Anemic Cinema

1967 film directed by Greta Deseson about the Dada art movement. Featuring Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Hans Richter and Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia

Free-associative images are juxtaposed with disorienting poetry in Richter's late work. The film is visual dynamite: Upside-down and reversed footage, play with shadows and light, billiards and dice and balloons-- suggestive and surreal images. Tenets of Dada writing, such as games of chance, punnery, wordplay and loud nonsense noise are foist upon the viewer as Dada poems are read / performed by their orignal authors.

Stop-motion photography blends with extreme slow-motion in Clair's first and most dada film, composed of a series of zany, interconnected scenes. We witness a rooftop chess match between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, a hearse pulled by a camel (and chased by its pallbearers) and a dizzying roller coaster finale. A film of contradictions and agreements.

The surrealist film shows repetitive imagery involving a string fashioned in a bizarre, almost spiderweb-like pattern over the hands of several individuals, most notably an unnamed young woman and an elderly gentleman. The film also shows a shadowy darkness and people filmed at odd angles, an exposed human heart, and other occult symbols and ritualistic imagery which evokes an unsettling and dream-like aura. Considered an unfinished film.

A short film containing a collection of clips from various Hollywood movies.

Merce by Merce by Paik is a two-part tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel Duchamp. The first section, “Blue Studio: Five Segments”, is a work of video-dance produced by Merce Cunningham and videomaker Charles Atlas. The second part, produced by Paik and Shigeko Kubota, further queries the relationship between everyday gestures and formal notions of dance.

8 x 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements is an American experimental film directed by Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau. Described by Richter as "part Freud, part Lewis Carroll" and filmed partially on the lawn of Duchamp's summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.

A deep dive into the history of São Paulo's avant-garde poetry movement, starting from fragments of the works of poet Augusto de Campos. A collage of rare scenes shows a long trail of comradery between avant-garde poetry and experimental cinema.

A storm of Modernism swept through the art worlds of the West in the early decades of the twentieth century, uprooting centuries of tradition. The epicenter of this storm was Paris, France. For an incandescent moment from 1905 to 1930, Paris was the magnetic center for radical innovation and experiment, and the Mecca for creative talents who would change the course of art throughout the Western world.

Produced over several years between 1962 and 1967, Grimaces shows the faces of over a hundred artists, gallery owners and critics grimacing to the camera.

Hans Richter's documentary on the game of chess. Narrated by Vincent Price. Outlines the history of chess from ancient times to the present and traces its origins in India, China, and Persia. Prints, painting, illuminated manuscripts, live photography and rare chess pieces are shown as well as chess figures designed after Picasso and Braque.

Three-part, three-hour documentary with interviews about Marcel Duchamp.

Filmed amidst the Arensberg collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where 35 works by Marcel Duchamp are gathered, this 1956 NBC interview features the artist talking with James Johnson Sweeney, former director of the Guggenheim Museum. Duchamp describes his transition away from Impressionism toward a Cubist, and then post-Cubist, approach, providing commentary while standing before Nude Descending a Staircase (“I was not aware of Italian Futurism when I painted it”) and The Large Glass (“The two crackings are symmetrically arranged and there is… almost an intention there… a ready-made intention, in other words, that I respect and love.”). These concepts are paradoxically, although quite logically, articulated alongside his desire for “dryness” and mechanical precision. Viewers also gain insight into Duchamp’s thoughts on painting for an “ideal” public—a notion he clearly distinguishes from ivory-tower elitism.

Leroy Trenchard loves Therese Verneuil, and when Leroy enters the army goes to France to fight, Therese follows as a Red Cross nurse. But suspicion arises that Therese is actually Princess Sonia, a German spy.