Tom Chomont

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.

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, particularly Greece, Switzerland, and Italy. 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.

Filmed when Beavers was 18–19, this self-portrait depicts him and Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. A diary of domestic life, it transforms everyday objects and intimate details into a charged meditation on love, memory, and desire.

In March and April of 1966, Markopoulos created this filmic portrait of writers and artists from his New York circle, including Parker Tyler, W. H. Auden, Jasper Johns, Susan Sontag, Storm De Hirsch, Jonas Mekas, Allen Ginsberg, and George and Mike Kuchar, most observed in their homes or studios. Filmed in vibrant color, Galaxie pulses with life. It is a masterpiece of in-camera composition and editing, and stands as a vibrant response to Andy Warhol's contemporary Screen Tests. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2001.

Portrait of gay filmmaker and Parkinson's sufferer Tom Chomont.

"Panic Bodies is a 70-minute, six-part exploration of the ways we experience the body's betrayals: disease, decline and death. The film is a panorama of emotionally charged recollections of strange relatives and estranged siblings, staged recreations of fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)

Portrait studies of Mrs. Hodges, Gail Beavers (the filmmaker’s sister) and Gregory J. Markopoulos.

Portrait of the American experimental filmmaker Tom Chomont, who resided in Eruope from 1969-1975, before returning to New York.

A portrait of Eric de Kuyper.

One man shaves another in this highly charged erotic performance.

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.)

Third part of a trilogy.

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

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

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.

“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)

Made in 1990. Short experimental film.

Short experimental film made in 1994.

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

Made in 1994 with Clark Coleman. 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)

Two portraits paired, one warm, one cold.

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

"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 film by Tom Chomont

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

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.

No synopsis available yet.

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

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

1 minute, color, silent 16mm

"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)..."