Experimental (shorts)

Stan Brakhage films the birth of his first child, Myrrena.

Two schoolgirls act as society ladies, evoking an atmosphere of the roaring twenties. A transvestite tries to read while spaghetti descends on his head.

An experimental short in which San Francisco is viewed from an elevator moving up and down 24 floors.

At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned.

Footage from The Entity (1982) is edited into an abstract nightmare.

In 'What Can I Do With a Male Nude?', a male model's poses are accompanied by a photographer's narration exploring censorship, self expression and sexual desire.

A poetic revision of Greek architecture focused on the temple in Bassae, which was peculiar given its isolated location unlike other major Greek temples.

An absolute dada movie. Somebody gets killed, his coffin gets out of control and after a chase it stops. The person gets out of it and let everybody who followed the coffin dissapear.

Black and white rectangular images fade in and out of the screen. Their movement make them sometimes look like they're panning from side to side. Their movement also make the black and white individually change from foreground to background and visa versa.

An experimental film from artist Harry Smith and part of his Number series of various animated scenes.

With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into chains of cells then more complex images from tribal cultures and contemporary modernist concepts. The images react, interpenetrate, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis (or redemption?) is achieved.

Imagine a rusted, medieval film can having survived centuries, a long lost D. W. Griffith / Georges Méliès co-production, a film left to us from the Bronze Age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken, when they poured down like silver, not to be fixed and washed, but free to form and coagulate into unstable, temporary molds, mere holding patterns of faces, places, and things, shape-shifting according to whim.

The surreal story of a bird and its cage with both their conflict and union.

Pairs moody landscape imagery culled from a video game with John Huston's reading of James Joyce's 'The Dead'.

The film's soundtrack is an original musical composition produced with synthetic sound - through photographing unusual geometric shapes and running them through an optical sound head. The images are an artistic rendering of this soundtrack.

The solarized patterns in Chas Wyndham's Airborn (1968) are periodically resolved as rock 'n' roiling orange-and-purple mushroom clouds. - J. Hoberman

One of the many short works by pioneering digital and computer artist Lillian F. Schwartz. Extended editing techniques based on Land's experiments affect the viewer's sensory perceptions, including intense usage of strobe light-esque effects.

Mussorgsky's composition is the soundtrack for this pin-screen animated take on night and wild things. A scarecrow blows down, clouds move by quickly. Beings take shape; a town appears, animals flee, and a horse gallops by. A child looks on. Monsters run and float by: the phantasmagoric is everywhere. A woman's figure tumbles through space. A clash ensues. The horse falls. Goblins take control. The night and its denizens are relentless. Forms appear and become grotesque. Will dawn and calm ever come?

Experimental animation by Nobuhiro Aihara.