Just Hold Still

Man with a Movie Camera

1929

A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.

Anônimo e incomum

1990

Congo

1972

An experimental ethnographic documentary that criticizes the colonizer view of anthropology.

The Five Obstructions

2003

In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.

Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box

1991

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

Poisons

1964

Industrialization brings progress, but also harmful influences on the environment. Warning of the dangers of waste materials dumped into the air and the waters.

Puenting (Leap of Faith)

2019

A first feature based on sexual events. An actress undertakes her desire of directing her first movie, without a budget or any production company funding her project. She gathers a group of professional actors and actresses, and proposes a project based on a very particular experience: stepping on their fears through a metaphorical 'leap of faith'. As the project advances, individual conflicts will arise affecting the shoot, making the movie crew wonder whether or not they should go on. Will they take the leap of faith with all its consequences?

Blow Job

1964

Andy Warhol directs a single 35-minute shot of a man's face to capture his facial expressions as he receives the sexual act depicted in the title.

Thot-Fal'N

1978

This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."

Alex & José

2007

Alex and José, is a 16mm single channel projection that explores gender, movement and form.

Rumstick Road

2014

A video reconstruction of the 1977 Wooster Group production Rumstick Road, an experimental theater performance created by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte after the suicide of Gray's mother. Archival recordings are combined with photographs, slides, and other materials to recreate the original production.

Everyday Life

1976

Dialogue-free short detailing the daily tasks of a man and his wife.

6-18-67

1967

Filmed during the production of the Columbia Pictures western "Mackenna’s Gold," this short work presents a non-narrative visual study of the Arizona desert. Rather than documenting the film set itself, "6-18-67" assembles landscape images, time-lapse photography, and ambient sound into an abstract record of place and duration.

One Second in Montreal

1969

A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.

Song 5

1964

SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).