Michael Rudnick's cinema is a visual amusement park, a tiny yet infinite aleph, where there's room for the unexpected: cityscapes, natural exuberance, portraits of animals and children, indecipherable objects, clever wordplay and encapsulated stories. In his witty, sensual and extremely condensed divertissements, sometimes accompanied by filmmakers and close friends, Rudnick created unusual melodic experiences in which he explored other ways of seeing the world, inverting the expectations of the viewer and the conventions of projection.

The vast catalogue of gadgets designed and patented by Rudnick, free from any ostentation or virtuosity, seeks to expand the unexplored possibilities of cinema to the maximum, from angles and scales, colour and emulsions, patterns and music, as well as the multiplication of images. His orchestra of instruments - a motorised camera platform to produce time-lapses combined with panoramas, his reconstructed 16mm projectors and animations with rotating faceted cylinders - places the rest of cinema firmly in the stone age.

Michael Rudnick: Pup Y Pup, 1977, 3’; Gridlock, 1983, 2’; Ondeo, 1980, 5’; An Old Coat Flapping, 1977, 3’; Cleo, 1977, 4’; A Tooth Film for Ruby, 1985, 5’; You Won, You Lost, 1983, 2’; Go, 1986, 3’; Panorama, 1982, 12’; Intermission, with Rock Ross, 1997, 1’; Thinking a View, with Rock Ross, 1983, 4’; Art School Remembered 1971-1975, 1981, 1’; You Are Christine Dietrich, 1977, 4’; You Can Make Anything Small, 1997, 4’; The Compound, 1980, 5’; Delugion, 1982, 4’; Things I’d Say If I Were Pope, with Marian Wallace, 1994, 3’; Wirework, 1992, 4’; Wazoo Oiseau, 1983, 3’; Reseeding Air, 1985, 6’.

16 mm projection.

Copies from the Academy Film Archive. With thanks to Michael Rudnick and Mark Toscano.