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.
Related Movies
plant portals: breath (2020)
"plant portals: breath" is an experimental meditation on the unspoken history many queer and trans people of colour carry daily, connecting bumblebees, colonial trauma, alternate universes and the complicated concept of "rest" to ask: Can nature heal us? Shot entirely on an iPhone, the film is intentional in imagining what is possible, and manifests a reality rooted in mindfulness.“
Cassis (1966)
"I was visiting Jerome Hill. Jerome loved France, especially Provence. He spent all his summers in Cassis. My window overlooked the sea. I sat in my little room, reading or writing, and looked at the sea. I decided to place my Bolex exactly at the angle of light as what Signac saw from his studio which was just behind where I was staying, and film the view from morning till after sunset, frame by frame. One day of the Cassis port filmed in one shot." -JM
The Smell of Burning Ants (1994)
A haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. The film provokes the viewer to reflect on how our society can deprive boys of wholeness.
An Empire Spik Bootleg (2010)
We received this bootleg of the ESB Spike broadcast in Times Square. Since there was no audio, %20 added fourteen fan commentary or ESB 30th anniversary podcasts which were sync'd up at the starting point of the crawl. Since a DVD can only have eight audio tracks, each of the commentaries were mono'd and shifted to the left or right channel. Use this disc to practice your audio shifting and commentary channel switching abilities, while you get an in-depth listen to the public's continued fascination with this movie sequel.
Unboxing Eden (2013)
Unboxing Eden is a YouTube collage about snake breeders and their animals. The video documents the arrival, the breeding and the handling of snakes in all shapes and sizes.
Strokkur (2011)
In the beginning the idea was to make something from nothing, in a neutral and unknown place. Collect images and sounds instead of producing them. The camera, the microphone and the mini-amplifier: tools that take away and then give back. We defined a rule: the sound shouldn't illustrate the image and the image shouldn't absorb the sound. Less than a hundred kilometres from Reykjavik we found Strokkur. For three days we saw and heard the internal dynamics of the crevice: the boiling water that spat out every seven minutes and the thermal shock, given the eighteen degrees below zero of the atmosphere.
Black Hole Radio (1992)
Black Hole Radio is an installation that consists of taped confessions of callers of the New York City Phone Confession Line and video images. The Phone Confession Line is based on anonymous callers ringing to confess on things they had done or thought like adultery, theft, murder or regrets. Thereafter anybody could call and listen to the confessions. Although making a confession was free, listening to a confession costs money. After Cohen got his hands on the confessions, he used them as an audio heartbeat to accompany video-images of every day life in New York City he had taken over the years. This installation is a portrait of the city with its dark secrets, hushed voices and nocturnal images. In this way Cohen tries to bring across an experience to the viewer that relies on absence, waiting and the effort to hear something in the dark.
Urgent ou à quoi bon exécuter des projets puisque le projet est en lui-même une jouissance suffisante (1977)
Gérard Courant applies the Lettrist editing techniques of Isidore Isou to footage of late 70's pop culture. Courant posits that his cinema offers an aggressive détournement to the French mainstream, reifying a Duchampian view of film: "I believe in impossible movies and works without meaning... I believe in the anti-movie. I believe in the non-movie. I believe in Urgent... My first full length movie that is so anti-everything that I sometimes wonder if it really does exist!"
Selva. A Portrait of Parvaneh Navaï (1982)
Trance dances and out of body projection. In front of the camera, Parvaneh Navaï becomes a mediator who enters in contact with and immerses into the energies of Nature, while her own energy radiates and echos in the forest ("selva"). The camera amplifies and expands her presence, transforming the forest into an imaginary space. The camera becomes a painter's brush.
Braverman's Condensed Cream of the Beatles (1974)
Photos, animation, and music illustrate the story of the Beatles.
Dawn (1979)
Szirtes's masterful experimental work is a dazzling composition of several years of filming within an industrial macro/microcosm, an abstract model of revolution and the beauty of daybreak.
From the Earth to the Moon (2020)
Humankind has always dreamt of the night sky. Of the infinite freedom offered by the black void, and of the strong, shining beacon inviting us to ascend. This is a story, a history of the events that led up to our conquest of space, and the consequences throughout wider humanity. The film is a collage. Of genres, documentary and comedy. Of media, drawing from painting and film. Of films, cannibalising all film history. Of truth, both objective and subjective. Watch the small steps and let your mind take a giant leap.
How Every Film You Watch Tells You To Love The Rich and What To Do About It (2019)
"How Every Film You Watch Tells You To Love The Rich and What To Do About It" explores the representations of wealth in cinema. It looks into how most beloved characters are subtly more well-off than they should be, how criticisms of the system are crushed, how the rich have become the average in the world of the cinema. And it shows how these stories distort the view of the real world, and are used against you by politicians.
CNN Concatenated (2002)
An 18-minute long single-channel video which uses CNN footage cut so that each word is spoken by a different newsperson. The pieces literally asks the viewers questions about media authenticity and give CNN a distinct voice
The Sacred Art of Tibet (1972)
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.
Cairo Chorus (2010)
"Filmed in Cairo, in Al-Azhar Park, sunset during Isha'a praying time. The city becomes a Chorus. Dedicated to the people of Cairo. With love and hope." Part of the Azan series & the Cairo fieldworks.
Zamboanga (2011)
Images and sound captured in Zamboanga city Mindanao, Philippines. During sunset. Part of the Azan series & the Philippines fieldworks.
Sylvia Kristel – Paris (2003)
Sylvia Kristel – Paris is a portrait of Sylvia Kristel , best known for her role in the 1970’s erotic cult classic Emmanuelle, as well as a film about the impossibility of memory in relation to biography. Between November 2000 and June 2002 Manon de Boer recorded the stories and memories of Kristel. At each recording session she asked her to speak about a city where Kristel has lived: Paris, Los Angeles, Brussels or Amsterdam; over the two years she spoke on several occasions about the same city. At first glance the collection of stories appears to make up a sort of biography, but over time it shows the impossibility of biography: the impossibility of ‘plotting’ somebody’s life as a coherent narrative.