Film Categories: Sound Art + Music

  • Faust Film: An Opera: Part 1

    A collaboration between composer Rick Corrigan and Stan Brakhage, featuring Joel Haertling as Faust, Gretchen LeMaistre as Gretchen, Phillip Hathaway as Faust’s friend, and Paul Lundahl as Servant. This is the realization of a 30-year-old dream (grant applications and fragments of script from the 1950s published in Brakhage’s “Metaphors on Vision”), a wish of the young filmmaker to film a “modern” Faust (quite opposite of the traditional Fausts) which finally came to a fulfillment as unpredictable and as absolute as, say, three decades of living experience.

  • Dark Adaptation

    Dark Adaptation extends the experiments with alternative optical systems I began in Refraction Series (2008). These films are rooted in the experiments and writings of Ibn Al-Haytham and Isaac Newton, pioneering investigators of the nature of sight and light. In them I use fundamental phenomena such as refraction and thin-film interference to create images of pure prismatic colour in motion. Dark Adaptation is both a true representation of a series of tiny performances with light that were recorded by the camera, and an analogue for an interior journey. The music is by Graham Stewart of Violence and the Sacred. “Dark…

  • Athyrium filix-femina

    The second in a series of “quilt films” that pay homage to the work of pioneering female artists, “Athyrium filix-femina” reimagines Anna Atkins’ founding work in photography as a moving image. In 1843, Anna Atkins published the first book of photography, “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions”, an exploration of regional botany that classified different kinds of algae using direct prints of the plants. The cyanotype process was a relatively short-lived as a dominant form of photography, however, it found refuge in the domestic sphere where it was used to decorate fabric for pillows, drapes and clothing. By combining filmmaking…

  • Mezzo

    When Breanna was 12 years old, she discovered opera and began exploring and acknowledging her gender identity. At age 25, she is the first transgender woman to complete a Masters in Opera at a major conservatory. The film traces the days leading up to her graduation recital while harkening back to the defining moments of her girlhood.

  • Luna e Santur

    “Originally commissioned as a short for Ben Coonley’s My First 3D Part 2 at Microscope Gallery, I expanded this project into what it currently is: hooded figures, violent passion, and stroboscopic tenderness brought on by a paranormal encounter I had in the summer of 2015.” –JGS ‘‘A visually assaultive threnody for losses never fully revealed and composed for monstrous times, LUNA E SANTUR mingles sex and death with the supernatural and subnaturalistic.’-Colin Beckett “Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a…

  • AbRuPtiOns

    AbRuPtiOns is a short abstract-musical film set to an original score by the composer-animator. Forms and shapes blink on and off in a complex rhythmic structure.

  • Watergazing

    Watergazing is as old as humanity. It is the practise of calmly and peacefully studying the water, its motion and its shimmerings in order to experience images rising from our own depths. The flowing water becomes a metaphor for time, which assists the practised watergazer in seeing into the past and the future.

  • Brain Heart Lungs

    A meditation on the end of life. Brain Heart Lungs is a visual music film set to an original score by the composer-animator. In an era of electronic imaging, transplants, and implants, much has changed in the contemporary view of our physical selves. Brain Heart Lungs delves under the skin, beyond race, religion, and gender into the world of organs and their contemporary meanings.

  • XircaNoX

    It is an abstract musical narrative in which the hunting instinct plays out in an other-world setting. XircaNox inhabits a mysterious and challenging world full of art historical images. Set to an original score by the composer-animator, XircaNox is a significant addition to the artistic genre. Art history images include iconic works by Van Gogh, Holbein, Fragonard, Rodin, Manet, Da Vinci, Velazquez, Renoir, Ingres, Michelangelo, and more.

  • Eight In One

    A study in synesthesia, matching colour and motion and gesture to sounds, correlating the auditory and the visual in relation to personal experiences with synesthesia.