The Evil Faerie

Sitting on a promenade in nice with a sign: Watch me, that’s all.

"Single Frame sequences of TV or film images, with periodic distortions of the image. The images are airplanes, women men interspersed with pictures of texts like: 'silence, genius at work' and 'ich liebe dich.' The end credit is 'Television décollage, Cologne, 1963."

Swimming across Nice harbour fully clothed. Ben swims across a bay in Nice.

In an endless loop, unexposed film runs through the projector. The resulting projected image shows a surface illuminated by a bright light, occasionally altered by the appearance of scratches and dust particles in the surface of the damaged film material. This a film which depicts only its own material qualities; An "anti-film", meant to encourage viewers to focus on the lack of concrete images.

Each film frame is a different image from the Sears Roebuck mail order catalogue. The film places pictures of the objects sold by Sears to the consumer society side by side with pictures of female models

Single frame exposures of dot-screens.

Various gestures of hand held razorblade, single frame exposures.

"INVOCATION is Higgins' Satie movie... the purest attempt to clear art from any or all historical, esthetic, thematic, ornamental claptrap to regain the lost-eye consciousness." - Jonas Mekas

Word & number gag, no camera.

A smile gradually fades into a neutral facial expression.

Flicker: White and black alternating frames.

Time counter, in seconds and minutes.

Prestype on clear film measuring tape, 10ft. length. No camera. At the end of every foot of film numbers appear, 1, 2, etc to 10

Numerals on clear film from 1 to 1000."

A 16 mm film, featuring Yoko Ono's own eye slowly blinking, shot by Peter Moore with a high-speed camera at 2,000 frames per second, which is projected at normal speed, 24 frames per second, thus creating a slow-motion effect.

Features entrance and exit door signs, fading through black and white.

Begins with a picture of Marilyn Monroe, then shifts to a female body, shot from belly button down, which is wriggling under piles of cellophane.

Begins with a shot of a demarcation line on an asphalt tennis court. A hand points to the distant landscape, then numbers 408 and 409 appear on a female torso.

X-ray sequence of mouth and throat; eating, salivating, speaking.

Collected as part of the Fluxfilm Anthology (a multi-reel compendium of 37 short films assembled by Fluxus founder and central operator George Maciunas), One captures the lifespan of a single match recorded at 2,000 frames per second using a 16mm high-speed camera. The frame rate is then decelerated to the standard 24fps for presentation. The film emphasizes each gesture, sway and flare of flame as the small pinewood carrier ignites across the landscape of the filmstrip and screen, signalling the drama and poetics of this ”minor” event before the fire is extinguished. One also stands as an unassuming beacon, immortalizing on film the essence of some of Ono’s early concerns as an artist. At the slightest touch of fire, they burst into flame. Strike everywhere. Strike often.

This film consists entirely of close ups of famous persons' bottoms. Ono meant it to encourage a dialogue for world peace.

A handful of rocks and chestnuts falling, filmed with high speed camera.

Shot at 2,000 frames per second, this short shows a man exhaling smoke in incredibly slow motion.

Single frame exposures, color. Different image each frame, various items in the room, etc.

Artype patterns, intended for loops. Benday dot patterns. Dots, lines. Screens, wavy lines, parallel lines, etc. on clear film. No camera.

This is fluxfilm No. 21 and without a title

Close-ups of two faces, shouting at each other.

Color test strip from developing tank.

Single frame exposures of words.

"Face Smiling. Hammering a brick. CU of an ear (moving?). Face twitching. Dancing on one leg. Rolls, twitches on the floor. Boxes the wall."

Cale makes a short film called Police Car. No sound, and it is in black & white. Part #31 in the Fluxus Film series.

Seeing, Hearing, Saying Nothing. Ben stands with ears, eyes, mouth bandaged.

Lifting and holding up a chest of drawers.

Tips of feet walking at the edge of frame, all around the frame.

Face going out of focus by layering sheets of plastic between camera and subject.

The Land Camera Collective presents a (nearly) shot-by-shot remake of the Owen Land 1977 classic experimental film 'On The Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist be Wholed?'

As Landow and his students were testing a new video camera, an elderly man began to talk to them about new technology. This impromptu conversation forms the basis for a comparison of spoken and written language. - Harvard Film Archive

Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.

A found, utilitarian object, the overtly moralizing educational film “How to be a Good Citizen,” is elevated to the status of ‘art’. First presented unaltered and then in Landow’s color facsimile, the film is further modified by applying an opaque matte that creates a spatial paradox. - Harvard Film Archive

A reworking of an earlier film, Institutional Quality, in which the same test was given. In the earlier film, the person taking the test was not seen, and the film viewer in effect became the test taker. The newer version concerns itself with the effects of the test on the test taker. An attempt is made to escape from the oppressive environment of the test — a test containing meaningless, contradictory, and impossible-to-follow directions by entering into the imagination. —Canyon Cinema

A revision of Bardo Follies, Diploteratology suggests that “death (destruction of the original image) is not an end but merely the next stage.” Preceded by longer versions entitled "Bardo Follies."

A shot of a Southern Belle waving to a group of tourists on a pleasure boat ride is looped, multiplied and then melted, creating psychedelic abstract images. “A paraphrasing of certain sections of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in motion picture terms.” - Harvard Film Archive. Originally ran 45 minutes, then was edited down to 30, then 20 minutes. Final version was simply entitled "Diploteratology" and runs 7 minutes, and is the most commonly shown version.

“Freud established that jokes were structurally akin to dreams in their use of condensation, displacement, representation by opposites, punning and ‘nonsense’. All of these strategies are much in evidence in (Land’s) marvelously duplicitous ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE… [...] so clever and original a filmmaker as to make most others – not to mention his critics – seem flat-footed by comparison. ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE harks back to Bunuel’s early work. Not only is it structured like a dream and filled with sexual imagery, but like Un Chien Andalou, it smacks of being an insider’s joke played upon the avant-garde. Where Bunuel used the insights of psychoanalysis to satirize Christianity, Land– with an almost equal perversity – reverses the process and uses Christianity to send up Freud.” – J. Hoberman, American Film

Two artists create grotesque characters; Two-dimensional drawings which somehow have a life of their own, that exist in the same space as real objects. The film seems to ask, "Isn't every filmmaking venture a series of repeated, once-negative images displayed alongside the real world?"

A rapturous audio-visual mix that “deliberately seeks a hidden order in randomness.” The film combines the face of a woman in ecstatic, contemplative prayer with shots of an animal rights activist, and a scantily clad model advertising Russian cars at the International Auto Show, New York. - Harvard Film Archive

Film in Which There Appear... is a six-minute loop of the double-printed image of a "China girl" or "Shirley card", her image off-center, making visible the sprocket holes and edge lettering on the film. According to Land, within the loop, "no development in the dramatic or musical sense" occurs. Fred Camper described Film in Which There Appear... as "a kind of Duchampian found object, a [...] film that focuses attention on the medium and the viewer." There also exists a 20-minute "widescreen version" involving two prints of the film projected side-by-side, with the left print flipped horizontally so that the "China girl" forms an almost complete face in the center.

Landow rejects the dream imagery of the historical trance film for the self-referential present, using macrobiotics, the language of advertising, and a speed-reading test on the definition of hokum. The alienated filmmaker appears, running uphill to distance himself from the lyrical cinema, but remember, "This is a film about you, not about its maker."

An interpretation of The Confessions of Saint Augustine featuring an ordinary middle-aged man who undergoes a conversion experience whilst watching an experimental film. - Harvard Film Archive

A radical Christian group's lecture tour of US colleges was filmed in the cinema verité tradition, with hand held camera, sync and wild sound. To avoid making a conventional documentary, the filmmaker created a dynamic collage by stroboscopically editing together pairs of scenes using a rapid rhythm of three-frame units.

Feature-length compilation program presenting 37 out of 41 original fluxfilms produced and directed in the 1960s by Fluxus artists, including George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, Paul Sharits, et al.

Dialogues is Land's last film: A chaotic, self-reflexive experimental narrative about many, many things-- namely Land himself. A caustic, anything-goes attitude permeates the late work.