A Minimal Difference was shot using a multi-plane camera setup and features receding cell paintings referenced from widely circulated press images (barricades from political protests in Bangkok, bodies piled after the 2010 Haitian earthquake, furniture from an eviction in Cleveland, destruction in Gaza) and more metaphoric pictures (a logjam, clouds or smoke). Each tableau is separated into visual planes that, when filmed with movement, mimic the perception of optical distance.

Piano practice, road kill, ice cave. Daffodils. The night is exactly like the day only less obvious. Shot and narrated by Dani Leventhal, written and edited by Steve Reinke.

A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saens or Shostakovich, and filled with colorful forms, elegant design and sprightly, dance-like-rhythms, Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. “Beginning with Escape, Mary Ellen began to work in color, and used more conventional animation for the main themes in the music, but still combining it with ‘special effect’ backgrounds– sometimes swirling liquids, clouds or fireworks, other times light effects created with conventional stagelighting, such as imploding or exploding circles made by rising in or out of a spotlight.” (William Moritz)

Figure-ground features hand-painted cels filmed in receding distance with a multi-plane camera. Each scene is derived from photographs published online and depicting the aftermath of a death associated – tangentially or directly – with the 2008 global financial crisis: the gruesome drug-debt murder of a child in an economically depressed region; the suicide of Bernie Madoff’s son; an untreated, mentally distressed Iraq war veteran freezes to death in a mountain stream after his manhunt for murder; the murder of Treyvon Martin; the cyanide suicide of a former Wall Street trader in court. The body of each individual is initially excised from the scene and later replaced by abstractions in regular form – a coloured square and an audio tone.

Mosaic is a film of unusual movement, color and sound, created in an unusual way. It is an example of ‘op’ art in film, a play on the retina of the eye. The basis of the film is a single tiny square that divides, eventually forming a colorful mosaic to the animators’ musical orchestration.

A man loses his job and starts falling apart. Phase one, welfare; phase two, moving to an unfamiliar seedy neighbourhood. In phase three, his pack of neighbours affects his mental state. Thinking he’s having hallucinations about the people around him, and to help himself regain normal, banale objectivity, he starts filming them discreetly, like a thief, from the window of his squalid room. Once developed, far from reassuring him, the films drive him from confusion into psychosis.

Movement in Squares is a two-channel video comprised of three documentary sources: video appropriated from a Florida-based foreclosure broker who documents the condition of bank-owned properties at the time of their repossession; studio recordings that document retrospective exhibition catalogues of painter Bridget Riley; voice-over narration from filmmaker David Thompson’s 1979 profile of Riley’s work for the Arts Council of Great Britain.

“James Richards’ Radio at Night grapples with the anxiety and pleasure of seeing and sensing in an era saturated by technology. Like his previous work, this short experimental video collages together appropriated footage from highly disparate sources: intimate fragments from cinema and medical film, an extract of an erotic movie that documents an imagined Venetian costume party, news broadcasts, negative footage of seagulls flying over the ocean, and imagery of pigs and fish being processed at a food facility, to name a few.” (Isla Leaver-Yap)

Arthur Lipsett’s first film received a 1962 Academy Award nomination in the Best Live Action Short category. Like all of his films, Very Nice, Very Nice disrupts the representational value of documentary image and sound, moving beyond the genre’s aesthetic codes of truth and reliability. The result is a sardonic re-reading of 1950s consumerism, mass media and popular culture. Images of the repulsive and often overlooked damage left by both war and technological progress punctuate Very Nice, Very Nice, giving the film an enduring punch.

The Innocents features an image stream, an interview with Truman Capote’s desire, and shapes that correspond to the former through the instructions of the latter. “Jean-Paul Kelly’s elegant and enigmatic The Innocents is partially constructed around a shot-by-shot re-enactment of segments from the Maysles brothers’ 1966 documentary With Love from Truman, with Kelly ingeniously recasting Capote’s desire as the speaker. With its own formal predilections, the film succeeds in drawing parallels with the legendary author’s brazen statements about form and style.” (Andréa Picard)