Arcadia Public Library

Avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy reads an abstract of his latest book to a haunting video collage of disaster and beauty by director Johan Grimonprez.

'Damned If You Don't' is Friedrichs subversive and ecstatic response to her Catholic upbringing. Blending conventional narrative technique with impressionistic camerawork, symbols and voice-overs, this film creates an intimate study of sexual expression and repression. Featuring Peggy Healey as a young nun tormented by her desire for the sultry irresistible Ela Troyano. --Kanopy.

This short film weaves an unexpected narrative from Hitchcock’s trail of walk-on parts, in which the master himself is pursued by a number of shadowy doppelgängers, caught up in a world of mistaken identity. Playing out a multi-leveled ‘reality’, Grimonprez’s cinematic twists and turns echo the trademark of the Master of Suspense, while radiating a quiet and beguiling surrealism reminiscent of that other great master, Rene Magritte.

An anthropologist, who tries to decode corporate culture, gets obsessed with the story of a parachutist who died after his equipment malfunctioned. In the parachutist’s finitude - caught in an ultimate meditative moment of plunging to an approaching death - the anthropologist sees a sudden and catastrophic voiding of the webs that hold and cradle us all.

An award-winning animated children's fable about the power of advertising, the meaning of life and ultimately the test of a mother's love.

35mm 1.33:1 black & white silent 20fps, 6:40 minutes; production assistance Man Ray, Marc Allégret; new music by Gustavo Matamoros; preserved by Det Danske Filminstitut. Thought provoking and offensive are possible ways to interpret the ten optical discs and corresponding puns displayed in the film. The word play fo French syllogisms gleefully collides with the protruding-receding optical illusions of the rotating spheres. Julien Levy called the...

Ballet Mécanique is a Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy (with cinematographic input from Man Ray). It has a musical score by the American composer George Antheil. However, the film premiered in a silent version on 24 September 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exposition for New Theater Technique)...

35mm enlarged from 16mm with 2K digital insert from 16mm 1.37:1 black & white sound, 12:27 minutes; production assistance Miriam Arsham, Alexander Hammid; with Chao-li Chi; music a mix of Chinese classical flute and drums recorded in Haiti by Maya Deren; preserved by Bruce Posner and Anthology Film Archives at Cineric, Inc. and Trackwise from camera original, optical negative and composite prints with funding provided by the Women's Film Preservation...

35mm 1.33:1 color sound, 7:02 minutes; production assistance John Cage; music_Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2_by Franz Liszt; courtesy Warner Bros.,Turner Entertainment Co. A milestone in object animation, Fischinger manipulated hundreds of paper cutouts hung on invisible wires and shot a frame-at-a-time in close synchronization to Liszt's rhapsody. The dance of shapes resembles a voyage through an imaginary space where "the keen sensation of depth becomes...

16mm 1.37:1 color sound, 11:46 minutes; music Bumblebees Sip Honey by Peliatan Gamelan; mastered from a composite print; courtesy of the filmmaker, Chicago Film Archives. DL2 reflects the influence of the American Bauhaus movement in Chicago introduced by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy during the late 30s/early 40s. The film was made by shocking 10-foot strips of unprocessed black and white film into tanks of cold water, fixer, hot water, developer and then repeating...