Petals and Feathers

“Convalescing, when you don't have to participate in the world. Time to read, to dream, to look - the blue, the light of the television, the blue, the book, the patterns the light, the blue. Time to appreciate how much that really is.”

Faces pass by in quickly edited, split-screen recordings. A 'structuralist' film in which the film material itself plays an important role. Grain, scratches and flickering give the film texture. The music is by Steve Reich.

Experimental film by Motoharu Jonouchi comprised of both archival footage from the 1960s Japanese student riots and dramatised re-enactions. It was created as a tribute to Michiko Kamba, a student victim of the riots.

A group of leftist activists expose the exploitation of immigrant workers by a criminal network with connections to local government officials. The movie was produced by the group SLON (Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles, also the Russian word for elephant). SLON was a film collective whose objectives were to make films and to encourage industrial workers to create film collectives of their own. Its members included Valerie Mayoux, Jean-Claude Lerner, Alain Adair and John Tooker, and Chris Marker.

A thrillingly lo-fi salute to the old-school, hand-crafted special effects that were once a mainstay of pre-CGI science-fiction films.

An experimental film that lifts the veil on the world of African American drag racing.

Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.

A film by Philip Hoffman that chronicles the final days of his father.

This experimental short traces the lifespan of the graffiti and murals present at the occupation of NYC’s City Hall in June and July of 2020. The encampment formed to demand the abolishment of the NYPD and the reallocation of its resources to housing, education, and other social programs.

For us, a thought always presupposes a society, a culture and above all the consciousness of time. We are haunted by immortality, human notion par excellence. As if the world was here to fascinate us. And to disappoint us. The film travels around the bulb like the Earth around the Sun. Light makes the film visible. A fragile film, like our existence. In the orbit of the film tragedy and our reality, the image resists the cruelty of the experiment.

'The angle of the world allows us to see the real as an outer and inner presence at the same time, an opaque otherness, yet capable of becoming an intimate space. These incommensurable lengths and distances of an interior that opens up: The mysterious movement of the clouds, the cadence of the waves against the light, or the silent slippage of a barely identifiable human silhouette, everything seems transfigured, derealized and reinvented by light in a poetic world that evokes the paintings of Turner or Friedrich, the writings of Poe or Baudelaire.’ — Violeta Salvatierra

Two halves split by the perseverance of a scorpion. Come on, feet.