Film Categories: body
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memento mori
A meditation on (im)mortality, mediated by a lifetime’s compendium of images, memento mori is a layered time-lapse exploration of the total photographs captured over the course of the filmmaker’s life – over 120,000 in total. This all-seeing archive is blended into permutations and combinations of subjects, objects, percepts, dreams, and experiences, to form an encyclopedic index of the possibilities of sight. “A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies,…
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Jenny Haniver
A photographer steadies a Polaroid camera and composes a shot of the sky, flanked by tree branches. Later, a woman wakes from a nightmare. Jenny Haniver takes its title from a cryptid totem sold for centuries at the docks of Antwerp: a Jenny Haniver or jeune d’anvers (young girl of Antwerp) is a disfigured ray or skate carcass, carved to resemble an angel, a devil, a dragon. A series of ten filmed portraits are subject to all manner of alteration. By this they compose the hull of a ship wrecked on rocks sung by sirens. To mirror its namesake, the…
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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…
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Nude Descending
A video reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting, “Nu descendant un escalier n° 2”, that updates the work’s inter-media and temporal concerns into a contemporary frame, one century later.
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Summer 1975
summer 1975 is an animated film based on one year in the filmmakers fractured life. Hand drawn rotoscoped figures are layered with stills and live video footage to create an open narrative based on events in his life that took place in 1975. He was 13 and this was a pivotal year for him in many ways. He discovered the magic of animation and was hooked. He made his first animated film with his best friend, they locked themselves away for the whole summer to complete it. 1975 was also the year that he had his first sexual experience, with…
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Last Vestiges
Aging stripper Eddy isn’t the superstar he once was. The patrons are bored with him, his lap dance regulars are blowing him off, and he’s coping with it all by self-medicating with drugs and booze. During a night of harsh rejections, Eddy notices an elderly man staring at him from across the club. Desperate for attention and money, Eddy offers the man a dance. But once the two are alone in a private booth, things take an unexpected turn.
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Seasons Fall
Fragments of a forest trail – a path traveled many times, never the same way twice.
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Augury (Full Version)
Through augury a city is founded: the bridge, the temple, the tower, the burial ground. Guided by an original soundtrack of Appalachian dirges and drones, eight connected works contemplate the history of, and possible responses to, technophilia. Using handheld and macro video, family super 8 and archival footage, Augury explores the fissures in constructed space for signs of personhood, care, and the possibility of a shared pre-linguistic ground. At each site, various strategies of ethical engagement are suggested: wait out the techno-enthrallment, unconceal the ancient myths, map alternative narratives, breathe through the machine, or seed wilderness in the cracks. Beneath…
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Levitation Road (Part 01 of Augury)
A bridge, to hold firm, demands a human sacrifice: the architect’s wife. Guided by an original soundtrack of Appalachian dirges and drones, this is the first of eight connected works which contemplate the history of, and possible responses to, technophilia. Through augury a city is founded: the bridge, the temple, the tower, the burial ground. Using handheld and macro video, family super 8 and archival footage, Augury explores the fissures in constructed space for signs of personhood, care, and the possibility of a shared pre-linguistic ground. At each site, various strategies of ethical engagement are suggested: wait out the techno-enthrallment,…
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Ash Beetle Backstep (Part 03 of Augury)
New bugs, lost trees. And after the Green Resurrection, will there be a confession? Guided by an original soundtrack of Appalachian dirges and drones, this is the third of eight connected works which contemplate the history of, and possible responses to, technophilia. Through augury a city is founded: the bridge, the temple, the tower, the burial ground. Using handheld and macro video, family super 8 and archival footage, Augury explores the fissures in constructed space for signs of personhood, care, and the possibility of a shared pre-linguistic ground. At each site, various strategies of ethical engagement are suggested: wait out…
