Racket Busters

Perchance A young boy in a regimented world dreams of a different, freer self. Using found footage from two educational films, Caryn Cline chose, combined, optically-printed and edited scenes to create a new story. Original score by Melissa Grey.

Lucy's Terrace Caryn Cline composes a gentle, poetic film of optically-printed plants and leaves from her neighbor Lucy Goeres' terrace. Goeres also plays the flute on the accompanying musical track (aided with birdcalls and nature sounds as recorded by Cline herself).

In the Conservatory On a gray winter day in Seattle, the Volunteer Park Conservatory offers a trip to a different climate: lush, wildly colorful, strange, and beautiful. IN THE CONSERVATORY experimentally captures the essence of the place, through the use of direct animation, ambient sound, and music. Plants from the conservatory’s winter collection were gleaned and pasted onto clear, 16mm film leader, then re-photographed on an optical printer while they were still fresh, resulting in a second, chance animation. The soundtrack combines ambient sound recorded in the Conservatory with a performance of a Samuel Barber composition, featuring Lucy Goeres on flute and Eliza Garth on piano.

Left Side, Riverside LEFT SIDE, RIVERSIDE experimentally documents the filmmaker's experience of Riverside Park, on the left side of Manhattan. The film combines "live action" footage and in-camera double exposures. This footage is then further layered by superimposing and bi-packing the camera footage with handmade and hand-painted film frames created from plants and flowers gleaned in Riverside Park. The ambient sounds come from both Riverside Park and the filmmaker’s childhood home in northeastern Missouri.

Eye etc. Filmed on vacation in Hawaii, EYE ETC. explores the light, colors and sensuous movement of the Hawaiian culture.

Equinox In 16mm, hole-punched black frames, their inner circles filled with plants gleaned in Seattle, animated and optically-printed, interact with the complex rhythms of Barcelona-born, New York-trained composer and jazz bassist Alexis Cuadrado’s group, Noneto Ibérico.

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting Julian (Percy Marmont) is a poor artist who lives with wife Edith (Alice Joyce) and their newborn baby in Harlem. Struggling to make ends meet, he foregoes his artistic calling and draws for magazines. Reaching his limits, Julian convinces his wife he could reach higher grounds if he were to go to Paris. He moves to Paris while his Edith works at a shop on Fifth Avenue. Each of their lives evolves differently—Edith is courted by a wealthy suitor whom she ignores while pining for her husband, while Julian fails to meet his goals in Paris, returning defeated three years later. The meeting highlight how different their routes have been.

Turner Colorful, energetic, delicate and sensual, this early short by M.M. Serra presents her unique vision of eroticism and poetic cinema in a fast-paced collage of dreamlike imagery. Fragments of a poem by C. Breeze are read and manipulated in a manner recalling the tape experiments of Steve Reich. Rich reds and deep blues stutter and sparkle along with her descriptions of love and "canine sex." TURNER is a brief glimpse at Serra's roots in the New York avant-garde and the Film-makers' Cooperative.

Art Parade ART PARADE is a meditation on staring and display, and on the ambiguous energies that emanate from both. Much of the film is dominated by the stunning presence of Kembra Pfahler (leader and co-founder of rock-performance troupe The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black) escorted by a chorus of her Karen Black Girls.

Notes From the Lower Eas... An experimental documentary filmed over a two-year period, NOTES FROM THE LOWER EAST SIDE includes such personalities as Clayton Patterson, performance artist Penny Arcade, Anthology's own Jed Rapfogel, and other amazing HOWL Fest personalities.