Movies: Abstract

Yoshika has had a crush on Ichimiya, whom she calls "the One" since she was in middle school. Now, a 24-year-old salarywoman, her all-consuming fixation has prevented her from even considering another candidate for boyfriend until an office colleague...

In this surrealistic and free-form follow-up to the Monkees' television show, the band frolic their way through a series of musical set pieces and vignettes containing humor and anti-establishment social commentary....

A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom....

The film tells a story of Mariana, a nurse who leaves Lisbon to accompany an immigrant worker in a comatose sleep on his trip home to Cape Verde. The devoted Portuguese nurse took a journey only to find herself lost in abstract drama....

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Imag...

Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle....

An exploration of Rodez Cathedral and its stained glass windows: praying figures and scientific imagery. A study on color, repetition and flickering consisting of 292 photographs....

The Goal Is To Live is an infinitely-looping assemblage constructed out of repurposed content from the popular show How It’s Made, which chronicles the factories that create everyday objects. The film takes Dina Kelberman’s practice of accumulation ...

Exploring helplessness, Pyre is an experimental short film which personifies death as a ghoul in a dress, drawing closer and closer until striking....

A girl sitting on an autumn leaf-filled sidewalk communicates with a mysterious figure across the street....

A short film released alongside AFI's 2003 album Sing The Sorrow. The four members of AFI search to obtain a mysterious box that bears a resemblance to the album's artwork. There are two separate soundtracks for the film, one composed by AFI guitaris...

A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-e...

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, abstraction - that most quintessentially modernist innovation - maintains a peculiarly contradictory position. Used, on one hand, by post-modernist artists as just one more quotable style amongst many, it...

cloud film meditates on the calming effects of watching clouds, while also demanding action to combat our impact on the environment. It calls attention to a loss of control as the clouds turn into a storm, reflecting the momentum of climate change. A...

Channelling Lye and McLaren, de Bruyn continues his explorations of ‘direct-to-film’ inspired artwork barely contained within the frame....

Jane Conger Belson Shimane's first film, Logos, premiered in 1957 and was screened at festivals in North America, Europe, and Latin America. The animated film featured an electronic score by Henry Jacobs. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 200...

Rhythm and repetition plays an important role in the animated film Allahu Akbar by Usama Alshaibi. With this film, Alshaibi questions the confrontation between tradition and modernity by drawing inspiration from geometric motives of Islamic art. The ...

A space occupies it, awaiting to be unlocked by a freeing action or notion. What lies ahead is its determination....

[The] Insinuation of accidentally spilled ink that would be running across the paper in random, aleatory oozes displaces the graceful liquidity of the careful animated choreography. - William Moritz...

On a bleak island where monolithic concrete buildings rise above the windswept horizon lies work-colony #191286. Piwonka is one of a handful of migrant workers who are forced to work here under harsh conditions. He has been estranged for two months f...