Formally eclectic but heartfelt tribute to the holiday home movie heritage of low gauge formats.
Shot over 3 holidays, and including a dream I had about rescuing a cat from Norway, Stay … is my attempt to pay homage to 8mm’s home movie heritage. It’s pre-digital, so originally cut and shown as sticky tape spliced celluloid. Though rough hewn it’s a film that I still maintain a great fondness for.
p.s. The Wales section is shot on Single 8.
An independent film portrait of singer/songwriter Elliott Smith in Portland, Oregon in 1996, wherein he plays three songs. The songs were done live acoustic--in his old studio, a living room, and a bathroom (it was quiet in there). It's also a small portrait of Portland, Oregon.
The songs are "Between the Bars", "Angeles", and a cover of "Thirteen" by Big Star.
This is Elliott as I remember him, at his simple finest as musician.
Shot in black and white Super 8, this lyrical short follows a wandering, disengaged youth through grey afternoons. German Song features the hard-edged music of Come, an alternative band from Boston.
Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.
Nobody counts the hours and nobody cares how the years are piling up. Souls begin and end. Then comes the night. A snow landscape of souls.
Transmission from the Liberated Zones is an experiment which brings together Swedish statements and documents, accessed and presented by a boy through a low-fidelity feedback channel — an optical dimension created to move through time, and between tepid and tropic encounters.
There has to be a way to win is the refrain. Three women fold clothes, stroll and shop as they discuss jealousy, murder and dead bodies. An enquiry into the generosity of women.
Players: Trina Vester, Karin Westerlund, Lise Kelleman.
Shot on location in Kobenhavn.
A hypnosis-inducing pan-geographic shuttle built on brainwave-generating binaural beats, Deep Sleep takes us on a journey through the sound waves of Gaza to travel between different sights of modern ruin. Restricted from travel to Palestine, I learned auto-hypnosis for the purpose of bi-locating. What results is a journey, recorded on Super 8mm film, to the ruins of ancient civilizations embedded in modern civilization in ruins, to a site ruined beyond evidence of civilization.
The Palace at 4 am is the experience of a fragile palace of collisions suspended in a montage vision. A hazy patchwork of structures. The Palace becomes visible only to repeatedly collapse in a liminal interference of the absence. An unrest landscape of the insight. Space-time of thresholds. This is The Palace at 4 am.
In Hyperthermia the cinematic body becomes overwhelmed by the luminous projection of outside political factors, causing the internal temperature of the celluloid to rise to dangerous levels.
In collaboration with art historian Dore Bowen, a video recording of her phone interview with Yoko Ono during which a discussion of John Cage and chance operations intervene. Shot in 2002, this document was released in 2007.
"Exhibitons, whether of objects or people, are displays of the artifacts of our disciplines. They are for this reason also exhibits for those who make them, no matter what their ostensible subject. The first order of business is therefore to examine critically the conventions guiding ethnographic display..."
- Destination Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998
Through a catalogue of looks, movements, and gestures, Mayhem presents a social order run amok in a libidinous retracing of film noir conventions. Sexuality flows in an atmosphere of sexual tension, danger, violence, and glamour; antagonism between the sexes is symbolized in the costuming of women in polka dots and men in stripes. Censored in Tokyo for its use of Japanese lesbian erotica, this tape creates an image bank of what signifies the sexual and the seductive in the history of imagemaking, pointing to the way we learn about our bodies, and how to use them from images.
"In the guise of chronicling the final moments of three polar explorers marooned on an ice floe a century ago, Baron's film investigates the limitations of images and other forms of record as a means of knowing the past and the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph. Marrying matter-of-fact voiceover and allusive sound fragments, evidence and illustration, in Baron’s words, "meaning is set adrift"."
--New York Film Festival, 1997, Views from the Avant-Garde program notes
Scratch of image. As a consequence of a global quarantine, an entire device emerged. With much of humanity locked up and eager for communication, a pandemic exhibitionism went viral. Covid-19 mobilizes an audiovisual pandemic. The result: a plague of viralized images.
These are the western lands of the mind. The western tracks in the land. The western landscapes of our time. The wasted times of our lives. So is the rest of the Capitalocene civilization.
A nostalgic glazier shows off his knowledge and expounds his theories. Taking glassmaking processes and history as its central theme, Slow Glass explores ideas about memory, perception and change.
A 3D video cover version of Michael Snow's seminal structural film Wavelength (1967). Reflecting on Snow's work from a digital vantage point, Wavelength 3D loosely adopts the story and basic formal structures of the original while forging an entirely new path across three-dimensional space and time.
This work should be presented through ANGLYPH 3D PROJECTION. No special 3D projector is needed, but Red-Cyan anaglyph 3D glasses are required for exhibition. May be projected, and can also be presented on a flat, 4:3 monitor in a dark space.
This is a gaze of the body and a notion of spectator that the 90´s decade constructed, this is the audiovisual legacy of the 90's for our actual audiovisual control world.
Two University of Virginia grapplers take instruction.
This title is only available on Can You Move Like This: Black Fire.
A reflection on the phenomenon of the touring musician.
"I shot this film with a 16mm wind-up Bolex, and the 25th Anniversary tour of Dutch band The Ex, when they embarked on a 'convey tour' with about 25 performing comrades. If half the battle is getting there and half the battle is joy, then the other half is madness. I thank all of the musicians who float in and out — of the film, in particular, and my life, in general."
— Jem Cohen
Soundtrack music: Guitargument, an Andy Moor and Mia Clarke improvisation, arranged and edited by Jem Cohen.
"When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes. You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory. And then you'll close your eyes to the facts." These words are spoken at the beginning of this agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: "When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories."
An all-over textile constructed under the spell of Arachne, an audiovisual textile in five parts that exposes a web of raids in construction over the american houses, a landscape of protests under the webs of segmented time, the entrails of the american factory in movement through the endless american party.
In these lunar paths the moon is the celestial body of brilliant colors that crosses with its cyclical and mythical dance the dark space of our present time and in whose dance the moon enters, moves away, approaches and lies on itself in a cycle rhythmic of celestial agitation. These are the shamanic ways of the moon. Part of the Lunar Films series.
