Movi Hub

On Generation and Corruption

2017

Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.

10.0

Gassy's Gas 'n Stuff

2023

Lulu the dog gets a job at the local convenience store and stays up all night cleaning the back room. Short created for [adult swim] Smalls.

7.6

Son of the White Mare

1981

A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.

10.0

Rectangle & Rectangles

1984

This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.

0.0

Thine Own Self

2022

Torn from their home by a hand in the sky, colorful entities seek freedom from a rigid binary in this short experimental animation.

0.0

Kappo

2007

9.0

D'art moderne

1977

7.0

Enigma: Nazo

1978

Enigma is something of a more glamorous version of White Hole, with a wide variety of elaborate textures (often composed of iconographic and religious symbols) converging towards the centre of the screen.

6.0

Free Radicals

1958

In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leader, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads. The first version of the film won a major award at the International Experimental Film Festival Held in Brussels in 1958 in association with the World's Fair. Stan Brakhage described the film as "an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece".

10.0

La Costante di Archimede

2012

5.6

Fuji

1974

A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-esque Japanese landscape of electrical power lines, passing trains, railroad tracks, and the gentle slope of obliquely peaked, uniform rooflines as Breer distills the essential geometry of Mount Fuji into a collage of acute angles and converging (and bifurcating) lines .

4.9

Blazes

1961

100 basic images switching positions for 4000 frames.

5.9

Tarantella

1940

Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) are subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.

6.4

Early Abstractions

1965

Early Abstractions is a collection of seven short animated films created by Harry Everett Smith between 1939 and 1956. Each film is between two and six minutes long, and is named according to the chronological order in which it was made. The collection includes Numbers 1–5, 7, and 10.

7.3

Air!

1972

Although only a couple of minutes long, this animated short makes the point that oxygen is the stuff of life whether on land, in the air or water, but that it is becoming scarcer as man-made pollutants crowd it out. This is a film without words in which plants, birds, fish and, finally, man come to the same "breathless" end

10.0

Scratch

2000

In Scratch both the animation and the soundtrack are abstract. The movie is a conversation of sounds and images. Soundtrack and animation are scratched directly on 35 mm film.

7.3

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

1965

Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.