Leslie Thornton Movies

Karl, a 70-year-old Austrian astronomer, is at a crossroads in life and work. After a conference in Greece, he decides not to return home and heads...

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....

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

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...

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

Paradise Crushed could be the black hole at the center of the film and video constellation that is Thornton's Peggy and Fred cycle. Scraps of sound...

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

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

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

The title simultaneously references the countdown to the dropping of the bomb and suggests anticipation. Minus 10 juxtaposes footage of the...

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 formal 1861 portrait of a Chinese Mandarin and his wife is the starting point for this allegorical investigation of the fantasies spawned in the...

Bedtime stories or prophesy? A child's version of geopolitical cosmologies, tiny bullies and the destruction and creation of worlds.

A film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

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

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

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

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

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 the ongoing project Photography is Easy, Thornton continues her investigation of the production of meaning through media such as photography, film...