Film Categories: Architecture

  • Go Between

    Looking down at the Brisbane River–a play of masking and superimpositions. Sound by Samuel La France. Made in residency at Container, Brisbane and nanolab, Daylesford.

  • The Courser

    We see white stone structures and hear the sound of horses at full gallop, snickering from afar. The sound volume increases rapidly and sets the large group of lithic sculptures in motion. Heavy traffic noises eventually mix with the animal sounds and just when they are about to take over the soundscape entirely, images and sounds introduce the actual location: Shanghai, at the intersection of Yan’an Elevated Road and Inner Ring Elevated Road, two major, multi-leveled, urban freeways. Amidst the massive architectural structures and immobile horses underneath it, we may remember Eadweard Muybridge and his early moving image studies.

  • Buses don’t stop here anymore

    Buses don’t stop here anymore is a chronicle on Super 8 of the closure, abandonment, and demolition of the Greyhound bus station in Ottawa, Canada. Once an important site for coming and going, an emotive epicenter, the camera observes the building’s erasure, dismantled by machines that writhe in the dust of demolition. Optical printing translates the act of observation into a requiem for a building, once so present and vital, now a ghost of the past. Filmed on Ektachrome Super 8 over a three year period from the sudden closure of the Greyhound station in April 2020 to its demolition…

  • Tabula Rasa

    “Tabula Rasa” is an exploration of space both on and off the screen. As a rhythmic composition of silent white surfaces, mumbling pine trees, humming motors, babbling crows and unsettling rain in the desert, it questions the current state of its own media, but at the same time portrays a location: Smith’s Ranch Drive-in Theater, Twentynine Palms, California.

  • Tarpaulins

    The point of departure for “Tarpaulins” was a colorful disturbance on the cityscape of Los Angeles: a home in the distance festooned with a giant striped tarp. These are termite fumigation tents and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann follows their story on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit…

  • Messengers

    A poetic exploration of three subterranean telescopes in remote regions of Canada, Japan, and Antarctica that reveal a new way of perceiving the universe from within. Underground, we are dreaming into the earth.

  • Him and Me

    “‘Him and Me’ has Benning’s hallmarks: pristine cinematography, a quasi-autobiographical stance, and a minimalist structure that juxtaposes concrete realities with off-screen mysteries. This is one man’s journey through the American landscape as he has experienced it since the 1950s: a richly hued vision punctuated by sexual, musical and political mores of three decades.” – Karen Cooper, Film Forum 1982

  • Monument

    Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration. Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re- calibration are explored through form and content and…

  • We will talk about this after the last air raid alert stops

    This film, shot within a game simulation, focuses on the opposition between culture and nature and the possibilities of dealing with obsolete mechanisms of environmental exploitation. It’s a utopia about a post-war city that launches a recultivation program. The program is an attempt to create a new society where the aims of people do not stand in the way of the aims of other people, trees, rivers, chipmunks, mushrooms…” The game simulation was used as a platform to develop a speculative scenario in which humanity survives the challenges of the current century. Looking at the dystopias of the last century,…

  • The Wind Probably

    A human is observing the deserted streets of his hometown on the edge of the Apocalypse. The world is on the verge of being absorbed by the Black Hole. Familiar places in the ruins are difficult to recognize and it’s hard to find the clues to understand is it a reality or dream. The sensation of “not quite real” is the sensation experienced during a catastrophe. In a person’s attempts to orientate the disintegrating reality, the only one with whom he can discuss what is happening is artificial intelligence.