Available to watch via the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste's media archive.

“Grünes Licht für ehrgeizige, strebsame und arbeitswillige junge Menschen.”

A zoo for National Visit The Zoo Day (USA)

“In the land of the legless, the one-legged woman is queen.”

A mathematics focused movie for National Mathematics Day (India)

 

Mahagonny is filmmaker, artist, musicologist, and alchemist Harry Smith's mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp's masterpiece La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even], aka Le Grand Verre [The Large Glass], which was completed in 1923. It is set to Brecht and Weill's opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny [Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny] from 1930, which was an opera Smith was obsessed with while living in New York's Chelsea Hotel.

“My cinematic excreta is of four varieties:–batiked abstractions made directly on film between 1939 and 1946; optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950; semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962; and chronologically superimposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organized in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and they should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will live forever—they made me gray.”

– Harry Smith, via

Read an interview with Jonas Mekas about Harry Smith and his Mahagonny.

A Christmas tree for National Christmas Tree Day (USA)

 

In August 1942, a Mexican-American man with a broken finger was found semiconscious near Sleepy Lagoon, Ca.. By association, a group of young Latinos was put on trial. This spark, mere months after Roosevelt sent thousands of Japanese Americans to concentration camps and fuelled by Cold War paranoia, eventually set off the Zoot Suit Riots.

 

Zoot Suiters or Pachucos and other “outsiders” like African, Italian and Filipino Americans, were viciously attacked by Anglo-American #sailors. Those suits, all that fabric, this colourful extravagance, they cried out, were hampering the war effort.

“Inflammable desires dampened by day under the cold water of consciousness are ignited that night by the libertarian matches of sleep, and burst forth in showers of shimmering incandescence.”

– The Dreamer

The Dreamer, Anger, dreams of a similar violent attack. The sadism is harrowing, filmed with such exquisite eye that it's impossible to look away. Blood finds its way out, pulsating and spurting. Ambiguous glances. A hand, no finger. A young man awakes, is born. The dreamer is still asleep.

A Judith or Judy for National Judith Day (USA).

 

By times, The Savage Eye has more in common with mondo than with drama. Judith's betrayed, by her husband. She takes a plane out out out. To Los Angeles, where an angel – it's their town after all – talks to her. About her life, the old one and the new. She tries to reinvent herself with new clothes, a hairstyle, a manicure. It fills the longs days, that too. She attends bloodsports. A burlesque, with her new lover, a married man. There are bleeders and drinkers and jumpers. Sticky sheets. New eyes and fiery tongues, courtesy of Jesus. What is Judith's life if not a stranger's.

“I dream of resurrection in a party dress.”

– Judith X

Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick's lonely exploration of a gritty, hopeless LA was filmed over 4 years by photographers Haskell Wexler, Helen Levitt, and Jack Couffer in wonderful, merely wordless cinéma vérité. It feels naked and raw, and broke ground for the American New Wave that came crashing in almost a decade later.

Christmas lights for National Christmas Lights Day (USA)

 

It took experimental filmmaker Marie Menken three years to shoot Lights. From midnight until 1 AM, she filmed New York's window displays during the holiday season, using her camera, motion, colour, and available light sources as her paintbrush.

“There is no why for my making films. I just liked the twitters of the machine, and since it was an extension of painting for me, I tried it and loved it. In painting I never liked the staid and static, always looked for what would change the source of light and stance, using glitters, glass beads, luminous paint, so the camera was a natural for me to try—but how expensive!”

– Marie Menken, c. 1966

Filming at night helped to avoid unwanted interruptions of people and cars, but turned out to be problematic for her hand-cranked #Bolex, which kept stalling in NYC's icy winter nights.