To the sweeping sound of a sitar, thousands and thousands of dots orbit a kaleidoscopic centre, like the individual notes of a raga circle the keynote. Repeated graphic patterns blossom and crumble back into the mass. As traditional as the reference points for James Whitney's breathtaking visual music were, the realisation with early computer animation by his brother John Whitney was just as innovative.

This new feature by American filmmaking legend Jem Cohen is like a strange cousin to his classic “Museum Hours,” another essay film given structure by fiction that swaps art for science and one time-honoured gallery in Vienna for a range of different institutions. Karl is an ageing Austrian astronomer and museum consultant. His wife Eleanor is a physicist based in the US, just like his young friend and colleague Sarah, a specialist in citizen science who is cautiously starting a new relationship. The three of them converse and hold forth on their respective specialities to mesmerisingly informative effect, but also keep returning to and interrogating the feelings that intertwine with their disciplines: politics and climate change, the uncertain future, solitude and intimacy – academic work as a pursuit for the melancholy.
Cohen’s camerawork shows them in frame, but also accompanies their voice-overs with his typical blissful digressions, wandering through museum corridors and exhibition spaces, fixing his gaze on heavenly bodies and scientific instruments, capturing city streets, oceans and landscapes, exploring and collecting with a curiosity equally studious and felt: tiny fragments, massive discoveries, stars at an infinite remove. Grasping the hugeness of the world might seem impossible, but it’s just about disentangling all the perspective: the big, the little and the far.

Spurred by an extremely convincing young man with an American accent, the spirits of the dead rise from their graves in a Mexican cemetery and set out to cross the wall to the United States. This ghost story from 1994 gives us goosebumps with its topicality and enchants with its wit, shimmering colours and vibrant shapes.

In her second feature-length film, Lee Anne Schmitt leaves California behind to explore the disparate influences that have shaped life in Utah’s Henry Mountains, home to one of the country’s last remaining bison herds, which are hunted to this day. Hewing closer to pure observation than much of the rest of her work, Schmitt and her roving camera stick tightly to the everyday rhythms of the contemporary cowboys who organise these now touristic hunts. The images of buffalos being shot at close range, disembowelled or stuffed speak for themselves, as do the endless landscapes, stubborn iconography of the former Wild West and the story of the Native American dream recounted in voice-over: the impossible return to a land never again empty.

A pop art-punk-psychedelic trip into the life and rich fantasy world of a young 1970s London housewife. Marcia is mesmerised by the astonishing mountain of folds in the bedclothes where the tiny, almost invisible tribe of the mites lives, and drawn into a conversation with the ghost of dirt. But stop, her zeitgeisty-feminist friends are coming over for morning coffee.