Film Categories: Earth

  • Picture Start

    This lyric brief is a meditation on the natural world, its carefully wrought superimpositions of sky, leaves and chromatic close-ups a powerfully felt evocation of animistic surround. Photographed with a keen eye for detail, Kneller’s painterly overlays collage these moments into a gently flowing homage to the present.

  • Plein Air

    This abstract travelogue flies just over the surface of the Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario. “Plein Air” is an engrossing sonic and visual trip and a continuation of Kerr’s fascination with landscape cinema.

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…

  • Leaves Like Feathers

    Leaves Like Feathers A neo-Impressionist film. A painterly film. Leaves Like Feathers was shot mostly with an iPhone Pro Max manipulated to blow out the backgrounds (sunlight) to white, and cause foreground subjects to materialize, dissolve, flash, and ‘morph’ into the light—when shot with a moving camera. The subjects are plants, mostly ferns, which are sometimes described as having ‘leaves like feathers.’ This quote came to mind while I was shooting the film: Having condensed his vision to a small area of the surface of his own lily pond, Claude Monet realized that the fragment could indeed suggest not merely…

  • Linea ver

    Spring sculpts their fierce emergence. Aspen, cedar, red oak, lichen (and others) phytograms on super-8mm tri-x film. Language: plants

  • Phosphene

    Phosphene searches for the harmony between the acoustics and the image of sound. The film’s soundscape comprises natural and industrial sounds from the west coast of Canada. Inspired by these sounds, the image was created through cymatics – a process that visualizes sound vibrations through various liquid mediums.

  • Two or Three Saprophytes

    Two or Three Saprophytes is a video essay that traces a speculative history of the industrial revolution, its ecological backdrop, and its intellectual legacy of growth-based thinking. Breaking from strictly didactic or documentary forms, the film defracts its historical research through a hallucinatory poetic lens, mixing critique and fantasy to frame the interconnected histories of mushrooms, trees, coal, chemicals, machines, and capitalists as a kind of ecological ghost story. Visual and textual motifs of circles, spirals, hexagons, and “revolutions” punctuate the film, sketching associations and contrasts between historical movements, economic patterns, rotational pistons, chemical diagrams, and ecological balance. Posing a…

  • Exit & Arrival

    There are places that we seek, and there are places that find us. One can never know for sure which comes first; the seeking or the finding. Often the unexpected moment occurs, the unforeseen discovery.

  • Vanishing Heat

    Vanishing Heat is part of a series of films where I explore the dichotomy between tranquility and activity in our natural and manufactured worlds. Time, motion and stillness are intertwined to express interactions that are both deliberate and accidental as energy given off by one system affects another.

  • Maybe…EARTH

    It is very easy to die on Mars. Yet the race to the cold, dark and oxygen-deprived planet has never been stronger. Maybe it’s some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy driven by billionaires. Maybe plants can help break the spell. Maybe…EARTH.