Forough Farrokhzad

The House is Black (1963)



The only film directed by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, who died tragically just four years later at the age of 32, The House is Black is a documentary on a leprosy colony in Tebriz, Iran, with Farrokhzad's narration of Koranic verses and excerpts from her own poetry.

Jean-Claude Risset/Lillian Schwartz

  

Mutations (1969)

French composer Jean-Claude Risset helped to pioneer computer music at Bell Labs in the early 1960s. Made in collaboration with computer pioneer Lillian Schwartz, this film sets animations by Ken Knowlton and others to Risset's titular composition for solo tape, which features a seemingly infinite glissando among its effects. Click here for part 1 of a 1976 documentary on Schwartz's work with computers.

Henry Hills

Henry Hills

SSS (1988)

Henry Hills filmed several performers on the streets of New York's East Village, editing the footage with music improvised by Tom Cora, Christian Marclay, and Zeena Parkins.

Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)

Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)

"With its long tracking shots through cavernous library hallways and its skeptical corresponding text (courtesy of writer Rémo Forlani), Alain Resnais' short essay film Toute la Mémoire du Monde imagines the Bibliothèque Nationale as a forbiddingly inhuman landscape in which man attempts to imprison "knowledge" in an effort to counter the limits of his own memory. Only in the act of individual selection - a single patron choosing a specific text - is there hope that this undifferentiated mass of knowledge can be redeemed, as the reader makes discriminating use of the collective national memory for the fulfillment of a

B. S. Johnson

Fat Man on a Beach (1973)

British experimental novelist, poet, critic, and filmmaker B.S. Johnson, author of Alberto Angelo (1964) and House Mother Normal (1971) made several films in his brief ten year career. Fat Man on a Beach, finished just before his suicide at age 40, starts with Johnson's unique brand of the absurd and comic, and ends with him walking directly into the sea:

“A simple but audacious idea was proposed: Johnson should revisit his beloved Lleyn penninsula [setting of Johnson's first novel, Travelling People (1963)] . . . and he should make a film about it. The format would be quite straightforward: forty minutes of Johnson sitting on his favourite beach, Porth Ceriad, and talking directly to camera about anything that happened to come into his head" Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V