A gentle and confused home movie in search of a lost space - my grandmother's garden, where I spent my childhood. There is nothing to testify to that place and my time there. There are memories pollinated by the pollen of garden poppies the warmth of my hands, toiling in the sunshine and the stories of adults about the big world. Summer, reveries, childhood, prejudices, the realities of the noughties, a small town - shimmering images that can never manifest, but endlessly manifest themselves. The intimate experience is torn by externalised reality: the formerly Latin poppy becomes a threat to gardeners and gardeners, bugs represent terror and flowers represent death.
Rat Race : A Short Documentary (2023)
Join College Student Parker Bennink and he interviews four of Rowan University's most prolific filmmakers, to uncover what life as a student filmmaker is really like in today's day and age.
Last Year in Dachau (2020)
Near Munich, in Bavaria, Germany, is the Schleißheim Palace, where French filmmaker Alain Resnais shot his film Last Year at Marienbad in 1960. Nearby is the Dachau concentration camp, where thousands of people were killed between 1933 and 1945. An essay about the present and the past, beauty and horror, life and death.
Wild Plants of Palestine (2018)
Wild Flowers Plants of Palestine follows journeys of observational tours solicited by the Palestinian Museum and conducted by two professors from Birzeit University to collect photos of and information on the Palestinian Flora. The title is adapted from a collection of 123 images (circa 1900 to 1920) of wild flowers in Palestine found in the Matson Collection in the Library of Congress. Despite the tendency to trace the wild plants, the text in general aims at questioning the territorial extension of what is meant by the term “Palestinian”, while standing on insignificant topographical features of the (postcolonial) landscape in West Bank. Furthermore, it addresses photography as a practice and a tool of distributing and restricting information at once.
no one knows who created skull trumpet (until now) (NaN)
YouTuber Jeffiot goes digging for the origins of skull trumpet / doot doot / mr skeltal, and ends up taking a trip to the early web heyday of animated gif art, and ruminating on creativity and legacy.
Ten Lives of a Cat: A Film about Chris Marker (2023)
Ten years after the death of iconic French filmmaker, Chris Marker. A filmmaker, hoping to rediscover that unique sensibility against the uncertainty of the new century, returns to the places synonymous with those incomparable and unforgettable films-- From the cat cemetery of Sans Soleil, to the mausoleum of The Last Bolshevik; The caves of Level Five to the rooftops of The Case of the Grinning Cat. A biographical portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest and most misunderstood filmmakers.
Klassenverhältnisse am Bodensee (2022)
A filmmaker reconstructs a common memory about the formerly industrialized Lake Constance region, which was also largely built up by migration – and in recent years has mainly attracted people who do not like to pay taxes. The imprints speak, the fog. Without talking heads, in perspectives beyond the memorialized self-image of this region, classism becomes comprehensible.
How to Explain Your Mental Illness to Stanley Kubrick (NaN)
A psychotic filmmaker named Philip summons a manifestation of Stanley Kubrick into his apartment to confront him on the depiction of mental illness in his filmography. Kubrick's obsession with 'crazy' characters who meet an untimely death disturbs Philip, who wishes he could see Kubrick characters who manage their illness. The two directors go on a journey into Kubrick's films to understand insanity in our modern era.
A Brief History of Circles (2024)
An experimental video essay which uses circles and waves to explore neurodivergent experience.
Martin und Hans (2022)
A fictional biography of Hollywood actors Martin Kosleck and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, both of whom fled Hitler-era Germany to live a long-lasting relationship.
After James Benning's YouTube (2024)
Divided into 26 parts, an attempt to remake James Benning's film, YouTube (2011) with similar internet footage after 13 years.
There We Are John... (1993)
In this revealing documentary, Ken McMullen creates an elegant portrait of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, based on an interview conducted by John Cartwright. The questions are unobtrusive, allowing Jarman to reflect on his major films. Despite the debilitating effects of serious illness, we see an artist with his inner vision unimpaired; still humorous, self effacing and disarmingly charming.
CARA-B (2023)
A desktop documentary that focuses on the Golden Record that NASA sent into space in the late 1970s. The piece reflects on issues such as the power of scientific discourse to produce revisions of the world, the evolution of the concept of the archive and the resignification of borders in the rhetoric of space colonialism.
Functions of Film Sound (2013)
This visual essay sets clips from Robert Bresson's "A Man Escaped" to a reading of "Functions of Film Sound," a chapter from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's book "Film Art." The chapter analyzes the sound design of Bresson's masterpiece as a means of discussing the use of sound in film.
Referred Pains: the Necessity of the (Minor) Malignant Violation in Slapstick Comedy (2023)
An extension of the Benign Violation theory of comedy developed by Tom Veatch and A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren. Source: The Cure (1917) Dir. Charles Chaplin and Edward Brewer
The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey (2020)
Joan Crawford's close-up in Humoresque. Michelangelo's David and Boticelli's "Birth of Venus". Stendhal was overwhelmed by the cultural overstimulation in Florence, which Graziella Magherini described scientifically in 1979 as Stendhal syndrome. Mark Rappaport describes his fascination for the Austrian actor Turhan Bey, who made a career in exotic roles in Hollywood in the 1940s. A very personal essay about the effect of close-ups, the canvas idols of the dream factory and the role of their admirers and fans.
Rope’s End (2022)
A fictionalized biography on John Dall who was in two great movies - Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950).
Saintmaking (2021)
This year marks the 30th anniversary of film-maker Derek Jarman’s canonisation by an activist group of gay male 'nuns' known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. At the time in 1991, Derek Jarman was the most prominent person in the UK living openly with HIV. He was outspoken, radical and unapologetically queer.
Letter to My Tribe (2024)
Letter to My Tribe started with a question: Why don’t more Jews and Israelis speak out about Palestine? Over many years my mother, who represents a more messianic perspective, and I have had numerous arguments, some recorded, some not. These form the backbone of this video essay in which Israelis and Jews, journalists, activists and a rabbi are interviewed, and in which documentation of actions on the ground, in the West Bank, are woven with more personal family histories and journeys to Iraq and to Poland.
Daedalus (2024)
"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." Daedalus weaves a tale of ambition and caution through an ancient myth, set in a nation below sea level. Shot in just seven consecutive days during the summer of 2023, it concludes the first volume of Bliss, a playlist of sounds and shapes. As the master craftsman gifts his son wings and wisdom, the film delves into the perilous dance between striving for greatness and the suffocating pull of stagnancy. This chaotic exploration bridges the warnings and epiphanic thoughts of 20th-century thinkers with the responses of today's dreamers.