Leslie Thornton Movies

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

Two circles, twice the same image: a restless pool of simmering tar. The soundtrack also evokes hellish associations with an eyewitness report of...

"A fragmented, experimental biography of the 19th-century poet and writer Isabelle Eberhardt, whose brief, unusual life ended abruptly in a flash...

An anti-narrative adventure traveling through a phantasmagoric environment void of stability. The video presents a bizarre compendium of archival and...

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...

HANDMADE is a film diptych that juxtaposes natural phenomena with technological discovery. Above, we see the chaotic, digitally manipulated streams...

A film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

A film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

Leslie Thornton.

Short film by Leslie Thornton, part of the Peggy and Fred in Hell series.

"Thornton's magnum opus, this ongoing and open-ended serial follows its two improvisatory protagonists, children “raised by technology,”...

b/w, 16mm film

Peggy and Fred in Kansas is one of the earliest installments in Thornton's Peggy and Fred in Hell series. Thornton represents the outside world with...

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...

A portrait of Thornton’s sister and a close friend. Shot while studying with cinema verite masters Ed Pincus & Richard Leacock, this early film...

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...

Jennifer, Where Are You? is structured by a speech-act, a constant proleptic call, a man’s voice which has been edited and recut into a...

A short film from Leslie Thornton from 2021.

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...