Imagina

Johann Lurf compiled his film solely from images of the universe drawn from a total of 550 films across motion picture history. The result is a compelling poetic essay that is as much about the way we represent outer space as it is about the cosmos itself.

This rich collage of shots, drawn from security camera images, pop culture, political newscasts, and even medieval art, is a playful exploration of the boundaries and character of everyday narratives.

This seminal cinematic portrait of Jamaica and its inhabitants compellingly merges the country’s spiritual, material, historical, and cultural contexts into a visual poem with a unique rhythm and an engaging narrative. Khalik Allah has created a colorful collage of the island nation, with images that exist almost between dream and reality.

While studying in France in the 1980s, Issei Sagawa shot his roommate, raped her corpse, and then began to eat it. Shot in extreme closeups that elicit feelings of revulsion, the documentary takes the viewer on an anthropological journey to the very limits of humanity, to a world of forbidden desire, fetish, and morality twisted beyond recognition.

For 20 years the Cassini planetary probe supplied humanity with new findings on the moons and rings of Saturn. Using archive footage and staged scenes, an original lament emerged for this particular space mission that organically links unknown desolate spaces, technology, and humans’ very existence.

A boy and girl wandering alone through lush terrain undergo a journey to real and imagined landscapes. This cinematic diptych by Croatian director Željka Suková is a playful allegory with an original approach to sound.

Three years ago a negative was found of a lost Finnish film made in 1937. After years of natural chemical processes and gradual degradation, the nitrate frames transformed the images of the filmed melodrama. Portions of the scanned negative, with all their defects left as is, make up a fascinating materialization of time and bear witness to the mutability of meaning and perception.

By mutually overlapping and approaching each other, mildly distorted images that have been photographed by a device sensitive to infrared radiation produce an almost hypnotic collage. This enchanting short film – created through optical illusion, perspective, the objects under observation, and even the camera itself – can cause one’s head to spin.

An abandoned upscale constructivist building in the middle of Moscow recalls the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Exploring the darkened rooms, stairways, and corridors at once becomes an investigation of an architecture inseparable from its history. As in a horror movie, spectral figures come to life that are caught in a web of time.

Guy Maddin and collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson used hundreds of film and television clips to create a fascinating tribute to San Francisco and to what is perhaps the best known movie ever shot there: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. And like that work, their film provides an obsessively erotic, topographic, and cinephilic experience.

The Imperial Valley stretches to the southern border of California. Through the efforts and investment of the agricultural industry, an inhospitable desert region was transformed into an oasis of verdure whose existence is subject to the strictly defined demands of human engineering. Contemplating the relationship between the landscape and civilization, the film unfolds in almost abstract shots taken from a bird’s-eye view.

Austrian film structuralist Siegfried A. Fruhauf takes inspiration from elements of the so-called phantom rides of silent film and transforms them into a distinctively original spectral trip, in which he tackles symmetry and perspective, and sets in motion an eternal conflict between industrial technology and elusive nature.

Eluding easy genre categorization, the film captures two characters, an aging clown and his daughter, in their oppressive microcosm full of aggression, loathing, fear, and anger. The visually spellbinding approach relies on a daring concept that aims to continually agitate and thereby create a uniquely rich viewing experience.

Soothing shots of the countryside complement a picturesque image of the landscape. But something hangs in the air and change is unstoppable. The creeping specter of a horrifying future permeates the environment. The found-footage film, which can be read as a portrait of the United States before the last presidential election, excels for original work with music and imagination.

A spectral landscape where human traces have completely disappeared. Only animals under the cover of darkness quietly await the arrival of a mystic spirit diffusing over the forest basins. This feature-length cinematic nocturne is a nightmare, a romantic excursion into unbridled wilderness, and an apocalyptic vision in one.

James Benning, who has been breaking the habits of even the more indiscriminate fans of non-narrative film since the 1970s, dispensed with a classic story in this, his newly-restored first feature. Emanating a childlike joy from the surprising possibilities of a pure cinematic language, the work toys with the relationship between the characters, props, movements, and spaces of semantically unconnected scenes.