Thanatopsis

"In Spring, 1963 Show Magazine called me and asked that I make a film on arts in New York. I told them, why did they want me to make it - didn't they know I was a bit unusual? ... 'We want something unusual,' they said. So I went out and made a newsreel on arts. Show people looked at the rough cut of the film and became very angry. 'But there is nothing about Show Magazine and DuPont fabrics in the movie,' they said. 'What has that to do with the arts in New York!' I said. The battle was short. The film was destroyed. Really, I have no idea what they did with it. This workprint of the first FILM MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS is the only print in existence, as far as I know." -- J.M.

In New York four years after the bombing of Hiroshima, a bible-carrying drifter who witnesses the rape and murder of a black woman is framed and pursued by locals while left as the sole protector of the woman’s young son.

In this wildly entertaining vision of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Bob Dylan is surrounded by teen fans, gets into heated philosophical jousts with journalists, and kicks back with fellow musicians Joan Baez, Donovan, and Alan Price.

Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970 is a 1972 documentary directed by Emile de Antonio. It covers American art movements from abstract expressionism to pop art through conversations with artists in their studios. Artists appearing in the film include Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, Hans Hofmann, Jules Olitski, Philip Pavia, Larry Poons, Robert Motherwell, and Kenneth Noland.

Experimental computer animation from pioneering artist Ed Emshwiller.

Emshwiller terms Family Focus a "family self-portrait, a stylized autobiography," which takes the form of an intimate collage of home movies, black-and-white videotape and photographs that have been colorized, synthesized or otherwise visually transformed in an electronic mediation by the artist. The viewer is witness to the spontaneous activities and conversations of the family's quotidian home life, which is accompanied by Carol Emshwiller's ironic, often poetic commentary. In one sequence of home movies, the children are seen "growing" over a span of twenty years. Using the video camera as a kind of psychological mirror, Emshwiller integrates video's intimacy, reflexivity and realism with its "unreal" technological manipulations to form what the artist describes as a "documentary/video art transformation of self-revealing images."

Made for Roger Reynolds's Voicescapes performance, containing elements from Emshwiller's previous film "Sunstone."

Emile de Antonio's film decimates Richard Nixon and exposes him as a paranoid, power mad lunatic... de Antonio compiles (via video and film) what amounts to the "best of" one of the worst political figures of the 20th century. Nixon was a shameless self-promoter while trying desperately to convince everyone that he wasn't. Through Alger Hiss and the "Checkers" speech to the character assassination of Helen Gahagan Douglas (among others), there are few stones left unturned.

George Orr, a man whose dreams can change waking reality, tries to suppress this unpredictable gift with drugs. Dr. Haber, an assigned psychiatrist, discovers the gift to be real and hypnotically induces Mr. Orr to change reality for the benefit of mankind --- with bizarre and frightening results.

In one of his first experiments in video, Emshwiller creates an electronic landscape of both abstract and figurative elements, where colorized dancers are chroma-keyed into a mutable, computer-animated environment. Working with the "Scan-i-mate," an early analog video synthesizer, Emshwiller choreographs an architectural, illusory video space, in which frames proliferate within frames, disembodied heads and hands move within a collage of animated forms, and the dancers and their environment are subjected to constant transformations through image processing. With its witty interplay of the "real" and the "unreal" in an electronically rendered videospace, and the skillful manipulation and articulation of a sculptural illusion of three-dimensionality, Scape-mates introduced a new vocabulary of video image-making.

Jack and Leo vie for the affections of Vera – who appears a little differently to each man – over the course of a series of energetic sketches, flashbacks and homages.

Ed Emshwiller’s tender portrait of his wife, avant-garde science fiction writer Carol Emshwiller.

A combination of animated line drawings with live photography of a nude model. A play on the title (living lines, life model, procreation and hand life line).

Emshwiller made this film on a Ford Foundation grant, and in his original proposal to the Ford Foundation, he outlined the film as "something that deals with subjective reality, the emotional sense of what one's perception of the total environment is -- sexual, physical, social, time, space, life, death."

In this spin-off from his original plan for Relativity (1966), Emshwiller continued with his desire to penetrate “space in a kind of flying camera, a dream of flying, a kind of sensual, sexual imagery where you were constantly going into an unknown space.” A trio of dancers (Carolyn Carlson, Emery Hermans, Bob Beswick) appear "first in leotards, then in bluejeans, then naked, as they “pass through rituals of movement.”

A comedy short which pokes merry anarchistic fun at such quintessential American institutions as mom, baseball, and apple pie. It features an early appearance from actor John Cazale.