Discover Movies

Henry Geldzahler is a feature-length underground film directed by Andy Warhol, featuring art curator Henry Geldzahler smoking a cigar and becoming increasingly uncomfortable for 97 minutes. The film was shot silent and in black-and-white in the first week of July 1964, using unused film left from the filming of Empire.

A film experimenting with the use of multiple exposed colored lights evoking the mystery of creation, stars and planets, atoms and electrons, souls and spirits

A lonely, bohemian poet befriends the good, the bad and the ugly in this rooftop drama set in New York's lower East side of Eden.

The poignant songs of church-goers, miners, and farmers of Hazard in eastern Kentucky express the joys and sorrows of life among the rural poor. John Cohen of the old-time string band the New Lost City Ramblers evocatively illustrates how music and religion help Appalachians maintain their dignity and traditions in the face of change and hardship. Featuring the noted banjo picker Roscoe Holcomb.

The swingest go-go show ever! Ever!!

The 600th Photo Squadron jumps into combat zones, risking their lives to film the war.

The shifting, abstract color imagery of Jordan Belson's "Cosmos," which unfurls to electronic sound, is attributed in the program notes to the artist's insight from experience with drugs and yoga. - The New York Times

A film about the naturalness of sexuality. Its four sequences feature heterosexual and homosexual lovemaking, dogs copulating, and naked childen at play.

Esteemed actor Cliff Robertson narrates this moving documentary, which was produced just months after President John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination. Through a montage of photos and film clips, the program chronicles the idyllic "Camelot" years of the 35th president and his elegant society wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, as well as JFK's childhood, his naval service during World War II and his early days as a young politician.

Swifty and Shorty ride a bus in New York City.

Instructional training film used to train police officers on tear gas use. Sponsored by Lake Erie Chemical Company.

SONGS 2 & 3: Fire and a mind’s movement in remembering (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).

THE FILMMAKER RECORDS A PORTION OF HIS LIFE IN THE MONTH OF AUGUST (1968), presents an intimate, autobiographical portrait of Malanga’s summer in 1968, capturing fleeting moments with Warhol and other New York artists.

There's dripping and dropping, squishing and squashing, curling and whirling, coming and going; in and out, up and down, when black and white does its thing.

The art collector Timothy Baum, in the mod style of the mid-1960s with a high collar and long sideburns, seems unable to relax, repeatedly swallowing, taking deep breaths, and even speaking briefly to the camera.

Black and White 16mm UCLA Student Film, Preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. When the Bendell girls receive a Doll's House as a gift, they share in the pleasures of the miniatures with their classmates. Yet, The Doll's House reveals the class divides between the Bendell girls' upper-class friends and the poor Kelvie Children, who are forbidden to play with the other girls. Set in the early 1900s, the film captures class divisions though the lens of girlhood and play.

This slow-motion film is a glass snow globe with dancers who topple and bounce off the sides of the frame. Re-purposed at a later retrospective, projected on the side of a white cup.

Every morning a man is born out of a paper bag. He distributes money to the financial world of the Stock Exchange in Wall Street, and disappears into his paper bag again at night. This is the basis for PAPILLOTE, a bizarre fantasy set in some unlikely corners of New York. –B. H. Third Ann Arbor Film Festival: "The satirical and marvelous surprise of the festival was Benjamin Hayeem's PAPILLOTE." –Gregory J. Markopoulos

"Flat image (of snowbound suburban housing tract) blossoms into 3D only when viewer places Eye Opener before the right eye. (Keeping both eyes open, of course. As with all stereo experiences, center seats are best. Space will deepen as one views further from the screen.) The found-sound is X-ratable (not for children or Nancy Reagan) but is important to the film's perfect balance (GLOBE is symmetrical) of divine and profane.. - K.J.

An experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions. Techniques include live action, animation, montage and found images. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2011.

Eikichi Shida, who works in the sales department of Jinbo Bussan, receives a scouting offer from Sakiko Minagawa, the secretary to the president of Nishida Bussan. The president of Nishida Bussan was originally a general manager at Jinbo Bussan, but he created his own company and started to ravage all of Jinbo Bussan's clients.... For the first time, Akira Kobayashi takes on the role of a passionate employee and faces corporate competition.

Test footage of David Allen's Taurus puppet. The beast looks like a combination between an ape and a bulldog. The test footage was shot on 16mm film (shot on a Bolex Camera and had a Motion-Analysis Film Projector) and was copying the climax to the original King Kong.

Last year readers of the underground press were invited to send $5.50 for a 50-foot full color 8mm film that promised to reproduce for the first time "the phenomenon of psychedelic perception." What they received was three minutes' worth of a nude dancing girl so obscured by an ever-changing kaleidoscope of patterns that it didn't matter whether she had clothes on or not. (Not only did this picture, called "Voyage Omega," end up at army posts but also in public libraries of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Currently it's being incorporated into the light show preceding the local production of "The Beard.") - Kevin Thomas, the LA Times, 02/25/68

A day in the life of Enrique Vargas' Guerilla Theater. A short, personal look at radical street theater in New York City.

Uses the authentic setting of the state legislature to study how a bill becomes a state law. Includes how the bill is introduced, faces a committee hearing and is brought to the floor for the assembly to act on and goes to the Senate for final action.

Photographed around the time of statehood, depicts hunting and fishing in Alaska's beautiful scenic wilderness.

"I would say that the films of Mike Kuchar interest me very much. Also, some footage by a young film-maker in Boston, Tom Chomont, his footage (unedited) for Night Blossoms. I was particularly impressed with Mr. Chomont’s footage because it reminded me of the painting (form and color) of Odilon Redon. Too often, the young new American film-maker will leave too many things to chance, thus avoiding that most import ant principle that, I fear, is lacking today in not only the amateur fields, but also in the professional, and that is arete, or excellence." (Gregory J. Markopoulos)

A film exposing the staged commodification and banality of the American "beauty contest" with color overlays of fireworks in reverse-motion. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2011.

"This short, silent film, a gallery of shots put together like a jazz improv, uses many devices to affect the image that comes from the camera. I play with superimpositions, with drawing and scratching on the film, and layering over the camera images with texture and color. The result is a rather rhythmic, physical, playful event intended simply to happen as you watch it. The actual imagery of objects in a museum gallery, seen frequently throughout, was footage shot in the Colby College Museum of art in the 1960s." —Abbott Meader

Short movie based on Picnic at Hanging Rock

This poetic story-documentary shows the death of a tradition as a man reflects on a certain spring of his boyhood. We see a Greek community and culture as it is assimilated into an American city. Filmed in the neighborhoods surrounding the present day site of UIC.

A visit into the home and studio of the artist-poet Leonard Baskin, describing the life and mind of the man.

Short film by Robert Allen Schnitzer as a college student, exploring the workings of the unconscious mind, set against a commentary of the popular culture of late 1960s New York.

This documentary is a zany portrait of the Grey Cup fever that hits the city of Ottawa, Ontario, during Grey Cup week. The film is also about the football game, where the Hamilton Tiger Cats faced the Saskatchewan Roughriders, and it is about Ti-Cats fans and their famous "Oskee Wee Wee", the magical chant with which they exhort their team to victory.

Film starring Akkineni Nageshwara Rao, Jamuna and Haranath

A tall, chain-smoking con man and a short, bulbous patsy of a man are on the highway of life.

Bollywood 1971

August 2, 1964: Long Beach, CA - Ed Parker, known as the Father of American Karate (Kenpo), invites Bruce Lee to give a demonstration. Bruce shows off his “one-inch punch,” and his two-finger push-ups, where he literally does “two” finger push-ups. At his first International Karate Championships are Jay Sebring, the hair stylist for Batman and William Dozier, a producer, who is looking to cast a part in a TV series he was developing. Sebring then gives a film of Bruce’s demo to Dozier who is impressed at Bruce’s “super-human abilities”. Bruce later flies down to Los Angeles for a screen test. February 4, 1965: Gives screen test at 20th Century Fox for TV series Charlie Chan’s Number One Son.

Film starring Adoor Bhasi

SONG 14: Molds, paints and crystals (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).

“An internal probing of the violence and mystery of the American psyche seen through the eye of a black man and the Russian revolution.”– A.T.

This work documents an action by Richard Long the creation of a transient line in nature made by repeatedly walking back and forth in a grassy field.

Made for Art by Telephone – an exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. Morris simply dictated instructions for the making of the film. Despite this conceptual origin, it is also an essentially cinematic ‘performance’, exploiting slow motion, tight framing and an implicit analogy between the transparent glass door against which the figure pushes, and the screen or image surface. The repetitions and variations, the use of gesture, weight and force, give the performance a dance-like gravity.

About a tall, chain-smoking con man and a short, bulbous patsy of a man.

Something of an aesthetic convergence between the diaristic autobiographies and quotidian images of Jonas Mekas (as illustrated in his Diaries, Notes and Sketches chronicles) and the hand crafted dissonance and material violence of Stan Brakhage, “Note to Pati” presents a seemingly typical winter scene – the day after a snow storm as a suburban neighborhood digs out from under the accumulation and children make the most of an unexpected day off from school by playing in their winter wonderland. Saul Levine’s images are diffused, faded, and ephemeral, made all the more dissociating by Levine’s disorienting rapid cut editing, restless and twitching camerawork, and destabilized, quick pan sequences – an evocation of a transitory and wide-eyed innocence.

Ian McHarg interviews politicians and land developers to get an understanding of the plannings for rising population density.

Produced by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, this educational short answers common questions about careers in the rapidly expanding field of nuclear science. The film introduces the types of training, education, and professional roles involved in atomic-energy research, engineering, and power development.

The relentless fight waged by public authorities against drug trafficking… Moroccan gendarmes pursue kif (cannabis) traffickers in northern Morocco.

A short documentary about the Iranian painter, calligrapher, and sculptor Hossein Zenderoudi.

Made by exiled Spanish filmmaker Rosina Prado in 1961, during her studies at the VGIK (All-Russian State University of Cinematography, Soviet Union).

"This film portrays basketball star Bill Bradley in his school days as a Rhodes Scholar, and later as a member of the New York Knickerbockers and a volunteer worker in the Harlem ghetto. The film also shows Bradley as he sees himself and sorts out his thoughts concerning his past and future" (US National Archives).

A performative variation on "Twice a Man” side by side, one running forward, the other backward. The sound is maintained only on the projector playing the film forward. At the midpoint of the film, for one very brief moment, both screens offer the same image.

Short film by Spanish artist Luis Pellegero Bel

American Industrial Promotional Film for Pan American Airlines.

Pigeon Lady is an observational documentary centered around the everyday comings and goings of an elderly woman in Chicago, Clara Miller. Palazzolo films her walking, carrying a shopping bag, and stopping to toss bread crumbs to pigeons and other birds. Palazzolo’s distance from her renders the film a portrait of the city as much as it is of the “pigeon lady.” Set to classical music including Ottorino Respighi’s “The Birds,” Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 1 in D Major,” and Richard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” the film is tender and sensitive, yet hints at the humor and penchant for oddball subjects that would come to define Palazzolo’s later films. Roger Ebert called Pigeon Lady a “masterpiece” and “one of the most moving experimental films” he had ever seen.

Uses animated and live-action sequences to provide a factual analysis of the looming water shortage in industrialized countries, and the ecological hazards implied for the world as the problem reaches a crisis stage.