FUCK TV

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

Trapline

Ellie Epp’s 12-shot study of a soon-to-be-demolished public bath in London, which “maps another way out of structural film toward a cinema of delicate implication".

Echo

A reframing of the classic tale of Narcissus, the director draws on snippets of conversation with a trusted friend to muse on gender and identity. Just as shimmers are difficult to grasp as knowable entities, so does the concept of a gendered self feel unknowable except through reflection. Is it Narcissus that Echo truly longs for, or simply the Knowing he possesses when gazing upon himself?

Grid

A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).

Anhell69

A funeral car cruises the streets of Medellín, while a young director tells the story of his past in this violent and conservative city. He remembers the pre-production of his first film, a Class-B movie with ghosts. The young queer scene of Medellín is casted for the film, but the main protagonist dies of a heroin overdose at the age of 21, just like many friends of the director. Anhell69 explores the dreams, doubts and fears of an annihilated generation, and the struggle to carry on making cinema.

Amanar Tamasheq

Amanar Tamasheq parts from the exciting adventure of the director on a trip with the Tuaregs rebels in the desert of Mali, to convert the camera into the most powerful weapon. The terrible history of this people, always under threat, is built through their own words in a text that, from their own statements reworked, overlaps in the form of subtitles to images. These, far in the highest degree of language that normally tells the violent, they gain political power and radical rarely seen.

Here We Are

A housekeeper received a film made by her daughter. It's a film that combines found footages of Thailand during the Cold War with the present days images of Bangkok. Through these images she tells a story of the house owner and her own story of coming to the capital.

Interview and Reading: Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas recites poems of his, both in English and Lithuanian. Exclusive Mekas interview by the poet Sparrow. The legendary poet-film critic and film diarist waxes philosophical in rare extended setting exhibiting his transcendental poetic humor. Jonas attacks the crass world of TV advertising and sell-out commercial filmmakers. Contributes zen anecdotes and filmmaking advice. Choice clips include Mekas' Film Diaries with deceivingly formalist amateur "home movie" style, but in small bursts of expression in a quick collage. Footage from Jonas' homeland as well as clips of famed pop figures John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Tiny Tim.

Those Who Wander

What are they? What do they seek? When all the lights go out, they will wander. And you will never see them.

Once Faithful

Days slip away in a former baptist church haunted by its past

He Who Dances Passes

A being from the beyond returns to Chile in 2019, embodied in a worker who dreams of social upheaval. Viral videos intertwine with fiction to narrate the experiences of a polarized country that wanders between drama and absurdity, illusion and failure.

The Ruins

A drawing of an ancient bathhouse in a French travel book to the Middle East sparks a visual poem, inspired by the Arab poetry tradition of "standing by the ruins". The ambivalence of the five-hundred-year-old image gestures towards enduring capitalist and colonial power dynamics. Pleasure and pain, seduction and domination, archives and ruins, histories of sex, and histories of empire, all commingle in this essay film. What transpires is a web of visible and invisible threads where homosexuality in the Middle East today seems to be enmeshe

Le crash

Let Us Persevere in What We Have Resolved Before We Forget

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

Parergon

“All that which in Picture is not of the body or argument thereof is Landskip, Parergon, or By-work” (Thomas Blount, Glossographia, 1656).

Witness

Experimental short film by Barbara Sykes

I Am Sitting in a Room

I am sitting in a room is a sound art piece by American composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier composed in 1969. The first performance of the work was in 1970 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In collaboration with his partner Mary Lucier. The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room while re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Due to the room's particular size and geometry, certain resonant frequencies are emphasized while others are attenuated. Eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic resonance of the room.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?

Soap Opera of a Frozen Filmmaker

"Soap Opera of a Frozen Filmmaker" project is a series of seven episodes of cinematic diaries. It is the unique point of view of an anonymous artist whose entire essence of existence is to make films, but he is rejected on every front time after time. During the process he ponders his life as an artist, the nature of material society and life in general, in which his owm life eventually become a tragedy.

Desde Lejos

This film combines original 16mm footage with 16mm film found on ebay, called “Gauchos and Rancheros in Argentina”. This is an American documentary of Argentina commissioned by the Philadelphia department of education in 1969, it contrasts city and suburban life in Argentina through scenes of gauchos and ranch life, scientific farming methods, and examples of Spanish architecture and furnishings.This film was manipulated by dying it, sewing on it and combining it with an original 16mm film. The resulting composition explores the artist’s personal relationship to her home country of Argentina through an American gaze, thinking about the American dream, displacement and the passage of time.