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This meticulously animated short by the Chinese new-media artist and educator Cao Shu traverses some five millennia of art in a single minute. As flickering images move chronologically, in flipbook fashion, through a parade of styles and artistic movements – from Ancient Egypt, to the Impressionist era, to the 20th century avant-garde – a gender-shifting character makes a series of simple movements, seemingly ambling through the history of art.
Director: Cao Shu
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Film and visual culture
Space and time expand, contract and combust in this propulsive animation
5 minutes
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Art
When East met West in the images of an overlooked, original photographer
9 minutes
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History
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
13 minutes
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Earth science and climate
Images carved into film form a haunting elegy for a disappearing slice of Earth
3 minutes
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Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
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Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
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Art
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
17 minutes
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Metaphysics
What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?
55 minutes
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Gender
A filmmaker responds to Lars von Trier’s call for a new muse with a unique application
16 minutes