Experimental
Films that break conventions and invent themselves new forms in order to tell the world differently. Films that will change your perspective and open the window on unexplored possibilities, transforming reality by inventing new points of view by which we can contemplate it.
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Colour Poems
Duration: 22 minutes
Subscription access
"Nine linked short films. Memory, chance observation, and the subsuming of one in the other. [...] A poem started in words is continued by the picture, part of another poem is read for the last of the nine. Some images are formed by direct-on-film animation, others are found by the camera." – Margaret Tait
Aerial
Duration: 4 minutes
Subscription access
"There’s a general theme of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water – in a different order – air, water, earth, fire and then air again, with all the elements intermingled. But just as a sort of song or even a kind of nursery rhyme. Although I don’t understand musical structure – I can’t really follow the structure of piece of music when I’m listening to it – but I think that film- struct...
A Portrait of Ga
Duration: 10 minutes
Subscription access
"My mother seemed a good subject for a portrait, (she was there), and I thought it offered a chance to do a sort of 'abstract film', in the sense that it didn’t have what you might call 'the grammar of film'. It’s mostly discontinuous shots linked just by subject, in one case by colour, only rarely by movement." – Margaret Tait
Goodnight Goodnight
Duration: 1h14
Subscription access
With overconsumption of electric light, the resulting light pollution, and the subsequent loss of the night sky, we have effectively rid our lives of context. By suppressing natural temporalities and obscuring our place within the solar system, we are left with a distorted sense of permanence—the permanence of our structures, institutions, and relationships. _Goodnight Goodnight_ is a mid-lengt...
Jazz of Lights
Subscription access
A pulsating city symphony of light, movement, and electronic music, transforming Times Square in the 1950s into what Hugo’s wife, the writer Anaïs Nin, called "an ephemeral flow of sensations.”
Summer Echo
Subscription access
Two children reminisce over a home movie which walks the line between documentary and experimental film. From a courtyard in bloom at their grandparents' home in the countryside, they are led by a chance encounter to discover the source of a mysterious music.
Garden City Beautiful
Subscription access
One sunny afternoon in the Middle West, suspended in a time between, two commuters daydream about a life lived otherwise.
Parade
Subscription access
_Parade_ is made of three parts, with each part using a different film language. The first segment uses narrative film language to tell a mysterious story. The second part uses expressionist visual language. The third sequence is composed of events all happening simultaneously which, in film, can only be shown as a sequence. The title _Parade_ refers to the fact that film is composed of individ...
Everything Everywhere Again Alive
Everything Everywhere Again Alive
Duration: 1h12Subscription access
In the early 1970s, Keith Lock moved to the hippie community of Buck Lake, north of Kingston, Ontario. He went there to join members of Toronto’s underground scene, capturing the daily life of a horizontal, ideal society, free from urban oppression. The result is one of the masterpieces of Canadian experimental cinema, but above all a free-spirited film that challenges the very idea of freedom.
Weather Diary 1
Subscription access
In _Weather Diary 1_, George Kuchar travels to Oklahoma in search of tornadoes, but spends most of his time watching TV and eating. The film is part of _The Weather Diaries_ (mid-1980s–2000s), a series of often humorous, low-budget video journals documenting his annual spring trips to observe storms in the American Midwest.
Meeting Meat Joy
Based on a deep, clumsy and humorous Skype encounter between French researcher Chlo Lavalette and legendary artist Carolee Schneemann, this evocative experimental essay explores whether – and at what costs – spectators should help artworks escape the intentionality of their authors and the zeitgeist in which they were made, and questions the contemporary affordances of a certain feminist legacy.
Orbits
Subscription access
Marie-Christine, who lost her sight some years ago, explores life in a particularly sensory way—through her fingertips. Through her personal experience, she arouses her son’s curiosity and sense of wonder about the beauty of the universe. Drawing from a constellation of highly textured analogue images and a rich tapestry of sound, _Orbits_ journeys into the sensorial depths of Marie-Christine’s...
The Dissolution of the Landscape
The Dissolution of the Landscape
Subscription accessThrough visual metaphors, the film offers an incursion into an inner landscape, a dive into subconscious, a mix of childhood memories and recurrent dreams, between surrealism and automatism.
Light Plays
Old footage from 16mm film is scratched, drawn upon, and experimentally animated with a quantum dots solution. The film seems at first about sound, the moon, and exotic birds, but it is more about narration, experimentation, and playfulness.
Meeting with Robert Dole
This experimental short film gives the floor to Robert Dole who gives us his story and exposes his vision of schizophrenia. The theme of mental illness is echoed here in a cinematographic treatment that explores the materiality of film and magnetic tapes to find points of meeting and detachment, spaces resonating with the fall and redemption of Robert Dole.
Landscape in the Mind's Eye
Through the eyes of children and women from different generations, this film reveals the soul of a small village on Quebec’s North Shore. Madame Kennedy shares a vital bond with the forest; Diane, faced with the hardships of her life’s journey, lifts her head high; Cathy, at 18, possesses the biting clarity of those who have had to fight. The strength and determination of each woman converge...
Ghost Strata
Subscription access
_Ghost Strata_ refers to the missing elements from within the rock strata that despite their absence offer hints of what was once there. The film is divided into the months of the year in which the footage was captured. Filmed in various places over the globe, charting various personal movements of the filmmaker, _Ghost Strata_ explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence ha...
With Veiled Intent
On a freezing winter night, in an small, isolated village, masked figures prowl. The monsters lurk by the houses, knock on doors. You let these strangers into your home. They remain silent. They observe you. _With Veiled Intent_, a documentary horror film, or maybe an experimental fable, brings to life an endangered tradition: Mi-Carême (Mid-Lent), as it is celebrated in Natashquan. Welcome to ...
Lights
Subscription access
Created during the brief, illuminated Christmas season, _Lights_ was made between midnight and 1:00 a.m., when vehicular and pedestrian traffic was minimal, over a period of three years. The work draws on store decorations, window displays, fountains, public promenades, the lights of Park Avenue, and the facades of buildings and churches. Due to near-freezing temperatures, filmmaker Marie Menke...
Colour Poems
Duration: 22 minutes
Subscription access
"Nine linked short films. Memory, chance observation, and the subsuming of one in the other. [...] A poem started in words is continued by the picture, part of another poem is read for the last of the nine. Some images are formed by direct-on-film animation, others are found by the camera." – Margaret Tait
Aerial
Duration: 4 minutes
Subscription access
"There’s a general theme of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water – in a different order – air, water, earth, fire and then air again, with all the elements intermingled. But just as a sort of song or even a kind of nursery rhyme. Although I don’t understand musical structure – I can’t really follow the structure of piece of music when I’m listening to it – but I think that film- struct...
A Portrait of Ga
Duration: 10 minutes
Subscription access
"My mother seemed a good subject for a portrait, (she was there), and I thought it offered a chance to do a sort of 'abstract film', in the sense that it didn’t have what you might call 'the grammar of film'. It’s mostly discontinuous shots linked just by subject, in one case by colour, only rarely by movement." – Margaret Tait
Goodnight Goodnight
Duration: 1h14
Subscription access
With overconsumption of electric light, the resulting light pollution, and the subsequent loss of the night sky, we have effectively rid our lives of context. By suppressing natural temporalities and obscuring our place within the solar system, we are left with a distorted sense of permanence—the permanence of our structures, institutions, and relationships. _Goodnight Goodnight_ is a mid-lengt...
Jazz of Lights
Subscription access
A pulsating city symphony of light, movement, and electronic music, transforming Times Square in the 1950s into what Hugo’s wife, the writer Anaïs Nin, called "an ephemeral flow of sensations.”
Summer Echo
Subscription access
Two children reminisce over a home movie which walks the line between documentary and experimental film. From a courtyard in bloom at their grandparents' home in the countryside, they are led by a chance encounter to discover the source of a mysterious music.
Garden City Beautiful
Subscription access
One sunny afternoon in the Middle West, suspended in a time between, two commuters daydream about a life lived otherwise.
Parade
Subscription access
_Parade_ is made of three parts, with each part using a different film language. The first segment uses narrative film language to tell a mysterious story. The second part uses expressionist visual language. The third sequence is composed of events all happening simultaneously which, in film, can only be shown as a sequence. The title _Parade_ refers to the fact that film is composed of individ...
Everything Everywhere Again Alive
Everything Everywhere Again Alive
Duration: 1h12Subscription access
In the early 1970s, Keith Lock moved to the hippie community of Buck Lake, north of Kingston, Ontario. He went there to join members of Toronto’s underground scene, capturing the daily life of a horizontal, ideal society, free from urban oppression. The result is one of the masterpieces of Canadian experimental cinema, but above all a free-spirited film that challenges the very idea of freedom.
Weather Diary 1
Subscription access
In _Weather Diary 1_, George Kuchar travels to Oklahoma in search of tornadoes, but spends most of his time watching TV and eating. The film is part of _The Weather Diaries_ (mid-1980s–2000s), a series of often humorous, low-budget video journals documenting his annual spring trips to observe storms in the American Midwest.
Meeting Meat Joy
Based on a deep, clumsy and humorous Skype encounter between French researcher Chlo Lavalette and legendary artist Carolee Schneemann, this evocative experimental essay explores whether – and at what costs – spectators should help artworks escape the intentionality of their authors and the zeitgeist in which they were made, and questions the contemporary affordances of a certain feminist legacy.
Orbits
Subscription access
Marie-Christine, who lost her sight some years ago, explores life in a particularly sensory way—through her fingertips. Through her personal experience, she arouses her son’s curiosity and sense of wonder about the beauty of the universe. Drawing from a constellation of highly textured analogue images and a rich tapestry of sound, _Orbits_ journeys into the sensorial depths of Marie-Christine’s...
The Dissolution of the Landscape
The Dissolution of the Landscape
Subscription accessThrough visual metaphors, the film offers an incursion into an inner landscape, a dive into subconscious, a mix of childhood memories and recurrent dreams, between surrealism and automatism.
Light Plays
Old footage from 16mm film is scratched, drawn upon, and experimentally animated with a quantum dots solution. The film seems at first about sound, the moon, and exotic birds, but it is more about narration, experimentation, and playfulness.
Meeting with Robert Dole
This experimental short film gives the floor to Robert Dole who gives us his story and exposes his vision of schizophrenia. The theme of mental illness is echoed here in a cinematographic treatment that explores the materiality of film and magnetic tapes to find points of meeting and detachment, spaces resonating with the fall and redemption of Robert Dole.
Landscape in the Mind's Eye
Through the eyes of children and women from different generations, this film reveals the soul of a small village on Quebec’s North Shore. Madame Kennedy shares a vital bond with the forest; Diane, faced with the hardships of her life’s journey, lifts her head high; Cathy, at 18, possesses the biting clarity of those who have had to fight. The strength and determination of each woman converge...
Ghost Strata
Subscription access
_Ghost Strata_ refers to the missing elements from within the rock strata that despite their absence offer hints of what was once there. The film is divided into the months of the year in which the footage was captured. Filmed in various places over the globe, charting various personal movements of the filmmaker, _Ghost Strata_ explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence ha...
With Veiled Intent
On a freezing winter night, in an small, isolated village, masked figures prowl. The monsters lurk by the houses, knock on doors. You let these strangers into your home. They remain silent. They observe you. _With Veiled Intent_, a documentary horror film, or maybe an experimental fable, brings to life an endangered tradition: Mi-Carême (Mid-Lent), as it is celebrated in Natashquan. Welcome to ...
Lights
Subscription access
Created during the brief, illuminated Christmas season, _Lights_ was made between midnight and 1:00 a.m., when vehicular and pedestrian traffic was minimal, over a period of three years. The work draws on store decorations, window displays, fountains, public promenades, the lights of Park Avenue, and the facades of buildings and churches. Due to near-freezing temperatures, filmmaker Marie Menke...
