Caution, the doors are opening! Ostorožno, dveri otkryvajutsja
Anastasija Žuravljeva, Russia, 2005, 5 min, no dialogues
A day on the public transportation system in the lives of...buttons! They go to work, use the elevators, stand on platforms, get on trains - just like humans do. Every day, from morning to night, year by year. But within all that monotony one can discover the small details that make life special, the romantic meeting of two buttons, the collapse of an old button, buttons with their babybuttons and - last but not least - the many patterns that make each button an individual button being.
The Little Girl and Her Cat La petite fille et son chat
Cinématographe Lumiere, France, 1900, 1 min, silent
The beauty of being close to a cat. Its fur, its purr, its whiskers! But cats are headstrong creatures and you might want to lure them with some food and you might have to tolerate their behind in your face! One of the very early films of cinema history, shot by the Lumière brothers who here brought a fragment of their private life in front of the camera.
The Six Sisters Dainef Les six sours Dainef
Neznan avtor, France, 1902, 3 min, silent
Six sisters perform a number of breathtaking acrobatic tricks on a stage that resembles the chamber of a palace with a garden in the background. The film was originally shot in black and white but was hand coloured afterwards. This is why we see the six sisters wearing yellow, green and pink outfits and it is also the reason why the outfit of one performer can change colours from one second to the next. The film is a typical example of early cinema's interest for performances originally designed for the stage as they involve a lot of movement and are often exciting to watch.
A Square Tér
István Szábo, Hungary, 1971, 5 min, no dialogues
A boy painting some letters on the walls of a city house with a piece of chalk takes us to the adjacent square where public life is being performed on a sunny day: Children, women, men, young and old - everyone is at play, chasing each other, dancing with each other, talking or screaming, always in movement. The camera captures this moment of collective life in a breathtakingly fluid movement, giving us the feeling that we could potentially be every single one of them or all of them at once, close to everything and at the same time strangely detached, flying above and watching life unfold from afar.
A Colour Box A Colour Box
Len Lye, Great Britain, 1935, 4 min, no dialogues
Music is key to Len Lye's A Colour Box - not only because the whole film is accompanied by a jazzy Cuban tune, but because all the visual elements follow the idea of a composition: Images become notes, sequences becomes tunes, colours become moods, the movement of a graphical element becomes the change of pitch, film becomes visual music. Everything we see has originally been handpainted by Lye directly onto the frame of the film strip, making sure that the image forms a dialogue with the music. And while this might seem like an experimental film at first, it was actually shot on behalf of the British Grand Post Office as an advertisement for their low fares.
A Visit from the Space Posjet iz svemira
Zlatko Grgić, Jugoslavija, 1964, 12 min, little dialogues
A young girl plays in the garden in front of her family's house. She wants to pick the apples from the tree and thus makes use of a kite which allows her to fly up to the branches and pick all the apples. Just as she is about to descend back to the ground an UFO appears. Two aliens exit and after one has left out of fear the other one gets to know the girl and slowly begins to trust her. As she is called for supper by her parents the alien remembers his mother who is waiting on the distant planet he has come from. With the help of the girl's kite the alien manages to return home, leaving a trace of gnawed apples between himself and the girl from another planet that he just met.