Experimental Film

In the nest of the sun, Xolotl, Huitzilin and Xochitl meet to recover the dance of radiation, whose colorful heat stirs the new fire of their cosmic dance. Part of the Film Tonalli.

As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven. They walk unseen. They Live.

The perception of machines' movement within industrial work.

John Smith, throughout his 40-year career, has approached the moving image from film, video and installations, generating a tremendous body of work that’s as diverse in its topics as it is in its methods. Weaving between early structuralist film and more personal, diaristic, documentary approaches to the places in which he lived, most notably London, his output is both broad and varied.

still/here is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. Though it constructs a documentary record of blight and decay, still/here is a refusal of closure that dwells within the space of rupture and confronts the presence of a profound absence.

–– Christopher Harris

Camera, sound, edit: Christopher Harris

Additional camera: Joel Wanek

This surreal, free-form autobiography is concerned with childhood and adult rituals, and the longing for meaning and connection during the often wildly absurd events of early life. Obsessive Becoming returns to Reeves’s early exploration of personal narrative forms, poetry, and his interest in creating a more spontaneous and direct fusion between language and video. Words and images of the expectations and disappointments of coming of age break down the boundaries of both mediums.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

These are the ghosts of a haunted civilization, a culture of progress that hides the social and political horror behind the streets. These are the haunted figures in the Capitalocene era. A sinister dance of macabre abstraction. A scanner darkly of the streets. Part of the Hauntology series.

A brief glimpse into the cycles of Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess, whose cycles used to be a dance. A fast-paced jazz soundtrack accompanies the quick, darting movements of the moon.

In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates simple mysteries. Just Hold Still is comprised of an interconnected series of short works and collaborations that explore the gray area between documentary, narrative, and experimental genres.

A Kafkian vision of the New World. The arrival of Karl Rossman to the contemporary Babylon under the spell of the paranoid avant-garde. Kinetic coexistence of the archaic forms in dissolution.

A series of numbers that form infamous years that are uttered in a repetitive pedagogical litany. Ominous dates as a correlate of forgotten apolitical portraits. Portraits of a remembered royalty whose wealth was made possible by infamous times. Political faces accompanied by their corresponding dates. Peaceful figures whose placid portrait rests on the automated civilizational barbarism. This is part of the educational film cycle.

Part of the paraconsistent sequence series.

This is a re-destroyed film that I was unable to finish in 2013. Filmed both in ruins: at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco and in final domestic spaces occupied with a former partner. Film was destroyed in ocean water.

Adopting the movements of various animals, Forti begins the performance by walking hypnotically in circles. She falls to the floor and begins a cycle of walking and crawling that becomes an open metaphor for evolution and aging. Through the course of the performance, the camera follows Forti's circling motion at increasingly close range, creating an interactive dance between camera and performer. While "rustic" in respect to the quality of the video image and sound, Solo No. 1 serves as an engaging document of Forti's dedicated study of natural movement.

These are the dancing bodies in an agitated rapture: prelude to trance, invocation of the gods, consecration of intermittence. Here our point of view sparkles under the spell and trance of things gathered, fallen, yielding, pluvial, Mesoamerican wind, goddess breath, breeze of sticks. percussive woods.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Leafless is a poem of textures about becoming familiar with a significant other’s body in reservation with its landscape.

“But the sun is also fierce; neither graceful athlete nor geometrician’s dummy will embody Apollo, the idol of light.” 

- Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956)

At this time even the flowery wars are ready to begin and the flowery atavism begins to flash. The flowers, the skulls, the moon and the sun are ready for the sacrificial trance. Part of Tonalli.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Vision of Anahúac: Traveler, you have reached the most transparent region of the air.

This is the invocation to the gods, the incense to the gods. A kinetic dance to the gods. Behold the hieratic nature of Tonatiuh (The Sun) and the ferocity of Tlaltecuhtli (Goddess of the Earth) raising her agitation from the white smoke of the burned Copalli, Mesoamerican aromatic resin, sacred resin that tears celluloid with smoke, white hair, on the dark background of the world.

Approximates a small child’s fantasy world in the dark. In a series of close-ups, the nightlight is transformed into a meditative star-spangled sky. An improvisation, edited inside the camera and shot on a single reel. The stars swirl in silence.

–– International Film Festival Rotterdam

In 1985, Hassan Zbib and Olga Nakkas separately started to develop film scenarios based on simple narratives, and would shoot them on Super 8, which was still possible to develop in Beirut at the time. Their work featured the city as a stage where lonely characters drifted: a taxi driver in his car, a man walking around, talking to a Rambo poster.