Leslie Thornton Movies

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

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

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

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...

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

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...

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...

An episode of Peggy and Fred in Hell.

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

A film in the Peggy and Fred in Hell cycle

A short film from Leslie Thornton from 2021.

A short by Leslie Thornton from 2021.

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

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

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

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

The remarkable landscape of the Swiss Alps inflects Thornton's musings on the sublime, as it may be pursued in nature and photography.

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...

Part 1 of The Great Invisible