most powerful and shocking eruptions of violence I've ever seen in a film. Like the killed rabbit in LAST CHANTS, it both gratifies our desires for meaning and action and shows the resultant blood on one's hands in the process. As long as Jost goes on making more films just as truthful, I don't expect him to win any popularity contests." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Comment Festivals: London, Sydney, Melbourne
Rental: $200.00
16mm Rental: $200.00
Slow Moves
Genre: Narrative
SLOW MOVES is a bluesy lyrical romance of two ugly-ducklings who meet on the Golden Gate Bridge and after a brief and awkward courtship, live together with the usual problems of money and work, take flight to an illusory freedom on the road, and dances inexorably to a drab doom. At once funny, grubby, beautiful, lyrical, tragic and sad. "... it is quite serious about demonstrating how the simplest of plots can be visually manipulated into a vehicle of tension and suspense. Technique is layered upon technique, all the while pushing the story forward to its shabby and oddly affecting little conclusion. SLOW MOVES deserves all the exposure it can get." -- John J. O'Conner, New York Times "Fascinating, oddly gripping and often visually stunning. It's not unlike a Peter Greenaway mystery translated to the dry dusty heartlands of Malick's Badlands, although here the emphasis is on spiritual paralysis rather than Greenaway's elegant intellectual conceits. Written backwards from its explosive end, the real Slow Moves doesn't actually start until you're leaving the cinema." -- John Gill, Time Out, London "Jost has a keen camera eye and a marvelously prickly feel for relationships poised between the plain spun and the psychotic. This bumpy California love story between two emotional down-and-outs is teasingly scripted, tightly acted by Marshall Gaddis and Roxanne Rogers and is probably the best value-for-dollar film in London." -- Guardian
Rental: $200.00
16mm Rental: $200.00
Bell Diamond
Genre: Narrative
Keywords: Political / Social Activism
Telling story of a Vietnam vet in Butte Montana whose wife leaves him after seven years when she feels there is no longer communication between them, and more painfully and pointedly, because she is unable to have a child owing to his sterility from exposure to Agent Orange. Told in a gentle style, richly emotional, made with non-professionals drawn from the community of Butte. "... with a story developed by the filmmaker and cast and completely improvised, the film deals with characters who are neither articulate nor particularly attractive, but pays them the kind of respect and attention that they would never receive from other quarters. Visually Jost's most impressive work to date. The impact of the film's original form of realism arrives only gradually, but once it registers, it becomes indelible." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader "Among the ten best of the year. Formally exquisite and politically pointed study of an alienated Vietnam vet against the background of a bankrupted mining town." -- Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune "Jost discerns emotions that conventional film practice misses. Using nonpro actors he proves his integrity almost too well, surround this desert of inarticulate, tight faces with some of the finest pictorial representations of the working-class West imaginable -- cloud filled skies, cyclone fences, desolate factories, pipelines, old tanks. A packing up scene between Jeff and Cathy and a confrontation with a veteran's counselor are sharp on attitude and language. All this through the intrepid pursuit of a different world and an alternate point of view." -- Armond White, Film Comment "Jost's method of narrating his tale will not be to every taste, for, though it's visually impressive, not one frame could be confused with commercial cinema. Using real time, Jost links Jeff's story to that of American labor history (in a brilliant sequence), ends with delightful ambiguity, and generally adopts an edgy, improvisatory style that reminds you of toned-down Cassavetes. This slow, quiet, intense film held me in its sway -- it has the power of reality." -- John Powers, LA WEEKLY
Rental: $200.00
16mm Rental: $200.00
Plain Talk and Common Sense (uncommon senses)
PLAIN TALK is a complex essay film on the State of the Nation, made for Britain's Channel Four in the year 1986-87. The work involved extensive travel around the United States, and poses an examination of just what America is, or what do we mean when we speak of it. Done in a series of radically different sections which collide with each other in a manner intended to provoke thinking, PLAIN TALK, which was made by an Americans, and intended for American viewers, was indeed broadcast in Britain, but somewhat predictably, not in the USA. Selection for the Whitney Biennale, 1987; shown at Berlin, London, Yamagata, and many other festivals. "No filmmaker could be more in the American grain that Jost, and Uncommon Senses proves to be a stunning experience, a totally original and challenging essay on America." -- Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times "Plain Talk and Common Sense is Jost's most successful film yet - a movie of expansive negativity, that putting patriotism under erasure, proposes to represent American and then revels in its inability to do so." -- J Hoberman, Village Voice "Funny, sinister and engrossingly watchable, it's a surprising and accessible success for a director notorious for his low-budget minimalism. And despite his complaint that the words have been hijacked by the loony right, it could only have been made by a patriotic American." -- John Gill, Time Out, London
Rental: $250.00
16mm Rental: $250.00
Rembrandt Laughing
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Comedy
A quiet, very San Francisco comedy of life among a small group of friends. Rembrandt Laughing was improvised over the period of about a month by Jost and his friends, mostly acting non-professionals. Berlin Festival, 1989, Toronto Festival 89. Broadcast WNET Independent Focus "A masterful elliptical account of a little over a year in the lives of a few friends in San Francisco... with a warmth, philosophical depth and overall sense of relaxation new to Jost's work. One of the ten best films of 1989." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader "Rembrandt Laughing ... a joy, a gem, a tissue paper tracing of epiphanies." -- Amy Taubin, Village Voice
Rental: $250.00
16mm Rental: $250.00
Hampton
Genre: Documentary
Keywords: Landscape & Architecture, Personal / Diary / Journal
Hampton came from North to Philadelphia as a young man of 19. He worked and became an accomplished plumber. He raised a family. His children have grown up and his wife has died. He lives on Gideon Street in the sKid-row section of Philadelphia. The world is changing in this area in its own relentless, mindless way. The neighborhood had never been 'up', but in the last 20 years, it has gone from better to worse. It now makes way for a highway exit ramp. Hampton, for his part, is a straight and honest man. He harbors no bitterness for the way things have gone. He is a man of dignity, not of pride--he talks more about the world than about himself. He is graceful in a graceless world. --P. J./A. D.
Rental: $35.00
16mm Rental: $35.00
Krypton Is Doomed
Genre: Experimental
KRYPTON IS DOOMED Ken Jacobs Computer assistance, Nisi Jacobs. 2005, 34 min, color, sound; Original radio broadcast of Superman drama, 1940. NOTE: This work should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders. In his 5th floor walk-up on NY's pre-fashionable Lower East Side, Jack Smith was determined to complete the beautification of his kitchen cabinet. AIDS was pressing. His friends pitched in, accepting slave status. Jack demanded this and Jack demanded that but because he wanted it perfect (as he had wanted his films to be perfect), and because perfection proved elusive, the remodeling finally had to be abandoned. Each friend going her or his own sad way. We are living under the imminent threat of GODS. The Republican Party ploy of allying with the religious right for votes proved shortsighted (grasping individuals tend to be shortsighted) and our religious crazies are now frustrated, concerned they might be cheated of prophetic fulfillment. You've got to hand it to those who resist, for the sake of the grass and the animals and the children, and for the preservation of the occasional work of art among the Faberge egg; who knows but that they will succeed against all odds and swerve their respective societies in time away from sure doom. We like to think so and it's easy to, after a lot of movies and the fact that all the living are beneficiaries of the ones who made it through, all those Papas and especially Mamas that did succeed in sending forward their young. In the late 1930's two Jewish teenagers came up with the story of a couple that sent their infant child on a lone trip of escape through space from an exploding planet. We all know the story: the boy would survive on Earth but would have to keep his identity secret. Were Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel dreaming out loud? Was Krypton actually the Old World heading into WW 2 and was the child -with his secret identity- escaping the fate of the Jews of Europe? (Put aside for a moment your stress regarding Israel, intended as a refuge from genocide.) The Jews then, all of us now. Jack's friends failed to convince him to make a will. "Why bother?", he asked. "To protect your work in the future." "The future?", Jack replied, "The future will be worse."
DVD NTSC Rental: $70.00
Make Light On Film (with Pulfrich filters)
Genre: Experimental
...with use of a single dark (Pulfrich) filter. Berlin documented by the US after WW2, recorded again in 1986 by Flo and Ken feigning innocence when passing by elevated train between Capitalist showroom and Communist austerity. One roll of film is blank, evidence of East Berlin guards commanding the film be unloaded onto the station platform. KJ narrates.
DVD NTSC Rental: $65.00
Chronometer
Genre: Experimental
(first Nervous Magic Lantern piece .. single light-source, no film-drive) Music: "Chronometer" by Harrison Birtwistle, stereo-2 track greatly enhanced by playing as 5.1 "virtual surround." Keep level comfortably loud. *Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy. "The movie projector's a kind of clock", Ed Bachelor said. Somewhere inside the machine beats a Piranesi space, shaped and given dimension by a string of exposures of a seated woman undulating gravity-free. Who is the alluring lady of this filmstrip tease? I call her Dinah, because the name contains a D, an N, and an A. Dinah Ovum! She is waiting, she is confident, she is radioing for help. Her message: "Let us gestate, love."
DVD NTSC Rental: $65.00
Insistent Clamor
Genre: Experimental
Brief sound at end, please keep volume high. *Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy. A mysterious terrain goes through changes, suggesting but never quite stating a submerged presence. Music (by Margaret Shelton Meier) briefly heard at very end.
DVD NTSC Rental: $250.00
Let There Be Whistleblowers
Genre: Experimental
Music: Steve Reich DRUMMING part 1 Stereo (2 channel) best heard as 5.1 "virtual surround." *Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy. A train passes through a tunnel and hurtles on to a station. Time and space is toyed with, moments enter an impossible state of on-going movement while going nowhere. The actual tunnel experience sets off a metaphysical one. Composed to the first part of Drumming by Steve Reich. Assisted by Nisi Jacobs
DVD NTSC Rental: $90.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $150.00
Nervous Magic Lantern: Spiral Nebula
Genre: Experimental
Music: Rick Reed. Audio to be played comfortably loud and (though it's 2-track stereo) as 5.1 "virtual surround." *Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy. What is this thing churning and flinging off and consuming universes? The screen can't contain it, it wants to be in 3-D. This music, one part machine noise mixed with a lot of open space, holds us at a safe distance but will we (the viewing audience looking through the movie) be able to get back? We need familiar streets to hold onto, the quotidian. This thing, after all, could be the god Shiva. Attempting to grapple with it, even Kong would amount to no more than a momentary flash of colored light.
Mountaineer Spinning
Genre: Experimental
Music: Rick Reed. Stereo track best heard comfortably loud (gets quiet towards end) and as "virtual surround" 5.1. *Throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy. We seem to be seeing a rustic landscape, perhaps. Everything here seems to be a perhaps, including allusions to Beauty and the Beat and if we are or are not seeing in 3-D. As in real life, everything is in constant motion (although unlike life not necessarily going anywhere, more like suspended in motion),achieving or foregoing distinction as specific entities. Rick Reed dpes the Mendelsohn and here too lines are blurred between life-recording and atral electrons at play.
Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy: Bye, Molly
Genre: Experimental
*throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy. Hardy walked a thin line between playing heavy and playing fatty. Laurel adopted a retarded squint, with suggestions of idiot savant. Their characters were at sea, clinging to each other as industrial capitalism was breaking up and sinking. Beautiful losers, they kept it funny, buoying our spirits. Laurel and Hardy... forever. Assisted by Erik Nelson.
DVD NTSC Rental: $150.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $300.00
Star Spangled To Death
Genre: Experimental
Made 1956-60/2003-04 Is an epic film shot for hundreds of dollars! Combining found-films with my own more-or-less staged filming, it pictures a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. Racial and religious insanity, monopolization of weath and the purposeful dumbing down of citizens and addiction to war oppose a beat playfulness. A handful of artists costumed and performing unconvincingly appeal to audience imagination and understanding to complete the picture. Jack Smith's pre-Flaming Creatures performance as The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living (the movie has raggedly comsmic pretensions), celebrating Suffering (rattled and impoverished artist Jerry Sims) at teh crux of sentient existence, is truly a visitation of the divine. Assisted by Nisi Jacobs
Pushcarts Of Eternity Street
Genre: Experimental
Hand-operated and horse-drawn street-carts fill the streets of New York's Lower East Side. The year is 1903. Peddlers distribute the produce of field and factory passersby on the move. Cops, all sticks and swagger, uphold the law. Tiny movements evolve in place, caught between 2 and 3-D
Rental: $50.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $50.00
Capitalism: Slavery
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: political_social activism
An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief.
DVD NTSC Rental: $75.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $300.00
Razzle Dazzle the Lost World
WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders. RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World is an early Edison shot cut off at its head and tail and along its four sides from the continuity of events like any camera-shot from a bygone day; no, like any camera-shot, immediately producing an abstraction. This abstraction pictures a great spinning maypole-like device lined with young passengers dipping and lifting as it circles through space. They look out - from their place at the start of the 20th century - with a remarkable variety of expressions, giddy to pensive. We observe them but of course they see nothing of this, our America, hopelessly gone to rot, its mountaintops leveled for extraction of coal, rivers and air polluted, crisscrossed everywhere with property-lines; they don't see its prisons or the corporations leaning in from their off-shore tax-bases to see what more they can take. Early stereopticon images also appear, digitally manipulated to reveal their depths. A digital shadow falls upon the scene and yet, grim as things get, as our crimes and failures then and now commingle, the movie proceeds with a cubist/abstract-expressionist zest. Impulse is like that, it’s fun to make movies. -K.J.
DVD NTSC Rental: $186.00
DigiBeta NTSC Rental: $279.00 DVCAM
Silvercup
Genre: Experimental
A tender ode to the industrial neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens, strung together with Manhattan across the East River by the Queensborough Bridge and the elevated subway line. "The trains and webs of steel enslave and at the same time bring us together. The past haunts me, and at the same time its memories are precious. Much of the film was edited in the camera. About half of what I shot was discarded, and in the editing room I very slowly removed and arranged what remained after several screenings." -Jim Jennings
Rental: $30.00
16mm Rental: $30.00
Candy Colors: An Interview with Stan Brakhage
Genre: Documentary
Keywords: Art & Artists, Biography, Films about Film, Media, Personal / Diary / Journal
An interview with Stan Brakhage.
DVD NTSC Sale: $500.00
Blue Skies Beyond the Looking Glass
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Keywords: Films about Film, Media
Ever dance the mambo with silent film stars and Jordan animation? That's what you get with "Blue Skies Beyond the Looking Glass". It's raucus. It's lush. It's delirium. Here are just a few stars in the film: Eric Von Stroheim Greta Garbo Gary Cooper Buster Keaton Lilian Gish Mary Pickford Lionel Barrymore Lon Chaney Joan Crawford Marie Dressler Charlie Chaplin What more can I say?
DVD NTSC Sale: $300.00
Postcard From San Miguel
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: Environment & Nature, Landscape & Architecture
The mystery and the beauty of Mexico's high desert colonial town, its churches, its abandoned silver mine, its statues and colored streets. Lines from Garcia Lorca.
DVD NTSC Sale: $200.00
Enid's Idyll
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Animation. Jordan has used 46 engraved Dore illustration to IDYLLS OF THE KING as settings for his extravigantly romantic saga. As Enid, the protagonist, is seen in a vast array of scenes from deep forests to castle keeps, her champion is sometimes with her, sometimes away fighting archetypal foes. She dies, and through the magic of Gustav Mahler's resurrection symphony, lives again. Both the black and white and the color-tint versions are equally affecting. Main themes love, death, and resurrection. Please note that there is a separate black and white version of this film.
DVD NTSC Sale: $400.00
The Miracle of Don Cristobal
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Keywords: Art & Artists
For a long time I have wanted to construct a melodrama (animated) from the funky engravings of the 19th century which illustrated "young peoples" adventure stories. Eventually, through a great deal of selection, such a film fell into place. I have attempted to present the high emotional overlay of very mundane events in this "alchemical melodrama." To that end, Puccini combines with blatent sound of police sirens and old door buzzers on the sound track, while "real" and nightmare images compete for screen time.
DVD NTSC Sale: $200.00
The Forty and One Nights
Genre: Animation, Experimental
Painter and Collage artist, Jess (Collins) performs 41 (now lost) collages to (his) selected sound bits in the manner of a turn-of-the-century nickelodeon.
DVD NTSC Sale: $250.00
Walkway
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: enviorment & nature
A serpentine path through the woods turns on itself threateningly. Two perspectives operate here, enmeshed with each other, making for a vibrant film straddling both 2-D and 3-D. Available on DVCAM.
Rental: $35.00
MiniDV NTSC Rental: $35.00
Capitalism: Child Labor
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: children / youth, history, political / social activism
A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great sky-lit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggest the machine din. Your heart bleeding for the kids? The children will surely be rescued and by their bosses! 'Boys', they will say, 'Have we got a war for you.'
DVD NTSC Rental: $100.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $300.00
Jonas Mekas In Kodachrome Days
Genre: Experimental
"Jonas remains most famous for not acting famous. Here he can be seen away from film audiences, dawdling in the cosmos while history happens elsewhere (unless we are mistaken, and the most meaningful and revealing moments are the moments at ease)."
Rental: $75.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $75.00
Hot Dogs at the Met
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: children / youth, family
Stereo photos from the 1970s are digitally animated with 3-D effects to be seen without spectacles. The computer, considering location, emulates a painting technique. Featuring Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, Flo Jacobs, and Azazel.
Rental: $75.00
Pushcarts Leave Eternity Street, The
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: history
Rental: $75.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $75.00
Day Was a Scorcher, The
Genre: Documentary, Experimental
a 3-d VACATION ALBUM, DAY WAS A SCORCHER, THE pictures what Jacobs describes as "movie-star Flo, Nisi the thoughtful young girl, and Aza old enough to trudge with us, but still expecting to be pushed around on wheels," frolicking in a sun-drenched Rome in the 1970s. Explains Jacobs, "It's a perfect day when nothing happens."
Rental: $75.00
DVD NTSC Rental: $75.00
Amorous Interludes
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: films_about_film, found_footage, history, technology
Includes: "Titles", "His Favorite Wife", "Hanky Panky", "We Are Charming", "Alone at Last", "Love Story", "The Discovery", "Nymph". "His Favorite Wife Improved And Other Amorous Interludes, the installed work of Ken Jacobs, is a 'series' composed of short video and stereographic animations. The aspects of the Hollywood melodrama mise-en-scène are in the introductory, His Favorite Wife destructed by the natural element of the February New York storm. A sequence of animated stereographs follows and Jacobs adds to their usage: 'I have (and deeply enjoy) a collection of early stereographs, most from the 1800's, bought years before they became pricy as collectors' items. It fascinates me that two images can produce so much richness of detail when forms undulate and skip through deep space.'" -- Martin Mazanec
DVD NTSC Rental: $DVD NTSC
Seeking the Monkey King
Genre: Experimental
The film could have well been called KICKING AND SCREAMING but that only describes me in the process of making it, questioning its taste. Once the message kicked in it overrode all objection. The piece demanded J.G. Thirlwell's music, normally way too overtly expressive for me as most of my stuff comes out of painting and is also to be absorbed in silence. Who will even notice visual innovation now, or what's happening with time? Determining a place between two and three dimensions, pushing time to take on substance, is what I do. SEEKING THE MONKEY KING is a reversion to my mid-twenties and that sense of horror that drove the making of STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH. --Ken Jacobs
DVD NTSC Rental: $150.00, Blu-Ray $300.00
The Surging Sea of Humanity
Genre: Experimental
NOTE: THIS TITLE IS INCLUDED IN THE KEN JACOBS BLU-RAY COMPILATION. WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders. Ken Jacobs writes: "Stereograph of the crowd at the opening of the US Centennial Exposition of 1893. It turns into a movie. Into an enormous rugged and craggy 3-D landscape.... before the people return and the scene is righted again. Many laws were broken in the making of this movie, beginning with laws of gravity."
DVD NTSC Rental: $125.00 Blu-Ray
DVD NTSC Sale: $350.00 Blu-Ray
Another Occupation
Genre: Experimental
Keywords: ethnic_multicultural, films about film, found footage, political/social activism
A stroboscopic train ride along a jungle stream. Asian military men appear with their pith-helmets, keeping the ferns, trees, monkeys, natives in line. The master of the stroboscopic depth illusion changes territory, but applies his familiar strategy: a ghostly, flicking film takes us into a deep and ominous Asian past. Jacobs: 'Bangkok, is it? Spelled in an unfamiliar way.' A black-and-white train ride along a jungle stream shows us military men in their pith helmets, keeping the ferns, trees, monkeys and natives in line. Sparse intertitles trigger further thoughts about the war economy.
DVD NTSC Rental: $75.00, Blu-Ray 125.00
Return to the Scene of the Crime
Genre: Experimental
Warning: throbbing light not for persons afflicted with epilepsy. Ken Jacobs writes, "In 1969, Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son seized me, with a new film (as I said then) almost incidentally a result. Placing the 1905 Mutoscope original in the computer allows for an unbounded freedom of study and playfulness. Now I seize the film, introducing a quasi-3D and strange time-dimension, the Eternalism. Far more is revealed (the stealing of the pig!) and, joined to sound, the old movie even tells a new story. This is how the film begins, duck-on-a-leash to Little Bo Peep to the revealing of the too-busy full stage-set. Each gets their close-up and the many choreographed incidents happening together, and impossible to sort out, are given time out of the welter of events to shine. While it seems a mistake to break apart the wonderful muchness of the original, it's fun to see one action centered while others we've become familiar with repeat around it in the grand clockwork mechanism that is cinema. Actions made familiar take off into abstract permutations, veering in and out of recognition. God appears, centering the commotion, but splits when the crowd deserts his act to go after Tom."
DVD NTSC Rental: $250.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $600.00
ANAGLYPH TOM (Tom With Puffy Cheeks)
Genre: Experimental
WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders. The real subject of ANAGLYPH TOM (Tom With Puffy Cheeks) is depth-perception itself. Our beloved performers from the 1905 Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son again encapsulate human absurdity for our amusement but this time in illusionary (and berserk) 3-D. Clowns and harlots and slumming gentry freely step forward and back through the screen surface, often misplacing heads and limbs as they change location. They step from—and back into—the screen surface. This is cosmic play with all strings pulled.
DVD NTSC Rental: $250.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $600.00
Ken Jacobs DVD Box Set: RAZZLE DAZZLE: THE LOST WORLD, RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, and ANAGLYPH TOM (TOM WITH PUFFY CHEEKS)
Genre: Experimental
This DVD box set contains these Ken Jacobs titles: RAZZLE DAZZLE: THE LOST WORLD, RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, and ANAGLYPH TOM (TOM WITH PUFFY CHEEKS). Search the individual titles in our database for more information.
DVD NTSC Sale: $75.00 individual, $500.00 institutional
The Scenic Route
Genre: Experimental
WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders. "One of the nice things about movies was you could keep them at a distance. Movies knew their place. We were dimensional, they were flat, so it was easy to know which was which. But THE SCENIC ROUTE seemingly spills from the screen, threatening demarcation lines everywhere."
DVD NTSC Rental: $100.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $300.00
Bye Bye Bob
Genre: Experimental
Made in memory of filmmaker Bob Fleischner
16mm Rental: $30.00
Close Quarters
Genre: Experimental
"CLOSE QUARTERS etches scaly textures and carves wedges of light into a silent, velvety shadowbox where a cat stands watch over a sleeping mistress. Jennings teasingly conflates the cat's paw with the woman's bare feet protruding from the covers." -- Ioannis Mookas
16mm Rental: $30.00
Day Dream
Genre: Experimental
"In a way, making street films is daydreaming with a camera. It's capturing a fantasy you're having when you're wide awake and life is going on around you. There is, of course, a similarity between daydreaming and making any kind of art because they both spring from that narrow groove between the subconscious and the conscious. That's when self-expression and technical problem-solving both flow together in an almost mystical way. For me this film represents that mental state. I shot it in late July 2001 but put it away for some forgotten reason. It's very much about everyday life--a nondescript New York neighborhood on a calm Sunday afternoon, garbage cans piled high, feet reading here and there . . . but it's also about the magic I can see in that world when I free my subconscious. I made this film so effortlessly (I just cut out one brief shot) because I was so fully in that mindset, which, I think, shows in the nature of the images."
16mm Rental: $25.00
Elements
Genre: Experimental
Formal abstractions of the Manhattan cityscape are viewed through the physical and emotional blurrings of a rainstorm.
16mm Rental: $25.00
Made in Chinatown
Genre: Experimental
MADE IN CHINATOWN was made in Chinatown. -- Jim Jennings
16mm Rental: $25.00
Prague Winter
Genre: Experimental
Jennings is best known for his portraits of New York City street life, and with good reason; his patient eye and deft camera-stylo approach represent one of the key contributions to the "city symphony" genre since its heyday in the 1940s. Jennings, along with Ernie Gehr and Ken Jacobs, is one of the preeminent urban film-poets. He does regularly stray beyond this mien, sometimes exploring the domestic interior (as in his 2004 masterpiece Close Quarters) but also packing up the Bolex and filming urban doings abroad. These films are inevitably compared to the Manhattan works, and it's often difficult not to register them as films of overwhelming discovery or even dislocation. Jennings' intimate knowledge of New York is precisely what allows him to continually renew his vision, staking out unconventional ways of looking at the deeply familiar. On the other hand, his Venice film, 2001's Impossible Love, struck me as customarily lovely but a tad awkward, as though Jennings is using the film to organize unexpected sensations but without the templates that can provide order and shape to such immediacy. (Think of it as jazz improv, with vs. without a chart.) So part of what's so surprising about Prague Winter is that it feels so lived in, so thoroughly grounded. It's not so much that Jennings makes Prague look like Manhattan (although there are commonalities in terms of architecture and the gaps of light between it). But the film restricts itself to sights on and around the tram, which provides an uncharacteristic linearity to the film. What's more, Jennings' status as a guest observer seems to bring out a humanism in his work, as he fixates on the elderly and, implicitly, the history to which they've been subjected. The post-Communist malaise hardens into grim acceptance, and this, along with the physical traces of Prague's history as manifested in the built environment, is what fascinates Jennings here. His camera is tender and unobtrusive, as you would expect from a filmmaker of his sensitivity. But I did come away feeling like this was the first of Jennings' films that kind of explained itself very clearly on first pass, rather like an impressionistic documentary.
16mm Rental: $30.00
Public Domain
Genre: Experimental
PUBLIC DOMAIN was shot over Manhattan in my subway travels from job to job.
16mm Rental: $30.00
Train of Thought
Genre: Experimental
"TRAIN OF THOUGHT flips subway rushes in various directions and quick cuts to provide a whole line study of broadway (Queens) boogie-woogie that only occasionally syncopates into rhythms, while giving the wet apparitions of the metro--graffiti, rust, people's crowded, fleeting faces . . ." -- David Phelps
16mm Rental: $30.00
Alfredo
Genre: Experimental
ALFREDO is a 16mm film-to-video portrait of the artist Alfredo Martinez. The film watches Alfredo shooting guns, hanging out, playing video games, and working on guns. Sound was recorded during the filming, but it became evident during editing that the film was more evocative as a silent movie. "Alfredo . . . grew out of a firing range installation created by the conceptual artist Alfredo Martinez for the group show, "Quiet," in Tribeca. Ostensibly a silent portrait of the artist, the film's grainy, high-contrast montage of Martinez loading, shooting, stripping, and reassembling a frightening assortment of exotic, high-powered rifles and automatic pistols is implicitly mirrored by Jarmusch putting his own 16mm equipment through its paces. Images are over cranked, under cranked and then optically printed as freeze frames. By its climax, the film pointedly suggests a direct parallel between the violence and obsession of Martinez's onscreen fetishism and the invasive, voyeuristic assault of the cinema camera." -- Bill Raden
DVD NTSC Rental: $50.00
BetaSP NTSC Rental: $50.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $75.00
BetaSP NTSC Sale: $75.00
documents, memory, for my friend Bill Rice
Genre: Documentary, Experimental
Soon after Bill's death in 2006. Bill Rice was New York York painter, underground film and theater actor, and writer. My video-film is portrait of Bill. I limited myself.to whatever material I personally had. I never explain who Bill is or what he did. _documents, memory . . . is an assemblage of super8 film, video of a reading of Beckett's _Endgame_ in Bill's East Third Street garden, audio cassettes of Bill speaking, photographs, and a few pieces of Bill's artwork, becoming this portrait of Bill Rice and a brief meditation on living, "_documents, memory . . . _ is an all-too-brief document of departed East Village icon, painter and actor Bill Rice." -- Andrew Lampert, archivist Anthology Film Archives. Notes: As an actor Bill Rice appeared in films by: Gary Goldberg, Beth and Scott B., Richard Kern, Jacob Burckhardt, Robert Frank, Jim Jarmusch, Andrew Horn, Amos Poe, Harris Smith, and plays by Jim Neu. Also appearing: Gary Indiana, Bette Bourne, Michael Cobarubias, and Jim Neu in some photographs.
DVD NTSC Rental: $50.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $75.00
Sometimes City
Genre: Documentary, Experimental
SOMETIMES CITY is a gritty and personal documentary portrait of Cleveland, Ohio. SOMETIMES CITY suggests the city's people, landscape, and decline. SOMETIMES CITY was conceived to include documentary, home movie, personal, and possibly fictional elements. SOMETIMES CITY originated from two different video installations with the intention that it would evolve into a film. As filmmaking progressed it became important to let different people speak, people that we do not usually hear from. I filmed a great deal and found what I would. The movie juxtaposes many scenes of residents and some performed music becoming kind of a "spare-parts scavenging of stories". The title comes from a poem by d.a. levy and part of one of his poems is read in the movie. SOMETIMES CITY was photographed during 2008 and 2009 using various consumer video formats, 16mm and Super 8 film. -- Tom Jarmusch
DVD NTSC Rental: $100.00
DVD NTSC Sale: $150.00
