Film Categories: Earth

  • Landform 1

    Studies in motion, made red, black and blue by tone and tint. To be present in a landscape is to turn from vision to a menacing rhythm.

  • On Sundays

    A record of textured surfaces and passing throughts on an uneventful Sunday spent in quiet contemplation at home, accompanied by the memories of defocused lights on a somnambullstic nighttime streetcar journey. Produced in collaboration with poet Goran Simic, commissioned by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) for Poetry Projections II.

  • Routes

    Tree rhythms in the backyard of my parents’ house.

  • Quanta

    Particles in space recorded during an afternoon on familiar waters. Quanta is an investigative record of patterns found in the observable Universe, as contained within the perceptions of a Bolex taken for an excursion in a rowboat. Special thanks to Ajla Odobasic.

  • Waterfilm

    Two film strips illuminated by passages of water: one aboard a ferry crossing the English Channel at day, the other on the banks of the Seine river at night. The soundtrack is generated directly by the projector ‘reading’ the images shot in Super-16mm.

  • Cairo In One Breath

    Every day, people are being replaced by machines. The adhan is a 1,400 year-old oral tradition in the process of unprecedented change in Cairo. After 60 generations, thousands of individual muezzins are being replaced by a single voice broadcast from a radio station as part of a plan of the Mubarak regime. As the Adhan Unification Project takes hold, Egypt undergoes Revolution and regime change. The film follows muezzins from when they heard rumors of the AUP through its implementation, which since 2010 has displaced thousands.

  • Recomposition

    A short visual study of repeating layers; dissolving forms reemerge and return. Composed of thousands of animated still images, Recomposition is an early experiment in polyphonic image processing techniques developed by Browne over the course of a decade. Images of the urban landscape and its technological interventions on space merge with decaying natural forms and the tactility of human flesh, suggesting an erotic sensuality lurking beneath the surfaces of the material world.

  • Numbers

    Numbers was created during a trip to Manhattan, where I caught my self-reflection in a glass door that read ‘41’ after having photographed the number 42 earlier the same day, and subsequently continued hunting until I found everything else between 1 and 100. Dedicated to Hollis Frampton. – D.B.

  • 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,…

  • Serena Gundy

    Serena Gundy Park, in Toronto, so named for the late wife of Toronto businessman James Henry Gundy, who influenced the financial character of early twentieth-century Canada. Gundy had owned the parkland as a family estate, and upon his death in 1951, donated the land to the city in memory of his wife. In early spring, the trees remain bare from winter, on cusp of renewal. The film takes her name for its homophonic relation to the nursery rhyme Solomon Grundy (born on a Monday, christened on Tuesday, married on Wednesday…), which cycles through the days of the week that chart…