TSPDT's Brief Encounters

The Pier / La Jetee is a masterpiece from French director Chris Marker from 1962. A post apocalyptic science fiction short film in the form of a photo collage. The film inspired the film ’12 Monkeys.’

Sherlock Jr. is an American silent film comedy starring and directed by Buster Keaton from 1924. The film is about a film demonstrator who must fight for his life.

The family of a Parisian shop-owner spends a day in the country. The daughter falls in love to a man at the inn, where they spend the day.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí present 16 minutes of bizarre, surreal imagery.

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

In a Lower Manhattan industrial loft, a camera very slowly zooms into a photograph on a wall while various people occasionally enter and exit.

A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.

In a repressive boarding school with rigid rules of behavior, four boys decide to rebel against the director on a celebration day.

A depiction of life in wartime Britain during the Second World War. Director Humphrey Jennings visits many aspects of civilian life and of the turmoil and privation caused by the war, all without narration.

A Trip to The Moon is a science fiction film from the French film pioneer Georges Méliès from the year 1902 about a trip to the moon. The film was the first film with a self-contained plot and was the beginning of the Science Fiction genre.

Set in a leper colony in the north of Iran, The House is Black juxtaposes "ugliness," of which there is much in the world as stated in the opening scenes, with religion and gratitude.

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.

Skazka Skazok (Tale of Tales) is a 27-minute animated short film, considered the masterpiece of influential Russian animator Yuri Norstein. Told in a non-narrative style by free association, the film employs various techniques including puppets, cut-outs, and traditional cell animation. Using classical music and '30s jazz tunes instead of dialogue.

An army of gay/nazi bikers make their engines roar and ride the way to pain/pleasure as sexual and sadistic symbols are intercut into the dazing chaos and rhythmic experiences of this underground film by cult director Anger.

Two prisoners in complete isolation, separated by the thick brick walls, and desperately in need of human contact, devise a most unusual kind of communication.

Filmmaker and artist Jack Smith described his own film as a “comedy set in a haunted movie studio.” Flaming Creatures begins humorously enough with several men and women, mostly of indeterminate gender, vamping it up in front of the camera and participating in a mock advertisement for an indelible, heart-shaped brand of lipstick. However, things...

The last collaboration of Artavazd Peleshian and cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov is a film-essay about Armenia's shepherds, about the contradiction and the harmony between man and nature, scored to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

A young boy discovers a stray balloon, which seems to have a mind of its own, on the streets of Paris. The two become inseparable, yet the world’s harsh realities finally interfere.

An early example of ultra-realism, this movie contrasts the quiet, bucolic life in the outskirts of Paris with the harsh, gory conditions inside the nearby slaughterhouses. Describes the fate of the animals and that of the workers in graphic detail.

The subject of the film was the Hauka movement. The Hauka movement consisted of mimicry and dancing to become possessed by French Colonial administrators. The participants performed the same elaborate military ceremonies of their colonial occupiers, but in more of a trance than true recreation.

Simon, a deeply religious man living in the 4th century, wants to be nearer to God so he climbs a column. The Devil wants him come down to Earth and is trying to seduce him.

A narrator recounts the state of Great Britain near the end of WWII via a visual diary for the titular baby boy born in September 1944.

A chilling depiction of a series of violent killings during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

A young woman move towards a house that holds a potentially dangerous spirit that has been tormenting her. The woman tries to fight against the film itself as it starts to cause the world to collapse.

Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like Matisse. Green objects occasionally appear. Most wings are translucent. The technique makes them...

Originally commissioned by an Austrian couple in 1961 to photograph a travel diary documenting their wild game hunt, Kubelka shot three hours of film and recorded fourteen hours of audio. Over the next few years, Kubelka toiled in the editing bay, producing a work charged with intricate, ironic brutality.

At a morgue, forensic pathologists conduct autopsies of the corpses assigned. "S. Brakhage, entering, WITH HIS CAMERA, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without our knowing exactly why. All of us, in the...

Cornell employs clips from 1931's jungle melodrama East of Borneo – more specifically, clips of its lead actress, Rose Hobart – to disquieting effect. Through Cornell's collage editing, Hobart becomes a singular object of desire and dread, trapped in an exotic paradise.

A train arrives at La Ciotat station.

Experimental, cinematic symphony of Granada, José Val del Omar's birthplace.

This documentary short examines the special train on which mail is sorted, dropped and collected on the run, and delivered in Scotland on the overnight run from Euston, London to Glasgow.

La Sortie des usines Lumière is one of the first films in the history of cinema and a milestone. Three different versions of the film exist.

Another early experiment in portraiture from Tait. In filming her mother she asks the wider question of how much the camera can reveal of the person.

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Cote d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.

Stop-motion animated short film in which a puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

The short-tempered Daffy Duck must improvise madly as the backgrounds, his costumes, the soundtrack, even his physical form, shifts and changes at the whim of the animator.

This film memorializes the leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, on the occasion of his death. It narrates the story of a life which is also the story of a nation-recounting his important accomplishments in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism.

An experimental film, the last in Peter Kubelka's trilogy of “metric films”. Each frame of Arnulf Rainer is composed of darkness or light and silence or sound.

The first part of Bill Douglas' influential trilogy harks back to his impoverished upbringing in early-'40s Scotland. Cinema was his only escape - he paid for it with the money he made from returning empty jam jars - and this escape is reflected most closely at this time of his life as an eight-year-old living on the breadline with his half-brot...

Adebar is the first of Peter Kubelka's 'metric films', in which every element of the composition is precisely ordered and in relation to the gestalt. The film is made up of single units---13, 26 and 52 frames long---which are subjected to a complex rule-system, including a strict use of positive and negative space, that determines their structur...

A study of the psychology of a champion ski-jumper, whose full-time occupation is carpentry.

In 1957, Peter Kubelka was hired to make a short commercial for Schwechater beer. The beer company undoubtedly thought they were commissioning a film that would help them sell their beers; Kubelka had other ideas. He shot his film with a camera that did not even have a viewer, simply pointing it in the general direction of the action. He then to...

Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth. Old song of Mexican hero, Valentin, sung by blind Jose Santollo Nadiso en Santa Cruz de la Soledad.

A lyrical portrait of Amsterdam and its changing appearance during a rain-shower.

Gromit finds himself being pushed out of his room and home by a new lodger who is actually a ruthless criminal (and a small penguin). The penguin is planning a robbery and needs to use Wallace and his mechanical remote controlled trousers to pull off the raid. However, Gromit is wise to the penguin and comes to the rescue.

Bruce Conner's landmark experimental film consisting entirely of found footage edited to a new score.

On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's head, then the birth itself; we watch a pair of hands tie off and cut the umbilical cord. With t...

Little Stabs at Happiness is a collection of silent shorts Jacobs shot from the period of 1959-1963. Jaunty tunes (and a somber reflection) accompany the footage.

Stop-motion photography blends with extreme slow-motion in Clair's first and most 'dada' film, composed of a series of zany, interconnected scenes. We witness a rooftop chess match between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, a hearse pulled by a camel (and chased by its pallbearers) and a dizzying roller coaster finale. A film of contradictions and agre...

Michael Snow narrates a series of Hollis Frampton's photographs (speaking as Frampton, in the first person)—as each picture catches fire on a hot plate.