Film Categories: Nature

  • No Rest for the Restless

    Some stories appear complete, while others do not. Some stories are remembered, while others are forgotten. Some stories obscure, while others reveal. Even though somewhat different in shape and form “No Rest for the Restless” is in some ways a subconscious re-imagining of an exhibition I had many years ago of the same name. At that time, I found the human project to be astounding and baffling. I continue to be astounded and baffled today.

  • Isolated Gestures

    With Isolated Gestures I am primarily concerned with exploring the interplay of sunlight and shadows with weather as the narrative. The story for me is in how light contrasts the absence of light in shaping forms within a given frame of time and space. I generally gravitate towards places that reveal the many layers of time, stimulating reflections on all the different life forms that may have existed in a particular location where I have set up my camera and tripod. This is when I imagine worlds that have passed, worlds that are present, and worlds that are yet to…

  • Sightings

    During my childhood I spent countless hours daydreaming. Often about boarding an alien spacecraft where they would ask me about life on Earth. I would enthusiastically tell them my thoughts and observations about this or that, which the space aliens always seemed to find interesting. In retrospect I was engaging in a transference of my frustration that no one on this planet seemed particularly interested in my opinions. At that time, I was a voracious reader of science fiction novels, in particular Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov. After watching Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” I was certain…

  • Fire & Water

    For many years I lived near the village of Volcano, Hawai’i in a native Ohia rainforest. My house was about ten kilometers from the entrance to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park so I would go there whenever I could. Here was a place that displayed the essential forces of earth, air, fire and water, the very elements that form our existence. This had quite a profound impact on me, especially when new land suddenly appeared when only moments before it did not exist. Once the new land was established, birds, insects and seeds would establish themselves beginning with Hapuu ferns (a…

  • Air & Earth

    There are certain places that sustain me. Places where the elements of nature are so evocatively displayed, that my desire to return and experience them again never loses its hold. The Big Island of Hawaii is 20 degrees latitude north of the equator giving it a climate with a narrow range of temperatures along with continuous prevailing winds. Above 30 degrees latitude north and 30 degrees latitude south of the equator cold air from the Arctic and cold air from Antarctica mingles vigorously with hot air from the tropics. It is largely this interaction of cold air from the poles…

  • Sunprints 1,2,3

    Based loosely on the tripartite plan of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), the film was made by applying cyanotype chemistry to blank film exposed to sun . The resultant blue and white footage was then combined with camera footage in three sections: Into the Valley, Middle Ground, Radiance.

  • Folds of Stone

    Rock is subject to constant change. Natural forces, geodynamics, and anthropogenic interventions shape the supposedly rigid matter as an extended organism, which can only be perceived in geological thinking of time. In their short film “Folds of Stone” Nicole Krenn and Lisa Truttmann continue these thoughts: We see breathing stones, pulsating furrows, trembling rocks, material that vibrates. Microscopic landscapes dissolve in the image. Surface, materiality and structure oscillate between jagged rock edges and soft, silky fabric folds. The two artists translate a multimedia installation from an old sawmill at national park Gesäuse into the cinema space, showing the process of…

  • The Magical Quality of Armpits

    A silent foray into the most underappreciated part of the body.

  • How amazingly unlikely is your birth

    What could a cosmology of one person’s life look like? A daughter examines the life and premature death of her father, who had a troubled relationship with the psychiatric medical establishment and was passionate about ecology, politics and space travel.

  • Earth, Take Me With You !

    A return to the earth