Leslie Thornton Movies

Made in memory of the actor and my friend, Ron Vawter. Ron passed away shortly after the opening performances of the play "Philoktetes Variations,"...

Rhyme 'Em To Death reconstructs the trial from Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame from a new perspective, that of a minor character - the goat....

"Highly idiosyncratic and deeply creepy, this series as a whole – which includes passages in both film and video, sometimes shown concurrently...

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

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

A short by Leslie Thornton from 2021.

For Abyss Film, Richards and Thornton intermix new videos with raw material from their own extensive archives. By doing so, they break with familiar...

In her eponymous film “Ground” (2020), Thornton outlines the coming into form of a reality in which the ground or base—like the...

This video materializes an intense phase of exchange between the artists who belong to two distinct generations and contexts. Thornton, a media...

The remarkable landscape of the Swiss Alps inflects Thornton's musings on the sublime, as it may be pursued in nature and photography.

The explosive—or perhaps, more appropriately, the implosive—final episode to Thornton's epic Peggy and Fred in Hell, whose production has...

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...

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

Different species of animals–on one side the original image and on the other, a kaleidoscopic version.

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...

A short film from Leslie Thornton from 2021.

A film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

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

In Novel City, Thornton revisits her 1983 film Adynata, which explored questions of the Other through what Thornton has termed an "Orientalist...

Thornton evokes the instability that humankind acts upon through a combination of several voices – from cold to melancholic to anxious –...