Daily Stream: Cabin Fever playlist

In mid-March, Kate Lain, a multidisciplinary artist and teacher in the Los Angeles-based alternative high school program ArtworxLA, put together a list for her students of experimental films and videos available online. She called it CABIN FEVER: Coping with COVID-19 playlist of online experimental films & videos.

As Lain explains on her blog, "I thought it might be a fun collaborative resource for other folks out there in the same boat, so I turned it into a collaborative Google sheet, shared it with folks in the experimental film community, and it took off." The spreadsheet soon saw so much traffic, Lain had to change her system of expanding it to submission-only to prevent access problems.

You could easily fill a day poring through the dozens of films assembled, separated by theme ("animals," "train travel") and mood ("scream and break stuff"). The collection includes works from godparents of experimental cinema like Maya Deren (1944's At Land) and Kenneth Anger (1954's The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and 1964's Scorpio Rising), as well as Lain herself (Surface, from 2013), and several filmmakers who've presented or had residencies at the Wex. Among them: Jodie Mack, Barbara Hammer, and Sadie Benning, whose short Living Inside from 1989 (pictured above) chronicles a time when Benning self-isolated at the age of 16. retreating to her room and not going to high school for three weeks. We can relate.

Check out the list on Kate Lain's website.