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...

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...

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

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

A short by Leslie Thornton from 2021.

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....

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

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

A short film from Leslie Thornton from 2021.

An episode of Peggy and Fred in Hell.

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

b/w, 16mm film

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...

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...

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

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...

A film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

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

Video work from collaborative exhibition "once in a hundred years" at Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg and Lumiar Cité, Lisbon, featuring artists...

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