Pip Chodorov

Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.

A short portrait of Jonas Mekas on the occasion of his 2002 retrospective in Paris (for his 80th birthday). Through film clips and interviews, Mekas recounts his arrival in America, his early life in New York and his first filmmaking experiences. An introduction to his life and work.

Three weeks of travel in the USA in June 1997: New York, Vermont, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, edited entirely in camera and projected with music from the 60s.

Jonas Mekas came to Paris in October 1997 for the video release of his film Walden. I filmed the event and its twists and turns at the Cinémathèque, the Fnac, the École des Beaux-Arts, and in a few bars and restaurants. The film ends with some Halloween footage. Music by Bruno Geoffroy and Andrew Rogers, Call Me the Breeze.

A complement to the previous film (Numéro 4, 1989) : the fictional hero has the power to stop the projector, returning the cinema to its photographic origins, killing its motion. Having the unfortunate idea of taking his self-portrait, he finds himself caught in a photograph, condemned to live in the fleeting reality of the single frame.

Super 8 flicker film shot and hand-developed in Seoul in spring 2022 with jazz soundtrack from a Jonas Mekas centennial tribute in Busan.

The single frame is the only visible unit in film, yet it is nearly invisible. To see a single frame goes against the nature of cinema; even if that is its very nature. If every frame holds the same image, there will be no movement; if they are completely different from each other, there will be no movement either, but chaos. By using a still camera like a film camera and a film camera like a still camera, Numero 4 rides on the edge between film and photography. One unedited super-8 camera roll.

"This film is close to End Memory. Under the shock of a recent break-up I built a film with similar elements: a day of nostalgia in the countryside, the picking of blackberries, the meal, having fun with friends, at the edge of the pond, the sunset, the memory of a moment when everything was fine. It's also my only film since End Memory with my own music." (PC)

A founding member of the Lettrist movement with Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître describes here the genesis of the movement, his friendship with Isou, their discoveries in filmmaking and their inventions of infinitesimal and supertemporal art. Shot in his studio in Montmartre, we see him at work and showing his paintings, sculptures and films.

A joyful and light-hearted look at alienation. What we see: ugly modern buildings, too many tourists, uniformity - everywhere the same cafés, the same supermarket bags, beggars and homeless, Senegalese merchants selling small Eiffel Towers, police and people fleeing from them, aggressive restaurateurs, markets, crowded subways, traffic jams and exhaust fumes, prostitutes, street fights, clowns. What we hear: Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals by Carl Stalling, a selection of sound recordings for Warner Brothers cartoons from 1941-50.

- "The Spells of Kenneth Anger" was shot in Hollywood in July, 2003. Anger gives an overview of his life and we see clips of his many films. He touches on his run-in with Charles Manson, being influenced by Alistair Crowley, working with Marianne Faithful, and he shows us his favorite place in LA: the Hollywood cemetary.

Pip Chodorov's "Charlemagne 2: Piltzer" is a tour de force of hand-processed film which documents a Palestine piano concert. Chodorov uses flicker, negative/positive imagery, different printing techniques and colored filters to produce a film that is a true merging of sound and vision. - Frequent Small Meals

Pip Chodorov's profile of Jacques Perconte

About ends and memory, the end of an era. I film to remember: the end of a summer, of a family, a last trip to Vermont before a separation, grandparents getting older.... I film impromptu, dissolving and fading in the camera. At night I hand-develop the film in a beaker. It sticks together and stains, leaving traces and holes that only add to the nostalgia. I leave the film as is, adding only some improvised music, which by its minor harmonies and discordances goes well with the faded, stained pictures.

A short portrait of Anthology Film Archives, New York s museum of independent cinema founded by Jonas Mekas in 1970. Features interviews with some of the workers including Mekas and some of his Lithuanian friends.

A figure with two wings on a church's roof. An opera is suggested, Madame Butterfly. A silent poem that combines effect and (angelical) truth...