Movies: Abstract

Animation using cutout animation to craft a bizarre science fiction experiment. Moving spheres, such as balloons and bubbles, are superimposed on static backgrounds to suggest travel and discovery....

1995 Joan C. Gratz claymation short film...

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

A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shoshtakovich, and replete with rapidly mutat...

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, co...

The work is a video-poem, an exploration and reflection on the sense of vision as a tool to understand signifiers - but also and more importantly, as means through which we can interpret something by feeling it on an intuitive level. stripped of thei...

A unique journey across a topography created entirely from a form of digital light and shadow—a bristling terrain of poles bending the light in every direction. This film is the remake of Barcode, an abstract road-movie about light and shadows....

A film unmade-- That is, Survage's film was never realized in the traditional sense-- At the time, such a project was beyond technological possibility. His pioneering efforts to combine luminous, expressive painting and the moving picture were furthe...

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

A condensation of a handful of sunsets with various visual moods. Red and blue as opposites that still find a way to cohere. Concrete silhouettes over an ever-changing, expanding canvas. Every movement is collective, molecular. Over an invisible hori...

Number Two’ is an audio visual work which materializes the definite possibilities of sight and the existence of light in space with the drama in between image and sound as a reaction . It treats the surface of the film itself as a digital artefact th...

Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create...

An abstract animated film inspired by the work of jazz musician Chico Hamilton....

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...

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...

Cut up animation and collage technique by Harry Smith synchronized to the jazz of Thelonious Monk's Mysterioso....

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 ...

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This newly rediscovered short was created in Jim's home studio in Bethesda, MD around 1961. It is one of several experimental shorts inspired by the music of jazz great Chico Hamilton. At the end, in footage probably shot by Jerry Juhl, Jim demonstra...

Abstract horror short about a girl's face....