Film Categories: history

  • Synaesthetic Anesthesia

    Synaesthetic Anaesthesia is the product of many long years, experimenting with optical printing, travelling mattes, high contrast manipulation and other film specific techniques and processes. The optical printer is used to manipulate archival imagery from the colonial era, forming a layered tapestry with contemporary images of landscapes, architecture and phenomena. By means of montage and optical recombination the film takes these historical fragments and builds them up to a frantic pitch. The film seeks to depict the frenetic digital information age but entirely through traditional photomechanical methods, a reversal of the norm. The sound design enhances the film’s transformations, and…

  • The Alicorn

    The film takes the form of a three-tiered hallucination: a dream within a dream within a dream. A pharaoh time travels from the future to ancient Egypt and dreams of a medieval tavern where people are suffering from the Black Plague. In the tavern, on the brink of death, an old crone tells her life story. The woman’s story, narrated in old English song, alludes to her salvation by the appearance of an alicorn borne by her younger sister. Themes of women’s stories, power, and transgression are woven throughout the narrative.

  • Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds

    This solo performance for the camera pays homage to 1970s video art, exploring how the electronic manipulation of the video signal can create a choreocinema for body and machine. Choreographic patterns melding retro moves with a minimalist aesthetic participate in a jagged, pulsing duet with the danceable beats and noisy textures of the track “Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds” by Alterity Problem (Alexander Moskos and Joel Taylor). Effects were created in real-time with a raster-scan device built by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, accessed during a residency at the now-closed Experimental TV Center in upstate New York.

  • Finding a Place to Sleep

    Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era. The “film” image is re-invented through digital video to enact a sense of ambiguity between authenticity and fiction, as can also be present in the act of oral storytelling. This is one chapter in “Stories for a Future Generation,” a series of shorts which together tell the stories of my family’s and my own migrations, and the inter-generational impacts of those upon our lives and on those of our family’s…

  • Underground

    Underground presents a performative and re-staged first person documentary portrait of Westminster Station/London Underground, based on footage captured during the time period leading up to and just after the July 7th 2005 transit bombings. Through re-working the original footage, this short piece sets out to explore and present the contradictory moods of the time, from the more official government position of carrying on as usual, to the sense of anxiety felt in the day to day, while highlighting the intangible effects of trauma which shaped the experience of the city and urban space at this time.

  • Forever

    Part dream, part documentary, Forever weaves history and hedonism to form a world of dandelions, hypnosis, bicycles and memory. Created from experiments replicating the effects of radiation on film, the piece explores the nature of airborne radioactivity and brings us from a woman’s story of adolescence, to a bicycle race, to life in the Soviet Union. A bricolage of pop culture and personal histories, Forever is about looking for dandelions and finding atoms. As the opening film of Lion, Forever employs spray and smudge techniques to explore the concept of airborne radioactive contaminants and how they travel in open air.…

  • Water

    A film exploring the impulsive nature of radiation, Water is the last dream of a dying man. Using brilliant blue and black images from cross-processed 16mm, the film explores the end of the 3 Chernobyl divers – three men who sacrificed their lives to drain a pool of radioactive hydrogen peroxide beneath the burning reactor no. 4 during the Chernobyl disaster. Mutating out of darkness in to a piercing blue, Water drifts under the surface of consciousness and into final memories. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.

  • Cowboys and Iodine

    An attempt to tame the atomic frontier, Cowboys and Iodine is a fever dream involving the masculine bravado and seldom-discussed gender shaming used to encourage men to volunteer as liquidators for the cleanup of the Chernobyl disaster. Employing dip, spray and smudge techniques to replicate the different methods of radiation exposure the men experienced. The film also employs a split negative/reversal process to reflect the methods that waves of radiation enter the body. Cowboys and Iodine blends subtext, social stigma and personal aspiration to construct the internal contemplation of a man going to war with the atom. The full-length version…

  • Cure

    Cure is a document from a time when radiation was touted as a solution for everything- for beauty, power, perhaps even for a broken heart. A drifting composition, Cure uses gently applied “radiation” techniques to mimic the application of a precious beauty cream. It completes the look with whispers of the promise of radium and the solutions it brings, floating in and out like traces of perfume. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.

  • Lion

    A project spanning three years of production and research, Lion explores the Chernobyl disaster and the nature of radiation, recollection, and personal history. Lion navigates atomic fallout and a girl’s adolescence, a dream before death, radiation as a cause and a cure for cancer, masculine bravado, feminine obsession, a trip to Chernobyl amidst the death of a matriarch, and the destruction of memory. This conceptually arranged film album is composed of seven works on 16mm and hand processed with darkroom techniques that mimic the effects of radiation on film. The series combines memory, history, pop culture and technical experiments to create visual representations…