Movies: Abstract

Yoshika has had a crush on Ichimiya, whom she calls "the One" since she was in middle school. Now, a 24-year-old salarywoman, her all-consuming fixation has prevented her from even considering another candidate for boyfriend until an office colleague...

In this surrealistic and free-form follow-up to the Monkees' television show, the band frolic their way through a series of musical set pieces and vignettes containing humor and anti-establishment social commentary....

A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom....

Forced to confront adulthood, a teenage girl detached from reality prepares to leave her childhood home....

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

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 political assassination leads to division and chaos....

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...

To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their moveme...

"We follow Detective Rodriguez on a case that will take him to new and abstract places and feelings"...

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Imag...

The film tells a story of Mariana, a nurse who leaves Lisbon to accompany an immigrant worker in a comatose sleep on his trip home to Cape Verde. The devoted Portuguese nurse took a journey only to find herself lost in abstract drama....

Music: Carl Stone. Colored pen-and-ink drawings, like topological maps of biomorphic objects, grow and evolve from the red star. Once the master image is formed, this continuously throbbing, pulsating sight is used to ring changes based on years of o...

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

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...

Two Space systematically explores symmetries used by Islamic artists to create abstract temple decorations. The two dimensional patterns, like the tile patterns of Islamic temples, are generated by performing a set of symmetry operations (translatio...

A man's car somehow becomes completely autonomous and takes the powerless driver, to a scrap yard, or a 'cemetery for cars', where several more vehicles are waiting to be crushed by powerful reducing machines, their passengers still inside....

Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle....

...

1995 Joan C. Gratz claymation short film...