Used Innocence

Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.

Cine-diaries about rock bands and personalities from the eighties from the archives of Edgar Pêra.

Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put together a side program showcasing the medium in all its shapes and forms: surrealist film, absolute film, dadaist films, abstract film,… The side program would soon become a festival in its own right: ‘EXPRMNTL’, dedicated to experimental cinema, and would become a mythical gathering of the avant-garde…

A day in the life of director Boris Lehman: he wanders from cafe to bookshop, cinema to museum, writer to musician, and into the storeroom of the film archive... He celebrates his birthday in an alleyway, with a friend, and finishes his journey with an escapade to Bruges and a stroll by the North Sea. The camera plays dirty tricks and the sound recorder gets carried away, to the point that both are clearly telling Boris to stop filming. Yet he persists…

A short film about the meeting of a Trappist monk and a Zen Buddhist master.

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.

A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.

SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).

Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.

An observational film that using the fragmented format of a newscast program proposes a cinematic glance to the same reality depicted daily by the media.

An experimental docu-fiction short from hours of collected material shot by the director. Different scenes, from drunk parties with friends to shots of the Dutch landscape during a train ride, are cut together to see if a narrative story can be constructed from nothing but randomly shot footage.