Vis-à-vis

Lawale

A strange succession of tableaux of four women and a man which gives the sense of a sort of dream family locked in an antiseptic world of endless afternoon teas, dinners and waiting. Often her images seem to be stills either before or after something has been said.

Artikel

Mirador

An expedition report (a winter sailing trip down the Elbe), and a document about filmmakers who leave a city because it's more hospitable elsewhere, reflections, reflexes.

Lagado

An experimental film about the interpenetration of various levels of communication, dealing with the relationship of the pictorial functions to those of sound (direct sound).

Film Before Film

An exhilarating and amusing encyclopedic look at the "prehistory" of cinema. Werner Nekes charts the fascination with moving pictures which led to the birth of film, covering shadow plays, peep shows, flip books, flicks, magic lanterns, lithopanes, panoramic, scrolls, colorful forms of early animation, and numerous other historical artiffices. Working with these formats, early "producers" created melodramas, comedies, -- as well as lots of pornography -- anticipating most of the forms known today. Nekes probes these colorful toys and inventions in a rich and rewarding optical experience. Film Before Film is a bewildering assault of exotic (and sometimes erotic) images and illusions.

Blonde Barbarei

A female figure wanders inside a warehouse interior and through various motifs, including a fan and a birdcage, set to a medieval chant.

Johnny Flash

Jurgen is an unknown electrician with a dream of pop stardom. His mother browbeats him into fame, while two managers compete for his contract. All Johnny really wants to do is get some sleep.

Kaskara

An experimental film where a particular space is constantly "present" : there is a complex usage of superim- position, and of split-screen effects. The place shown is a part of a house in the country. Doors and windows are continually shown, emphasizing the film's concern with framing. Other images are present: city-scapes of a particularly sinister nature, implying a sense of ruin, and shots of a chorus on a stage. These shots begin and end the film which is accompanied by a vocal chant on the soundtrack.

Alaska

Alaska is a wordless experimental film with a simple, droning soundtrack that sounds as if it is a piece for violin and refrigerator hum.

00 Schneider - Jagd auf Nihil Baxter

The funny clown Bratislav Metulskie is found dead in circus "Apollo". The retired commissioner 00 Schneider is asked to assume control of the case. Schneider and his aged sidekick Körschgen investigate to find the murderer.

Beuys

The German artist Joseph Beuys is reflecting on his theory of art, being filmed as a kinetic sculpture. In 1981, the film has won the German film critic's award for “Best short film in Germany”.

Jüm-Jüm

A montage experiment in which Dore O., her body painted in different colours, swings back and forth in front of a movie screen, on which is painted a phallus (slightly abstract and fairly large). The perspective is such that the girl appears to be swinging into and out of the phallus. It is one who is content to see through the specific event. The work exhausts itself in a trivial aspect, the literary. This is most comfortable for the critic: the literary content of a work is easiest to reproduce in a literary form of criticism.

Cinématon

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

T-Wo-Men

The film is divided into five parts differing in pictorial and musical structure. The plot, two women and their love for one another, is of secondary importance. An ingenious combination of stereoscopic images and montage of individual pictures make new qualities of perception accessible to the viewer. In the final part of the love scenes pictorial sequences and music build up to a delirious rhythm.

Beyond the Image

The film traces the history of the camera obscura, the understanding of perspective and anamorphosis, peepshows and it shows the beauty of historical shadowtheaters and shadow toys.

The Magic Drum

Other essential predecessors of film were those devices that created the illusion of motion by taking advantage of the persistence of vision and the stroboscopic effect, such as the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope or wheel of life, zoetrope or magic drum and praxinoscope and later on, the more sophisticated flip-books such as the kinora and mutoscope.