Manuel DeLanda

In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood.

A noir mostly set in a bathroom stall and stairwell. A private dick trapped in a tight spot. A narrator searching for a way out of the story.

With research that spans the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger to modern mythologies in which time reversal plays a crucial role — such as failed time machines, speed of light travel, and occult practices involving speech — Stracke combines science and philosophy in an attempt to defy death through cinema and the notion of time reversal.

The film consists of five different versions of the same scene.

From the 1970s urban interventions on billboards, Ism Ism (1970), to his recent digital manipulation of digital footage, Manuel DeLanda keeps testing the rough edges of perception.

Once thought lost, but recently found and restored by Anthology Film Archives, artist/philosopher Manuel De Landa’s Super 8 Ism Ism captures his truly inspired collage mutations of New York City subway ads during the mid-to-late 70s. Slicing and dicing the perfect faces of models into deviant ghouls, Ism Ism turns the homogenate into the ripening rot of nightmares.

A beguiling swirl of movie references buried beneath oscillating animated interventions.

The editing strategies parallel the personal relationships depicted, and a mismatched cut is literally only the other side of a mismatched couple. Rarely have sound, image and the spatio-temporal coordinates of narrative illusion been buffeted about so vigorously.

A short survey of the small-gauge narrative film, beginning with the Kuchars' Sylvia's Promise (1962). Primarily focused on East Coast artists, the work of Eric Mitchell, Manuel DeLanda and Ericka Beckman is highlighted.

"The very first footage I shot in NYC, back in 1975. This version was put together in 1981 when I blew up the original super 8 to 16mmm. All the special effects (wipes of different types) are hand drawn with black ink directly on the super 8 original. The resulting A and B rolls were then superimposed."

The next chapter in the battle of effects versus porno.

A battle between special effects and porno, Will porno always win? If you think the effects are winning just squint.

Insects are tortured in various ways amidst the sounds of screaming.

Joan Braderman talks about and appears in front of a projected version of the soap opera Dynasty.

My take on New York City crowds. Some effects involve tracking individual faces and a lot of masking work, others use multiple slices of the same shot, offset a few frames, to stretch all moving figures in strange ways.

Using multiple layers of the same shot and animating masks on each produces a wide variety of effects that fracture and distort the shot. These were used here for NYC buildings, to create a dissonant urban symphony. The music is classical piano pieces played backwards.

Image and sound by Manuel DeLanda.

An experimental film; a digitally filmed video distorted by custom made machine learning algorithms, creating generative fractured city landscapes.

The hell of war (movies) made remarkably vivid and surreal.