Of Special Merit

This poetic found-footage collage explores how little is needed in order to recognize desire. Through the use of rapid-cut close-ups of the female face and body, sometimes nearly unrecognizable flashes of arms, eyes, and lips, and accompanied by a similarly fragmentary composition of sounds, the film creates a set of pulsating allusions to physical and fantasy delight.

The magnum opus of Dadaist film celebrates the photogenics of discreet objects, where among the captured objects, their mobile rayograms, and engaging asymmetrical shadows, we see a shot of the naked body of Kiki from Montparnassus, muse of the entire interwar artistic generation in Paris, who becomes a graceful projection surface for the penetration of light through the window in a perfect geometry of desire.

A passionate observation of a lover, whose body is imbued with grainy texture and the explosive flares of the film material. Using rapid cuts, the director fuses contrasting black and white negatives and color positives of the same images, so that the diary-like captured moments or evasive allusions can disappear in the fluidity of consciousness and the unsettled volatility of excited passion.

This legendary film on the free poetics of the body works with the DIY aesthetic, sprightly staging, performances, and humor. It transgressively refers to the approaches of melodrama and burlesque which Smith uses to create an unconventional and - for the period - radical depiction of sex. For its erotic scenes, it was banned in many countries, and in the United States it ignited a debate on censorship.

Long term observation of masturbation. Sackl, who uses extreme methods to explore ways of depicting the human body, used a time-lapse camera to record himself masturbating once every ten years, compiling the individual frames and films into a radical ascetic film showing aging and physical transformation.

The intensities of physical experience and mental passion are reflected in physical and metaphorical splices of cultural, political and personal mythologies. In intimate scenes of transforming photographs into food or masturbation with a razor blade, the image and body become the subject of borderline desire, injury, disruption and harm.

In her collage of pornographic films from the 1970s, Uman uses white paint and nail polish remover to erase the actresses. The blank spots in the shape of the female bodies emphasize and critique their position within the filmed act of sex and seduction, ironically reducing the men to cheap gazes and possessive physical contact.

The body and sensibility are celebrated by the renowned Japanese avant-garde artist with a poetic montage of the details of muscle and tissue movements, irritating glances at the crevices and vacant lots. In the spirit of abstract documentarism and accompanied by certain music from Yoko Ono, the skin surfaces touch each other in rhythmically composed approximations of crinkles and crumpling.

A female nude descending the stairs and multiplied by optical copying by multiple exposures of her three repetitions. Textur is the third part of the four-part Amalgam film, an experiment with time exposure and image layering experiment that examines film time and the tense motion between a particular image and abstract traces of moving objects on a film material.

This classic example of experimental and queer cinema weaves together a sadomasochistic fantasy of a violent conflict between the main protagonist and a group of well-built sailors. The film’s director, appearing in the role of the young man, explores desire and the imagination, supplementing sexual motifs with references to the conservative American dream shortly after the Second World War.

This material experiment and a film avant-garde classic uses both physical and chemical interferences with the film stock, creating a parallel between the shown (human) body and the (celluloid) body of the 8-mm film in the situation of a single-occupied hotel room.

The sharply ironic allusion to both Hollywood and avant-garde cinematography thematizes sexual frustration in a fictitious situation of a depressive freelance director asking an actress to be naked in the shower. Thanks to the combination of humour and a low-quality aesthetic, this is the most famous underground short film by Kuchar.