Movies: Abstract

Abstract Day is a semi-abstract animation film by Oerd van Cuijlenborg based on a story which is told in sound. We witness a day in the life of a couple, who fight, make love and escape the hot and crowded city. It is a simple story in which the visu...

A blind man stumbles about in a desert before his seeing stick is caught in a bear trap. Crawling, he manages to find a waiting line composed of the blind queuing outside a cinema. Their thoughts are represented by the twelve absurdist sketches that ...

A sculptor models a face with boxing gloves....

A couple are watching television together. Over time, the shows become more bizarre: a news report about the arrest of two terrorists reveals they have the same faces as the two spectators; in another, a female strips for the man and finally a politi...

A man pays local children to bring him flies. After having cut off their wings and legs, he sticks them on the walls of his apartment. When a prostitute appears at his door, he sees in her the final piece to his work....

A man is horribly tortured by another who wants him to reveal where his girlfriend is hiding....

A man comes home at night and is attacked by a bottle....

A subway passenger suffers from hallucinations and sees the metro that he has just boarded accelerate and gain speed quickly....

2001 Joan C. Gratz animated short...

This film is made by some beautiful and unique alchemical transformations of the film material itself. It is a visual expedition into the world of matter, which shows the bizarre richness of the smallest particles floating in the film emulsion. The c...

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 wh...

Cuba programmed solid areas and volumes instead of the vector dots of the previous two films. It also in four "colors": black, white, light grey and dark grey. In five episodes, he alternates single events involving ribbon-like figures following intr...

Non-narrative film, highly manipulated: tape-over-frames, ink-tinted, bleached and drawn into. As a montage, abstractly and rhythmically intense. Super-8, silent, color, b&w. Dedicated to Bill Gubbins....

Filmed in an empty shop, the remaining features of the space are used to create a kaleidoscopic light film. Ceiling lamps become coloured spheres and circles that sweep across the frame. Pillars provide wipes and fades, window shutters are hole punch...

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked separately, preferring to see if the score and visual track would synchronise by chance. Lye also experimented ...

Odds & Ends is a sly comment on the collage film and Beat culture. To discarded travel and advertising footage found at a local film laboratory, Belson Shimane added a mélange of animation—assemblages, cutouts, color fields, and line drawings—and fau...

The screen is divided again and again until the picture arranged in ever changing strips bursts into whirring dynamic....

An attempt to constitute a human / machine dialogue. It shows the filmmaker’s blood as seen / heard with the eyes / ears of the machine which is a film projector with optical sound. He affixed his blood onto clear film leader by cutting into the fles...

An abstract animated short by Michael Theodore....

Suggestion is the rock, and the physical evidence is the evanescent spray that breaks against the unseen. Transitive enharmonics of things touching in middair, an air which is Time—not an actual intersection, but with a consequence as powerful as pre...