Leslie Thornton

Karl, a 70-year-old Austrian astronomer, is at a crossroads in life and work. After a conference in Greece, he decides not to return home and heads for a small island in hopes of finding a sky dark enough to reconnect with the stars.

Rhyme 'Em To Death reconstructs the trial from Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame from a new perspective, that of a minor character - the goat. The trial of the goat, a postscript in the Hugo novel, has been extended and enlivened with actual transcripts of 15th-century trials in which animals were persecuted as witches.

Another Worldy opens with "The Lucky Girls" dancing atop a New York City skyscraper to the music of an all-female band. Among the many other dancers whose performances Thornton appropriates, this troupe of young, professional female 1940s-era American dancers reappears throughout both versions of the film in seedy Algerian dives, Russian outposts and Parisian can-can establishments. A preternatural luck seems to take them everywhere in space and in time with infinite energy. Yet as their various world travels were most likely filmed on the same sound stage, they are like-wise emblems of a flimsy utopia. In this void, there is no sound, or rather, the original sound of the all-female band is replaced by a techno beat that uncannily seems to have belonged there all along, punctuating the regulated paroxysms of ultimate global unity--promised in the image but deferred through the never-resolving beat.

A short film from Leslie Thornton from 2021.

For Abyss Film, Richards and Thornton intermix new videos with raw material from their own extensive archives. By doing so, they break with familiar forms of exhibition to share a kind of beginning in an open-ended encounter with the hidden and concrete aspects that characterize their respective works. Almost imperceptible attractions circumnavigate the breadth of their materials. Abyss Film speaks to possibilities made visible by the moving image, allowing a fall into the vertiginous pleasures of looking beyond and beyond again.

This collaborative work, created specifically for the 1992 Day Without Art/AIDS Awareness Day, addresses what Thornton terms "the relationship between the medicalization of the body and the personal." While the actor Ron Vawter reads aloud from a poem by Rilke, a doctor is heard discussing Vawter's medical condition. Medical photographs of internal organs and images of the moon's surface create landscapes of inner and outer space. This haunting rumination suggests the disparity between medical interpretations and personal experiences of physicality and mortality.

In Novel City, Thornton revisits her 1983 film Adynata, which explored questions of the Other through what Thornton has termed an "Orientalist spectacle" that was "intended to bring about a critical self-response, a simultaneous attraction and repulsion that provoke an instance of cultural self-awareness." In her new work, Thornton confronts the economic and cultural transformation of contemporary China, evoking a new spectacle of capitalism run amok. Thornton shoots from her window of the Jin Jiang Hotel in Shanghai, the site of Mao's 1972 meeting with Nixon, and projects images from the earlier movie, creating a layered landscape of alienation and dislocation. - Description from EAI

Different species of animals–on one side the original image and on the other, a kaleidoscopic version.

This was my first 16mm film, made with Desmond Horsfield. For the image we created a gridded score of movements, both within the frame ('subject moves right to left') and between the camera and the subject (zooms, pans, tilts...,) using this as a shooting script. The sound was derived from an old journal, read out loud and then cut-up into the same units of time as the image, ranging from 3 seconds to 1/4 second. Assembling the material was largely mechanical, following the predetermined score. That a tonal portrait of a person emerges was an after effect; we thought of the film as a structural or indexical system of sound/image relations, and viewed the soundtrack as a linguistic experiment, working with the building blocks of speech. - LT

This video materializes an intense phase of exchange between the artists who belong to two distinct generations and contexts. Thornton, a media artist who herself was influenced by Paul Sharits, Yvonne Rainer, and Joan Jonas often deploys projections complicated by ample sound-image interactions. Likewise, musical composition is key to Richard’s practice. Both artists’ work is motivated by their understanding of cinema and video as original languages and forms of thinking.

An episode of Peggy and Fred in Hell.

A short by Leslie Thornton from 2021.

In her eponymous film “Ground” (2020), Thornton outlines the coming into form of a reality in which the ground or base—like the ground of a painting or the physical ground that human existence has always been pulled toward by gravity—becomes undefined.

Made in memory of the actor and my friend, Ron Vawter. Ron passed away shortly after the opening performances of the play "Philoktetes Variations," directed by Jan Ritsema and co-authored by Ritsema and Vawter. It was produced by the Kaaitheater in Brussels. All of the images in this video were originally created for the play.

Made in memory of the actor and my friend, Ron Vawter. Ron passed away shortly after the opening performances of the play "Philoktetes Variations," directed by Jan Ritsema and co-authored by Ritsema and Vawter. It was produced by the Kaaitheater in Brussels. All of the images in this video were originally created for the play.

b/w, 16mm film

A formal 1861 portrait of a Chinese Mandarin and his wife is the starting point for this allegorical investigation of the fantasies spawned in the West about the East, particularly that which associates femininity with the mysterious Orient. ADYNATA presents a series of oppositions-male and female images, past and present sounds-which in and of themselves construct a minimal and fragmentary narrative, an open text of our imaginations, fears and fantasies.

Paradise Crushed could be the black hole at the center of the film and video constellation that is Thornton's Peggy and Fred cycle. Scraps of sound and image, barely recognizable from previous episodes, collide and recombine as the story of the two children "raised by television" buckles under the pressure of digital technologies, electronic surveillance and millennial apocalyptic fervor.

The explosive—or perhaps, more appropriately, the implosive—final episode to Thornton's epic Peggy and Fred in Hell, whose production has spanned more than thirty years, The Fold finds Peggy and Fred's world disintegrating into a sentient pile of electrical noise. Thornton describes the spinning funnel-shaped being that is the subject of the episode as the embodiment of the "artificial intelligence" represented by both the TV that raised Peggy and Fred, as well as by Thornton as invisible camerawoman and director. Here, an electronically-produced voice announces the dissolution of all meaningful elements of humanity, making claims that are at once horrific and comical.

The title simultaneously references the countdown to the dropping of the bomb and suggests anticipation. Minus 10 juxtaposes footage of the artist’s father in Los Alamos and on the way to Tinian Island with an interview with a woman in Japanese about the bombing. Minus 9 aligns an American nurse’s eyewitness account of the bombing and its aftermath with aerial landscape shots blocked by a blinking blue circle which could represent a mutant sun, an eye, planet Earth, an afterimage, or the inverted “rising sun” of Japanese national symbolism. Minus 8 and Minus 7 show excerpts from a documentary, The Growth of Plants overlaid by running text describing radiation-induced botanical mutations. Minus 6 explores current American war policies and ethics contrasted against the histrionics of Adolf Hitler; as the dictator gesticulates on-screen, women’s voices recite a diatribe by Goebbels.

A film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

"Highly idiosyncratic and deeply creepy, this series as a whole – which includes passages in both film and video, sometimes shown concurrently – represents the most exciting recent work in the American avant-garde, a saga that raises questions about everything while making everything seem very strange." - Jonathan Rosenbaum

HANDMADE is a film diptych that juxtaposes natural phenomena with technological discovery. Above, we see the chaotic, digitally manipulated streams of a gale-force storm. Below, we see the crafting of a handwoven device made by a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He is making a sensitive instrument for a massive research project studying antimatter, particles that have the opposite charge of ordinary matter. Yet the complex device we see being built has the simplest of means. “The object itself is a beautiful thing made out of parts from a hardware store,” Thornton notes. These vignettes are interspersed with haunting film recordings of fluid dynamics studies, which chart the unpredictable movement of liquid and sand. [Overview courtesy of MoMA]

An anti-narrative adventure traveling through a phantasmagoric environment void of stability. The video presents a bizarre compendium of archival and industrial footage accompanied by a noisy soundtrack of music and voices from the past, as if echoing the ether of the viewer’s mind. Thornton’s distinctive visual style of collaging random elements elicits an eerie sense of being lost amidst past and present, breeding a confusion that complicates any clear reading of the image.

Part 1 of The Great Invisible

2021. China/USA. Filmmaker Leslie Thornton. 1 min. Digital.