Ann Arbor Film Festival 2009

A dance film viewed twice (once forward, once backward) in five minutes. The film was shot at single frame exposures as well as 8, 16, 24 and 36 frames per second. Music by Ed Cobb. Dance and vocal by Toni Basil (Antonia Christina Basilotta).

"By my standards, Miss Clarke's picture, an eerie close-up of the metropolitan bridges, is extraordinary. A film that captures the bizarre magic of man-made spans with the movement of a lightning clap and with the same terrible beauty." - Howard Thompson, The New York Times

A meditation on the the origins of behavior and of transformation, the viewer is submerged in the silver sea of the psyche. The milky blindness of the visual cataract surges into a mythic foaming surf, a dormant birthplace for a new way of sensing and knowing. Facing departure and seeking metamorphosis, this film sensually dips its filmic toes into the synesthetic undertows of the unknown.

Cobra Mist explores the relationship between the landscape of Orford Ness and the traces of its unusual military history, particularly the experiments in radar and the extraordinary architecture of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. The place has a sinister atmosphere, which the architecture itself begins to reveal and the sense of foreboding is accentuated through the filmu's soundtrack.

"COMPOSITION shares the same jolly atmosphere as the commercials, but whereas each of Fischinger's previous films had utilized only one basic animation technique, COMPOSITION IN BLUE bursts forth with half a dozen different new techniques - mostly involving pixilation of three-dimensional forms… "The basic format of the film centers around solid objects moving about in an imaginary blue room. Fischinger delights in setting up conditions so that the audience makes associations with probable or 'real' everyday happenings, and then extending the analogy beyond the limits of possibility, bursting the bubble of the audience's credibility. In the opening scene, Fischinger is careful to show the red cubes entering the 'room' through a door, so we will identify with this as a plausible situation. Then he subtly introduces a mirror as the 'floor' to the room, again gaining our confidence in this special but logical reality. Then, at the climax of the film, a cylinder pounds on the mirror-floor and creates circular ripples as if the floor had suddenly turned to water, something that pushes us, with a rush of delight, out of the realm of reality into a joyous world of sheer, absurd fantasy."" - Dr. William Moritz, Film Culture"

What happens when you get into trouble with a not-so-nurturing nurse?

A 2nd part to the triptych started with Hymn to Pan, a material action poetic film about doom and love within nuclear death. Soundtrack: David Kristian

The film begins with a brief flash of molten-red grain followed by a long scene of darkest night-blue sea ripples. Hexagonal refractions and spectral rays puncture alluded-to landscapes—rivers, skies, prairies, trees, mountains. Graphic (yet spatially free-floating) imagery slices intently wrought rhythms of light and dark color fields, producing afterimages. The film concludes with bright, almost-discernable window shapes, hinting at an opening to a different realm.