Cinéma Absolu Avant-Garde 1920-1930

A silent film about a women who seduces a married man which in turn leads to deadly consequences.

A spiral design spins dizzily. It's replaced by a spinning disk. These two continue in perfect alternation until the end: a spiral design, a disk. Each disk is labelled and can be read as it rotates. The messages, in French, feature puns and whimsical rhymes and alliteration. The final message comments on the spiral motif itself.

A pulsing, kaleidoscope of images set to an energetic soundtrack. A young women swings in a garden; a woman's face smiles. The rest is spinning cylinders, pistons, gears and turbines, kitchen objects in concentric circles or rows - pots, pan lids, and funnels, cars passing overhead, a spinning carnival ride. Over and over, a heavy-set woman climbs stairs carrying a large bag on her shoulder. An Art Deco cartoon figure appears, dancing. This is a world in motion, dominated by mechanical and repetitive images, with a few moments of solitude in a garden.

A tilted figure, consisting largely of right angles at the beginning, grows by accretion, with the addition of short straight lines and curves which sprout from the existing design. The figure vanishes and the process begins again with a new pattern, each cycle lasting one or two seconds. The complete figures are drawn in a vaguely Art Deco style and could be said to resemble any number of things, an ear, a harp, panpipes, a grand piano with trombones, and so on, only highly stylized. The tone is playful and hypnotic.

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.

Rhythm 23 (Rhythmus 23, 1923) is an extension of the same film but with more angles and overlays added, and adding lines rather than adhering to the squares of the original. It looks so similar that the academic argument that both "21" and "23" were made in 1923 looks rather likely. Richter himself at some exhibitions showed these two together as a single film called Un film de Hans Richter. The hand-colored Rhythm 25 (Rhythmus 25, 1925) was the final "chapter," but it does not survive."

Entertaining Dadaist experimental short, similar to Man Ray's work, full of shifting geometric shapes, stock footage of seagulls, flying eyeballs, and glaring floating heads.

Inflation explores the subject of money through photographs and with with stop motion animation techniques, adding faces of people impoverished and enriched by the unpredictability of finance.

Hans Richter, noted for his abstract shorts, has everyday objects rebelling against their daily routine.

An abstract short film from Hans Richter in which a series of unrelated images are edited together.

A short film which consists of a collage of images at a Berlin street carnival.

In 1930 Moholy-Nagy designed one of the first electrically-powered kinetic sculptures. Later that year he created this short film of the shadow patterns created by his Light-Space Modulator as it executed a carefully choreographed cycle of movements.

A portrait of France's largest and most populous port cities, Marseille.

This movie shows us one day in Berlin, the rhythm of that time, starting at the earliest morning and ends in the deepest night.

A man travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention.

The life of a great city (Paris) from dawn until dusk, including the beautiful and the ragged, the rich and the poor, with little or no comment (intertitles) from the director, Cavalcanti (whose first film this was).

A long series of unrelated images, revolving, often distorted: lights, flowers, nails. A lightboard appears from time to time carrying the news of the day. Then, an eye. A woman in a car drives along country roads. Farm animals. She descends from the car, again and again. Images: dancing legs, seashore, swimming fish, geometric shapes, cut glass. A man removes his starched collar. It rotates. A girl has garishly painted eyes. No, she's only fooling. Those were her eyelids.

An experimental avant-garde film from director Henri Chomette in which the pure elements of form are emphasized.

Light plays over the surfaces of paper cut-outs, abstract shapes with curved lines. The movement of the light (which are small spots) speeds up, following the rhythms of the piano accompaniment. A small spot opens and closes; Shadows sometimes dominate. The lights, movement, and music take on a mechanical mood. Then, the opening images return.

A study on water, the reflections and motions of the liquid that accentuates its ethereality and metallic beauty.