The Silent Majority

In the summer of 1977, NASA sent Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 on an epic journey into interstellar space. Together and alone, they will travel until the end of the universe. Each spacecraft carries a golden record album, a massive compilation of images and sounds embodying the best of Planet Earth. According to Carl Sagan, “[t]he spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.” While working on the golden record, Sagan met and fell madly in love with his future wife Annie Druyan. The record became their love letter to humankind and to each other. In the summer of 2010, I began my own hopeful voyage into the unknown. This film is a love letter to my fellow traveler. - Penny Lane

Director Penny Lane’s decision to become a “good Samaritan” by giving one of her kidneys to a stranger turns into a funny and moving personal quest to understand the nature of altruism. “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” is a provocative inquiry into the science, history, and ethics of organ transplantation, asking an ancient question in a whole new way: Who is your neighbor, and what do you owe them?

A little essay about certain qualities shared by Emily Dickinson and Troglodytes troglodytes (the winter wren). A spontaneous collaboration by two women on opposite coasts searching for elusive things.

The Abortion Diaries is a documentary featuring 12 women who speak candidly about their experiences with abortion. The women are doctors, subway workers, artists, activists, military personnel, teachers and students; they are Black, Latina, Jewish and White; they are mothers or child-free; they range in age from 19 to 54. Their stories weave together with the filmmaker’s diary entries to present a compelling, moving and at times surprisingly funny “dinner party” where the audience is invited to hear what women say behind closed doors about motherhood, medical technology, sex, spirituality, love, work and their own bodies.

The Story of the Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys is the colourful and surprising true story of a man named Harold von Braunhut; a man who could look at the humblest of creatures – the brine shrimp – and imagine an empire built upon it. Breezy, colourful short about a half-century of marketing directly to children, the force of nostalgia in pop culture, and an unlikely meeting of flimflam and hard science.

Such encounters are extremely rare and can last for perhaps a few seconds. The resulting light and heat, however, can exist in a residual state for eons. This produces in the seeker a kind of agitated euphoria similar to that of the stargazer.

This video will teach you how to write your own autobiography, with examples from the narrator’s life.

Explore the changing role of American womanhood through the Mrs. America Beauty Pageant’s half-century history.

We Are The Littletons presents a tangled web of found objects, intercepted correspondences, reenactments and total fabrications centered around Eve Littleton, an artist with "movie star good looks" who was mysteriously banished from her postcard-perfect American family.

The sometimes-true story of Mame Faye, who ran a world famous house of prostitution in Troy, New York for almost forty years (c. 1906 to 1941). Despite being snubbed by official historians, everyone past the age of retirement has a story – funny, sordid, unbelievable – about Troy's most famous madam.

The film consists of two rolls of film I shot in 1998 or 1999 while living in a Bushwick loft. I was interested in the perfect simplicity of a movie camera and what happens when a single part is disabled. So I found simple old cameras and deliberately broke one part, to see what happened. In the first reel, I removed the claw. In the second, I removed the shutter. As I recall, I also have a scheme of swinging the camera back and forth and up and down and various f-stop settings. Very Ernie Gehr. Playing, drinking beer & shooting film. No editing to speak of.

A short work by Brian Frye

A short work by Brian Frye

6.95: Striptease might have been titled "Brian Frye Fails to Strip." We see Frye disrobe, but when he gets to his white undershorts, the roll ends in white flare-outs. There's ... something strange about his movements, especially when he drops his shirt — because in fact he ran the camera in reverse while putting his clothes on. As a result, the work is much more than a joke about not doing what so many other student performers are quite happy to do. - Fred Camper

How vitally will it affect the life of a modern Westerner when he learns, for example, that though the Indian peninsula was invaded and occupied by Alexander the Great and though his conquest had a capital influence on its history, India has not even remembered the great conqueror's name. – Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality

An essay toward documenting the ineffable...One might consider it a dialogue between a man of Faith and one who has merely tasted of the absurd, yet struggles to ingest it.

Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Show was obviously compiled from a lot more material, which I found over at least a year and a half of hunting about. I spend a good deal of my free time hunting out films. It’s not just any sort of material. I wanted to find films that weren’t totally naïve. None of this stuff is home movies, though some of it almost is. And it’s not professional either. Nor is it newsreel quality. It’s a sort of studied, non-professional filmmaking. It’s by different people, obviously, but they all have a similar position in relation to the camera. To me there’s a sort of beautiful openness to that kind of filmmaking.

A fragment of tinted nitrate. An acetate recording of a wedding ceremony. Echoes of the bitter sweetness of the Spirit on the tongue of Man. As Frampton tipped his hat to Gloria, so might I.

Robert Beck was an American soldier from Chicago, who served in the First World War. Struck deaf and dumb by shellshock, Beck was sent to an English sanitarium to convalesce. At some point, the patients attended a movie. Beck began to laugh, and was suddenly cured of his affliction. He became the patron saint of New York's Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, dedicated to films which touch the marvelous. On September 26, 2000, Stuart Sherman, the great performance artist and filmmaker, presented several of his films, interspersed with "perfilmances," in which he re-enacted the passion of Robert Beck. This film is a record of that "spectacle," shot by Lee Ellickson. Stuart Sherman died on September 14, 2001 in San Francisco. This may have been his last New York performance.