Leslie Thornton Movies

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...

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

The first installment of Leslie Thornton's ongoing epic follows two children, Peggy and Fred, through a densely cluttered, technological-consumer...

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

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

b/w, 16mm film

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

"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 film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

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...

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

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...

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

Short film by Leslie Thornton, part of the Peggy and Fred in Hell series.

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...

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

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

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