Film Categories: Sound Art + Music

  • 13 Related Sewing Machines

    Synopsis Why can’t I hear the sound of sewing machines anymore? A meeting with my family and the history of all their sewing machines. German: Warum hören wir den Klang von Nähmaschinen nicht mehr? In dem Film 13 Related Sewing Machines stiften wir Bekanntschaft mit einer Familie, in der die Nähmaschine immer zugegen war. Der Film ist dritter Teil eines fortwährenden Projekts über unsichtbare Frauenarbeit. I can´t hear the sound of your sewing machine anymore ist eine Hommage an meine Mutter und meine Großmutter und an alle die Frauen, die ständig ein schlechtes Gewissen haben, nicht auszureichen.

  • Cum Pane

    It’s physically demanding and sweaty. Grandma’s hands are gnarled from years of pain and hard work. Hands knead the dough. She works with rolling-pins, brushes and older baking utensils. She deftly places the bread on a peel and sets it in the stone oven. Grandpa takes care of the wood-burning , watches over it, blows life into it, again and again. He moves the bread around on the hot hearth. They work noiselessly. Close to each other. Crackling and pounding, scratching and clouds of flour. It is hot. The fire blazes. The smell of wood. The aroma of freshly baked…

  • Densen

    Synopsis: A musical voyage through photographs from Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Barcelona, Milan and Buenos Aires. The word for power line in Japanese is densen. Music by the Swedish group Tape. French: Inspiré du mot japonais signifiant « ligne à haute tension », le film Densen est un voyage musical à travers des photos prises à Tokyo, St Petersbourg, Barcelone, Milan et Buenos Aires. Spanish: Un viaje musical a través de fotografías de Tokyo, St Petersburgo, Barcelona, 
Milano y Buenos Aires. La palabra japonesa Densen significa conducto de corriente. Musica del grupo Tape de Suécia.        German: Eine musikalische Reise aus…

  • Between The Bullet and The Hole

    ‘Between the Bullet and the Hole’ is a film centred on the elusive and complex effects of war on women’s role in ballistic research and early computing. The film features new and archival high-speed bullet photography, schlieren and electric spark imagery, bullet sound wave imagery, forensic ballistic photography, slide rulers, punch cards, computer diagrams, and a soundtrack by Scanner. Like a frantic animation storyboard, it explores the flickering space between the frames, testing the perceptual mechanics of visual interpolation, the possibility of reading or deciphering the gap between before and after. Interpolation – the main task of the women studying…

  • Chromatic Aberration

    ‘Chromatic Aberration’ is a film which explores the early technologies of colour filmmaking drawn from the archives of George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Featuring vibrant close-ups of eyes from fledgling archival experiments in colour film, Chromatic Aberration turns the cinematic lens in on itself: from the prosthetic recording eye of the camera, to an evocation of the abstract inner screen of one’s eyelids. Satz has drawn inspiration from a scene in Powell and Pressberger’s 1946 film ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, where the transition from the reality of colour to the black and white of the afterworld is…

  • Doorway for Natalie Kalmus

    ‘Doorway for Natalie Kalmus’ is a film centred around the use of colour in moving image technology, exploring the disorienting technicolour prismatic effects of the lamp house of a 35mm colour film printer. Through minute shifts across an abstract colour spectrum, punctuated by a mechanical soundtrack, the film evokes kaleidoscopic perceptual after-images (bringing to mind Paul Sharits, Dario Argento and the Wizard of Oz). Natalie Kalmus was the ex-wife of technicolour inventor Herbert Kalmus, and was the colour consultant for hundreds of colour films, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, the Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and many…

  • Oramics: Atlantis Anew

    ‘Oramics: Atlantis Anew’ is conceived of as an artist’s film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958. The film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum in London.
Oram used drawn sound principles to compose ‘handwrought’electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. The film brings this obsolete technological fantasy briefly to back to life, enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences. The…

  • Sound Seam

    ‘Sound Seam’ is a film which gives voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The soundtrack’s musical composition is interlaced with a voice-over which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a gramophone needle. The overlapping voices of the narratives tell a forensic love story of yearning, encryption, inscription, decoding, memory and erasure. The film uses microscopic photography, scanning electron microscopy, and sounds of…

  • Last Vestiges

    Aging stripper Eddy isn’t the superstar he once was. The patrons are bored with him, his lap dance regulars are blowing him off, and he’s coping with it all by self-medicating with drugs and booze. During a night of harsh rejections, Eddy notices an elderly man staring at him from across the club. Desperate for attention and money, Eddy offers the man a dance. But once the two are alone in a private booth, things take an unexpected turn.

  • Levitation Road (Part 01 of Augury)

    A bridge, to hold firm, demands a human sacrifice: the architect’s wife. Guided by an original soundtrack of Appalachian dirges and drones, this is the first of eight connected works which contemplate the history of, and possible responses to, technophilia. Through augury a city is founded: the bridge, the temple, the tower, the burial ground. 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,…