Film Categories: cameraless

  • Chinese Series

    “This film was made on 35mm whereby Stan scratched off the emulsion of the film using his fingernail. The original was step-printed by Mary Beth Reed. This film is available is both 16mm and 35mm and is in black and white.”-Dominic Angerame Scratching on spit-softened emulsion “with bare fingernails,” Stan completed this work — all that he could manage of his long dreamed-of “Chinese Series” — in his bed, a couple of months before his death. Printed by Courtney Hoskins, who has written that: “On the negative, it seemed to have the essence of Chinese characters — “strokes” and blocks,…

  • Road Trip

    Late-night musings about the perfect road trip take form in animated photographs and a story that is all road trips combined.

  • Post mark lick

    “Post mark lick” is “a love-song to the pre-digital age of postal correspondence and photogram animation” (Images Festival, 2003). It explores the materiality of the postage stamp and the fleeting narratives of letters and postcards.

  • Jetsam

    An exaltation of the everyday, made using the photogram technique of exposing objects directly onto film; Wire mesh, fibrefill, salt, paper, steel wool, cherry blossoms, grease, spit, bubble wrap, tea leaves, washer rings and a drain-stopper chain are transformed in the process.

  • Letters

    “Letters” explores the transformation of painting through photography and the movement of light as music, text and body language. Formed through a combination of abstract hand-painted film and live photography, originated on super 8mm and 16mm, ‘Letters’ uses extensive optical printing and single-frame editing techniques to draw the material and structural properties of film into focus and create a sense of rhythm, gravity, weight and mass.

  • Root

    A notebook/catalogue of optical experiences, memories and thoughts composed of geometric and organic looking abstract images painted directly onto clear 16mm stock, interspersed with sequences of found footage. My first experiment in hand-painted film-making and optical printing, (painted in 1993 and edited in 2003) exploring the frame-by-frame interaction of contrasting colours, textures and shapes, and referencing Hans Richter’s ‘Rhythm 21’, Len Lye’s ‘Colour Box’, Stan Brakhage’s ‘MothLight’ and ‘The Flicker’ by Tony Conrad. Images from Root were used as source material for my other films Pour, Deluxe, Double, Radiator, SKZCP and Letters.

  • From Memory

    A poetic meditation on time and light, formed through an exploration of the material and illusory properties of paint and film, movement in counterpoint and miniature. Composed of organic-looking abstract marks and gestures painted directly onto film and manipulated photographically using an optical printer.

  • Cold Tape

    Rapid-fire computer-composed abstract animation exploring difference, the interplay of opposites, and the impact of light on the body.

  • Open

    An abstract film of vertical horror, absence and descent (After Marcel Duchamp’s painting, ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’, 1912) composed in-camera by optically manipulating an individual frame of hand-painted film. With electronic music track by David McKenzie. The film frame was painted in a single stroke to imitate the blurring of images produced by the opening and closing of the eyelid; and by film slippage (a common fault, where damaged film runs through the camera or projector gate without stopping). Subtle movements of reflected light on the film surface and parallax camera motion animate the painting; which, in tandem with the…

  • Pour

    An abstract animation exploring the themes of attraction and repulsion, suspension and release. Formed through the delicate transformation of colours, textures and shapes painted on film. With music by David McKenzie.