Film Categories: history

  • Les Mains Negatives

    A postcard, St. Ouen flee markets, Paris, 2012.

  • lay claim to an island

    Texts from the 1969 American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and letters from supporters propel an exploration of political yearning, emancipatory architecture and failed utopias. What does it mean to claim land that has more value as a symbol than as a potential home? And how does that symbol function beyond the boundaries of its geographic limits?

  • 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.

  • 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,…

  • Animals in Motion

    Between 1877 and 1885, an English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, conducted detailed experiments analyzing human and animal motion using rapid photography. In 1968, John Straiton took the published works of Muybridge and created from them a fascinating and hilarious film. A tribute to the serious maker of the first nudie before the invention of movies.

  • Wastewater

    The North Toronto Wastewater Treatment Plant lies in thick brush downhill from a hydroelectric corridor. The eye bounces, guided by the vertical forms coming up out of the valley, and a low flame bridges these movements.

  • Blue Guitar

    Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.

  • What Troubles the Peace at Brandenburg?

    All about red and green in time. Very much inspired by the work of Count Hermann Puckler-Muskau, Adolf Just and, above all, Gerhard Richter. A mnemotechnic and threnody for the infirm of Brandenburg an der Havel and environs during a time of hate (too like our own).

  • Gulf

    This film was shot on the north shore of Cuba looking towards the Gulf of Mexico, just months before 4.9 million barrels of oil was spilled by Deepwater Horizon between April 20-July 15, 2010. Wave patterns fill the frame, tearing apart the filmstrip itself. Selected Screenings: Berwick FIlm & Media Arts Festival, 2017 (Berwick-on-Tweed, UK)

  • 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…