A cruel anecdote on a subject of optical obsession: a glass eye which a young man cannot manage to get rid of.

A small family film shot in the summer of 1945, which brings together Léon Spilliaert, Paul Delvaux, Edgard Tytgat and his wife Maria, Luc and Paul Haesaerts. A garden, a few armchairs, plus a camera that scans the circle of friends. A film which, if it remains silent, documents, testifies, restores bodies and faces, the memory of a sunny afternoon.

An art short subject about a French surrealist painter, designer, and illustrator.

Subtitled as a cinépoéme, it features many techniques Man Ray used in his still photography, including Rayographs, double exposure, soft focus and ambiguous features. The title is Basque for ‘Leave me alone’, but can also mean ‘give peace’.

Entertaining Dadaist experimental short, similar to Man Ray’s work, full of shifting geometric shapes, stock footage of seagulls, flying eyeballs, and glaring floating heads.

Light plays over the surfaces of paper cut-outs, abstract shapes with curved lines.

Educational film discovered in a bin became raw material for On Eye Rape, where a hole-puncher was applied to individual frames in a bold statement against censorship.

“A found educational film about the sex of plants and animals was punched with big holes in almost every frame throughout the film by myself and an artist friend Natsuyuki Nakanishi who found the film in a garbage. At several points there are inserts of a few frames of a pornographic photo (which would work on a subliminal sense) in which the sex part was covered by black. The film is an irony and at the same time a protest against sex censorship in Japan at the time in which pornographic scenes had to be covered by black. At the end we even punched holes in these subliminal pictures, thereby “censoring” the censored image.”

Takahiko Iimura1

• 1. Masaaki Hirakata, catalogue Meta Media, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 1995.

Funny story about short sighted cats being given glasses.