Tom Chomont

Third part of a trilogy.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Whimsical variations suggested by the minute cracks in a print of Leonardo's famous portrait.

My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure is a film cycle by American avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers. It consists of eighteen films in three parts. The films were made from the late 1960s through the early 2000s in different European countries. Most of the works in the cycle are radically re-edited, condensed versions of the original films. The cycle premiered in its entirety in 2005.

With abda I was processing black and white film myself in buckets . . . I wanted to destroy my own image." – T.C. (An interview in Afterimage, Summer 1981.)

"I intended to make a film about food and spiritual nourishment, but this was punctuated by two visits from a friend (upon entering the us army and the birth of his daughter)..."

Third part of a trilogy.

Whimsical variations suggested by the minute cracks in a print of Leonardo's famous portrait.

With abda I was processing black and white film myself in buckets . . . I wanted to destroy my own image." – T.C. (An interview in Afterimage, Summer 1981.)

"I intended to make a film about food and spiritual nourishment, but this was punctuated by two visits from a friend (upon entering the us army and the birth of his daughter)..."

Lijn II is a tiny portrait of a friend made on a contact printer from scraps of a film that was lost

Video Art by Tom Chomont

Flashing lights illuminate black faces and dark eyes, oscillating between darkness and inverted lightness.

“Approximately thirty images comprise Oblivion. Most obsessively repeat themselves. Although the images appear to be solarized, the film was actually contact-printed, combining high contrast black and white negative with a colour positive of the same image. The high contrast accounts for the tendency of shots to flood. Images in the film swell and contrast, often disappearing into pure colour… Oblivion employs extremely rapid cutting. Some of the images last as briefly as two frames. The fact that we see so few frames, that a shot is representationally ambiguous, or shown upside down and sideways, often causes the viewer to project his/her own fantasies… When Jean Genet was asked to what end he was directing his life he responded, “To oblivion.” (J.J. Murphy, “Reaching for Oblivion”) (mikehoolboom.com)

A Berlin diary.

A portrait of Eric de Kuyper.

"The Heavens"–Symmetrical chaos envelops a lone, topless man, whose symmetrical abstractions conjure up a psychadelic version of DaVinci's Vitruvian Man.

A portrait of polymorphous lovers that references the Medieval parable of Les Noces du Roi et Reine and the marriage of opposites... dichotomy resolved in unity.

"The first experimental films I saw were mostly trance films or reactions to trance films. [My] first films, like Anthony (1966), are rather like trance films; that’s part of the reason I didn’t think of them as my own." (Tom Chomont)

A portrait inspired by reading about John Millais' painting Ophelia.

Short experimental film made in 1994.

A film by Tom Chomont

Short video by Tom Chomont, features Robert Beavers and his mother during the filming of Pitcher of Colored Light. Consists of sections titled Bathed in Light, Going For a Ride. Mother Garden, Robert's Mother's Flowers, Time Taken, and Brief Visit.

Two portraits paired, one warm, one cold.

Video Art by Tom Chomont

"I would say that the films of Mike Kuchar interest me very much. Also, some footage by a young film-maker in Boston, Tom Chomont, his footage (unedited) for Night Blossoms. I was particularly impressed with Mr. Chomont’s footage because it reminded me of the painting (form and color) of Odilon Redon. Too often, the young new American film-maker will leave too many things to chance, thus avoiding that most import ant principle that, I fear, is lacking today in not only the amateur fields, but also in the professional, and that is arete, or excellence." (Gregory J. Markopoulos)

For R. B. and G. M. Filmed in Diesntis, Switzerland.

The film began as a record of the painter Joseph Glin and his series of paintings inspired by "La Maison Des Mortes" by Guillaume Apollinaire. After filming Joe destroyed the paintings and closed his gallery, Shekhina, where the paintings were filmed.

“A portrait of Carla Liss, evoking the atmosphere of the old horror films we both loved.”

No synopsis available yet.

Made in 1969. 1min. 16mm. Black and White

Echoes in time of a lost moment.

One man shaves another in this highly charged erotic performance.

"De eevwigheid duurt een oogwenk./ De ti jd duurt maar door." – A. Roland Holet. "This film is in several short sections. Most are set in a single location or 'space'; the editing introduces a temporal element into that space. In the third section, for example, the setting is a European cafe; Chomont cuts between different shots that seem to be adjacent to each other in this single space, but various cues–such as the change in characters' positions–tell us that the shots were taken at different times. Chomont is exploring here a fundamental paradox of cinema: that time and space are interdepent, that one camera can film space in a way that make different parts of it seem simultaneously present, cut this simultaneity is an illusion – the time of the filming and of the strip of film in projection is always moving forward." – Fred Camper, The Chicagoan, March, 1978.

The story of Jacob wrestling the angel at the stream called Jabbok.

First part of a trilogy.

The film frame sometimes seems to function as a rug-like rectangle into or onto which the lover steps. Filmed in Orselina, Switzerland after reading the 'The Sufis' by Indries Shaf.

Short experimental film made in 1994.

Made in 1994 with Clark Coleman. Short experimental film.

1 minute, color, silent 16mm

Made in 1997. Short experimental film.

Made in 1990. Short experimental film.

Made in 1998. Short experimental film.

“I usually avoid the term ‘film poem,’ because it was overused in the ‘40s and ‘50s. But somehow it fits Phases of The Moon; it is a film poem and nothing else. A small, miniature film poem, a jewel, if the word masterpiece is too stuffy.” (Jonas Mekas, 1973)

"I, Prolugue, II, The Angel Morpheus/The Major Arcana, III, Jeu de la main. The title refers to (a) quote attributed to Stan Brakhage regarding the avant-garde artist: 'Orpheus has been too long in Hell.' Part II alludes both to the sixth strophe of the Third Song of 'Les Chants du Maldoror' by le Comte de Lautréamont (Isador Ducasse) and to 'Sirius Remembered' by Brakhage. Occult imagery and romantic narrative are reformed by repetition and the element of chance." (Tom Chomont)

A romantic and lyric study of a young friend and readings he encouraged, especially Mallarmé.