PARIS SIDE SELECTION
Ghost Before Breakfast
Ghosts Before Breakfast
Hans Richter · Germany · 16 mm · 6’30”
A German Dadaist film combining animation and live action. The film was about objects who come to life and fly around, but it was banned by the Nazi government as degenerate art. According to Richter the Nazis felt that if objects could revolt, people could revolt.
Director: Hans Richter
Cast: Werner Graeff, Walter Gronostay, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, Madeleine Milhaud, Jean Oser, Willi Pferdekamp, Hans Richter
Meshes of the Afternoon
Meshes of the Afternoon
Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid · USA · 16mm · 14’
Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the "trance film," in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted 'to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately. Music by Teiji Ito added to the film in 1959.
Lapis
Lapis
James Whitney · USA · 16 mm · 10’
Lapis is James Whitney's second film, completed over a three-year period by animating glass discs painted with dots under a rotating platform that was taken from army surplus equipment, originally an anti-aircraft gun. James was interested in spirituality and meditation and considered Lapis a mandala that represented the akashic ether. He did not sign his name on the film, preferring to begin and end it with the symbol of the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, a symbol of eternal life.
My Name is Oona
My Name is Oona
Gunvor Nelson · USA · 16 mm · 10’
My Name Is Oona began with footage of Oona that Gunvor Nelson optically printed. Inspiration for the film's soundtrack came when Nelson attended a Steve Reich concert. Gunvor recorded Oona saying her name in different ways, and after hearing about the project, Reich sent Gunvor a recording he had made of Oona saying the days of the week. Gunvor worked with Patrick Gleeson to create the audio track. Once that was complete, Nelson made a final cut of the film by editing the image track based on the audio.
Director: Gunvor Nelson
Cast: Oona Nelson
Spacy
Spacy
Takashi Ito · Japan · 16 mm · 10’
Spacy consists of 700 continuous still photographs which are re-photographed frame by frame according to a strict rule where movements go from rectilinear motion to circular and parabola motion, then from horizontal to vertical.
Yours
Yours
Jeff Scher · USA · 16 mm · 4’
“'Yours' began with a soundie, a film made for projection in a 'film jukebox' in 1945. It was a popular song in its day and, with its sentiment of eternal love, feels poignant in the context of the Second World War and all its separated loves. 'Yours' is performed here by the Roberts Brothers and the Bunnell Sisters, who appear to be two sets of twins, and the film’s built-in doubles made it feel right for an experiment I’d been thinking about. What I did was shoot abstract animation literally through the original film. I used a Master Oxberry, once the gold standard of film animation cameras, now sadly verging on extinction. With this camera you can have two rolls of film running at the same time, 'bi-pack' - or locked together - at the point of exposure. I shot through the film twice, first through the original and then through a negative of the original. The result is that all the blacks have been replaced by one layer of animation and all the whites by another. The surprise? How indelible the actual soundie is in the final film. It is now visible as the difference between my two replacements. I like to think that I added another twin act."