Rhythm 06

NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM -- its author Samuel Beckett, its star Buster Keaton, its production and its philosophical implications -- utilizing additional outtakes, never before heard audio recordings of the production meetings, and other rare archival elements.

Casa Loma was the unfinished dream mansion of Canadian industrial magnate Henry Pellatt. A self-made millionaire, Pellatt was derided by fellow aristocrats for nouveau-riche pretentions: the house and its décor considered by many an ornate fake. Its original contents were sold at Pellatt’s bankruptcy auction in 1924. Today the building is a museum. The movie has three sections—the first in a cellar tunnel, the next in a first-story workroom near the stables, the third in the tower’s summit.

A cultural history of ventriloquism disguised as a sci-fi TV series, integrating live actors with vintage and artist-made puppets. The Case of the Vanishing Gods is a fiction-doc hybrid that traces the phenomenon of ‘throwing voices’ from the oracles of ancient Greece to the spectacle of the modern horror film, and pushes the essay film into exciting new territory.

Documentary short chronicling the process of restoring John Cassavetes' debut feature, Shadows (1959)

THE EXPLODING DIGITAL INEVITABLE is a live documentary essay integrating an array of movie and audio clips, still photographs, and rare archival documents that tells the story of CROSSROADS' unique production, as well as the massive cultural spectacle of the original Bikini Atoll tests themselves--the singlemost recorded event in human history.

From Ross Lipman's "personal ethnographies" series, an informal visit with legendary filmmaker Bruce Baillie at his home on Camano Island in Washington State.