Leslie Thornton Filmes

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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 short by Leslie Thornton from 2021.

Part 1 of The Great Invisible

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

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

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

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

A film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

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

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

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.

A portrait of Thornton’s sister and a close friend. Shot while studying with cinema verite masters Ed Pincus & Richard Leacock, this early film...