In between our color films, we're throwing in a hefty dose of experimentation (on a Saturday for a change)! It's the weekend, it will be immersive; standing at the beginning, then walking, then dancing and finally dancing through the cinema, hall and foyer if our concept works: Because: The door of the Blue Salon remains open, outside and inside blur, there are drinks and music in the foyer and atrium of the HfG. It goes from our favorite bartender to our favorite DJ and from there in front of our favorite screen, where a roll of experimental short films runs in a loop all night. The films pick up the mood of the evening, set it, reinforce it, break it, you decide, dancing through the HfG by night.
Meditation
- Meditation
- Animation
- USA
- 1971
- Director: Jordan Belson
- 5 min
- 16mm
- Original Version
Meditation is an experimental short film that offers a visual interpretation of the meditation experience through hypnotic patterns and kaleidoscopic color compositions. Inspired by the teachings of Yogananda, Ramakrishna and Sri Ramana Maharshi, Belson uses innovative techniques to depict a state of calm and enlightenment.Representing the avant-garde cinema of the 1950s, the film shows Belson's contribution to visual art and the exploration of the medium as a tool for spiritual representation.
Tango
- Tango
- Animation
- Poland
- 1981
- Director: Zbigniew Rybczyński
- 8 min
- 35mm
- Original Version
- with Aoles Sport, Kenny McCormick
The animated avant-garde film TANGO, made in 1980 by Polish experimental filmmaker and artist Zbigniew Rybczyński, begins with a boy climbing over a window into a room to retrieve a ball. A snapshot that is repeated seemingly endlessly.
Jüm-Jüm
- Jüm-Jüm
- Experimental
- Germany
- 1967
- Director: Werner Nekes, Dore O.
- 9 min
- 16mm
- Original Version
- with Dore O.
Jüm-Jüm shows a series of still images in which a woman swings in front of a large painting of a phallus. The film creates a rhythmic interplay between movement and static images, using its unique visual composition to captivate viewers. Directed by Dore O. and Werner Nekes, the film reflects their jointly developed artistic methodology, which is characterized by the precise manipulation of various film techniques. This approach is based on a comprehensive investigation of visual and perceptual experiences.
Kustom Kar Kommandos
- Kustom Kar Kommandos
- Music
- USA
- 1965
- Director: Kenneth Anger
- 3 min
- 16mm
- Original Version
- with Sandy Trent
This fragment, shot in San Bernardino at the very time when car customization was becoming a commercial subculture and journalists like Tom Wolfe were writing about it, is a dreamy little gem - the most perfect of Anger's films. He himself provided the music, the pink background and the white cotton swab used to clean the engine. Anger assumed that the car's creator, who is anonymous in the film, had not noticed that the tailor-made seats, which were supposed to perfectly enclose his body, were shaped like labia. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Arabesque for Kenneth Anger
- Arabesque for Kenneth Anger
- Documentary
- USA
- 1961
- Director: Marie Menken
- 5 min
- 16mm
- Original Version
- with Willard Maas, Kenneth Anger
While traveling through Spain with fellow filmmaker Kenneth Anger in 1958, Menken shot this work in a single day at the Alhambra, a fortress complex in Granada. Later she added composer Teiji Ito’s soundtrack of classical guitar, castanets, and hand clapping; the percussive rhythm intensifies the alternating flashes of graphic patterning and long panning shots that trace the Moorish buildings’ ornate curvature. Menken’s experimentation with movement was innovative, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage recounted: “This is one of the first films that took full advantage of the enormous freedom of the hand-held camera. In the history of cinema up to that time, Marie’s was the most free-floating hand-held camera short of newsreel catastrophe shots.”