Short of Breath

Animal Charm: Golden Digest

January 1996 •English

Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature" and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.

Negativland: No Other Possibility

January 1989 •English

In an effort to cure her smoking habit a middle-aged woman discovers that she can communicate with her long lost son while watching a Halloween safety program on TV. After suffering a nervous breakdown, her husband, a used car salesman, is revitalized when he travels back in time to drive the first car he ever sold. Seventeen years later a powerful canned food manufacturer crashes the same car into a toaster truck while endorsing a brand of yams on live TV. At the funeral his clergyman experiences a crisis of faith when he and a lifelike Mexican continue their search for a married couple who have befriended an insect who enjoys drinking lime soda. They later meet a young man whose bizarre murder scheme involves four innocent members of an experimental rock band who have all given up smoking.

Between Science and Garbage

April 2004 •English

A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.

The Sacred Art of Tibet

June 1972 •English

An accurate depiction of the basic tenets of northern Mahayana Buddhism, cast into living or "experiential" form, consistent with powerful mantras heard on the soundtrack of the film. Tarthang Tulku, a Tibetan Lama, was the advisor.

Selbstportrait 1

January 2005 •English

You Will See Me

February 2021 •English

A five-channel video installation commissioned for the permanent exhibition space at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI). “The camera doesn’t just capture us, it frames who we are and how we’re seen. Since the camera became more accessible in the mid-20th century, artists and amateurs alike have turned the lens on themselves to create a stage both private and public. This tradition is continued, amplified and transformed through reality TV, the internet and social media, the latest forms to use straight-to-camera techniques to share our common humanity, project authenticity and illuminate how a sense of self can be constructed through the moving image.”

Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America

December 1991 •English

Baldwin’s “pseudo-pseudo-documentary” presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.

King of the Jews

March 2000 •English

King of the Jews is a film about anti-Semitism and transcendence. Utilizing Hollywood movies, 1950's educational films, personal home movies and religious films, the filmmaker depicts his childhood fear of Jesus Christ. These childhood recollections are a point of departure for larger issues such as the roots of Christian anti-Semitism.

good boy

December 2023 •English

The author's erotic imagination is mixed between desire and magazine clippings, and the trade of collage becomes a ship that travels from outer space to the city itself.

Collage

May 2021 •French

Considerations on collage as a cognitive act in artists’ cinema. A pedagogical film adrift: 35mm photographs and other materials collected over the last fifteen years by artist Stefano Miraglia meet a text written by Baptiste Jopeck and the voice of Margaux Guillemard.

Dance Fight Love Die: With Mikis On the Road

October 2017 •Greek

An intimate look into the life of composer Mikis Theodorakis from 1987 until 2017: comprising three decades, four continents, 100 locations and 600 hours of film material. The film interweaves personal moments with archive footage, documentary recordings and fictional pieces, all accompanied by Theodorakis’ music in jazz, classic, electro and rap versions.

Switzerlanders

May 2020 •German

A cinematic time capsule with over 1,400 hours of submitted material from all regions of Switzerland gives unknown insights about the life of Swiss people in the politically and socially turbulent summer of 2019.

8th October 2016

October 2016 •Hungarian

The title of the film is the date on which the editorial staff of Hungary’s largest opposition newspaper, Népszabadság, was fired. The filmmaker tore up copies of that day’s issue, layered them, and then turned them into an urgent collage expressing his yearning for the free expression of opposition viewpoints. The visible edges of the film emphasize the impossibility of presenting information in a complete context.

200,000 Phantoms

July 2007 •French

In 1914, the Czech architect Jan Letzel designed in the Japanese city of Hiroshima Center for the World Expo, which has turned into ruins after the atomic bombing in August 1945. “Atomic Dome” – all that remains of the destroyed palace of the exhibition – has become part of the Hiroshima memorial. In 2007, French sculptor, painter and film director Jean-Gabriel Périot assembled this cinematic collage from hundreds of multi-format, color and black and white photographs of different years’ of “Genbaku Dome”.

The Long Voyage of the Yellow Bus

January 2023 •Portuguese

For this behemoth, Bressane took his opera omnia and edited it in an order that first adheres to historical chronology but soon starts to move backwards and forward. The various pasts – the 60s, the 80s, the 2000s – comment on each other in a way that sheds light on Bressane’s themes and obsessions, which become increasingly apparent and finally, a whole idea of cinema reveals itself to the curious and patient viewer. Will Bressane, from now on, rework The Long Voyage of the Yellow Bus when he makes another film? Is this his latest beginning? Why not, for the eternally young master maverick seems to embark on a maiden voyage with each and every new film!

Koodal

January 1970 •

"Visionary post-war modernist Tyeb Mehta channels the nightmares of the nation in Koodal, at once the artist’s self-described “autobiography” and a profound meditation on collage, crowd control, cinematic subjectivity and the violence buried within every glorious act of foundation." -- Sarkari Shorts

Silent Witnesses

March 2023 •Spanish

Mudos testigos is a cinematographic collage made from all the surviving material of Colombian silent films, re-editing the images in such a way as to create a single imaginary film: the impossible love story of Efraín and Alicia that traces the convulsive first half of the twentieth century in Colombia. Compiled by the late Luis Ospina and finished posthumously by Jeronimo Atehortúa.

Remains

August 2014 •French

Something takes us underground, where gods and monsters are active, amid the ruins of a world they move around with their innumerable hands. Inspired by Fritz Lang and Richard Wagner, Remains is a daydream.

The Darkness of Day

November 2009 •English

The Darkness of Day is a haunting meditation on suicide. It is comprised entirely of found 16mm footage that had been discarded. The sadness, the isolation, and the desire to escape are recorded on film in various contexts. Voice-over readings from the journal kept by a brother of the filmmaker’s friend who committed suicide in 1990 intermix with a range of compelling stories, from the poignant double suicide of an elderly American couple to a Japanese teenager who jumped into a volcano, spawning over a thousand imitations. While this is a serious exploration of a cultural taboo, its lyrical qualities invite the viewer to approach the subject with understanding and compassion.

Fear Itself

October 2015 •English

A girl haunted by traumatic events takes us on a mesmerising journey through 100 years of horror cinema to explore how filmmakers scare us – and why we let them.