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...

An episode of Peggy and Fred in Hell.

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...

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

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...

Peggy and Fred in Kansas is one of the earliest installments in Thornton's Peggy and Fred in Hell series. Thornton represents the outside world with...

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

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

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

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

"A fragmented, experimental biography of the 19th-century poet and writer Isabelle Eberhardt, whose brief, unusual life ended abruptly in a flash...

A short by Leslie Thornton from 2021.

This collaborative work, created specifically for the 1992 Day Without Art/AIDS Awareness Day, addresses what Thornton terms "the relationship...

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

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

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...

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