Film Categories: Abstraction

  • Auroratone

    This abstract cut-out animation attempts to create orderly pixel patterns using only hand-cut and hand-arranged materials, without any grids, rulers, or visual guides. A stream-of-consciousness series of abstract patterns dance, transform, answer to one another, and at times evolve into recognizable icons, as if sending subliminal messages from a child’s play session. Back-lit pastel colorscapes reflect the airy, other-wordly transmission of Julia Holter’s song “So Lillies” .

  • Apart

    An atmospheric meditation marries fluid visuals and views of the world through tracks of raindrops on glass with a powerful yet subtle sound design to created a cinematic poem on  rain and passing. The scenes captured draw a haunting and tenuous connection to the world

  • Setting West

    “Setting West” was made using original printing materials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as wood type, borders and stereotypes of “Cowboys and Indians”, trains and bison. These words and images were printed directly onto 35mm clear film stock at eminent letterpress studios in North America: the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago, the Hatch Show Print in Nashville and the Musée de l’imprimerie du Québec & Lovell Litho in Montréal. Judith Poirier printed 1643 feet of film to produce her abstract western and her…

  • Between The Bullet and The Hole

    ‘Between the Bullet and the Hole’ is a film centred on the elusive and complex effects of war on women’s role in ballistic research and early computing. The film features new and archival high-speed bullet photography, schlieren and electric spark imagery, bullet sound wave imagery, forensic ballistic photography, slide rulers, punch cards, computer diagrams, and a soundtrack by Scanner. Like a frantic animation storyboard, it explores the flickering space between the frames, testing the perceptual mechanics of visual interpolation, the possibility of reading or deciphering the gap between before and after. Interpolation – the main task of the women studying…

  • Chromatic Aberration

    ‘Chromatic Aberration’ is a film which explores the early technologies of colour filmmaking drawn from the archives of George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Featuring vibrant close-ups of eyes from fledgling archival experiments in colour film, Chromatic Aberration turns the cinematic lens in on itself: from the prosthetic recording eye of the camera, to an evocation of the abstract inner screen of one’s eyelids. Satz has drawn inspiration from a scene in Powell and Pressberger’s 1946 film ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, where the transition from the reality of colour to the black and white of the afterworld is…

  • Doorway for Natalie Kalmus

    ‘Doorway for Natalie Kalmus’ is a film centred around the use of colour in moving image technology, exploring the disorienting technicolour prismatic effects of the lamp house of a 35mm colour film printer. Through minute shifts across an abstract colour spectrum, punctuated by a mechanical soundtrack, the film evokes kaleidoscopic perceptual after-images (bringing to mind Paul Sharits, Dario Argento and the Wizard of Oz). Natalie Kalmus was the ex-wife of technicolour inventor Herbert Kalmus, and was the colour consultant for hundreds of colour films, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, the Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and many…

  • Oramics: Atlantis Anew

    ‘Oramics: Atlantis Anew’ is conceived of as an artist’s film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958. The film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum in London.
Oram used drawn sound principles to compose ‘handwrought’electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. The film brings this obsolete technological fantasy briefly to back to life, enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences. The…

  • Sound Seam

    ‘Sound Seam’ is a film which gives voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The soundtrack’s musical composition is interlaced with a voice-over which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a gramophone needle. The overlapping voices of the narratives tell a forensic love story of yearning, encryption, inscription, decoding, memory and erasure. The film uses microscopic photography, scanning electron microscopy, and sounds of…

  • Stars Above (Part 1 of Trilogy: Sleep Cycles)

    Super – 8 filmstrips laid down the length of our long, dark hallway. Giggling as we fumble in the shadows. One flash and it’s done. While children sleep, in the tiny, fleeting window of time that we share, alone at last, the mystery and energy in these whispering, tiptoeing moments feed us.

  • What Troubles the Peace at Brandenburg?

    All about red and green in time. Very much inspired by the work of Count Hermann Puckler-Muskau, Adolf Just and, above all, Gerhard Richter. A mnemotechnic and threnody for the infirm of Brandenburg an der Havel and environs during a time of hate (too like our own).