Leslie Thornton Movies

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

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...

An episode of Peggy and Fred in Hell.

Leslie Thornton.

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

A post-script to ADYNATA, even more incorrect. -- L.T.

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 film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

A short by Leslie Thornton from 2021.

Part 1 of The Great Invisible

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

b/w, 16mm film

Thornton's continuing fascination with technology finds an unlikely expression in these digitally manipulated film sequences, in which a chimpanzee's...

A film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

A short film from Leslie Thornton from 2021.

"Elusive and compelling, Have a Nice Day Alone is surpassingly strange, even for Leslie Thornton, an acknowledged genius of the unexpected. The...

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...