Film Categories: Sound Art + Music

  • TV

    Transformational Vibrations (TV). Sound vibrations are interpreted as images in this abstract film. Resonating cycles of rhythm build until every frame contains a sound. This is an experimental animation created by applying both sound and picture directly onto the 35mm film. Once the soundtrack was created, each individual sound was assigned a specific shape and colour that repeats through out the entire composition. Visual shapes were airbrushed and hand-painted onto orange mask (negative film), then printed positive for further rendering by bleaching or scratching into the films emulsion before the final print copy was made. Sounds are made by hand…

  • BLU In YOU

    Walter Benjamin suggests that film is comparable to surgery, the instrument allowing the operator to penetrate the body of the subject while, paradoxically, maintaining his or her distance. This statement self-reflexively sets up the female spectator at the helm of the art-installation opening of Blu in You—an eloquent essayist film with visual conversations that dissects historical and contemporary representations of the black female body, sexuality and subjectivity. The female spectator (Melanie Smith), views the staged art installation conversations between visual arts curator (Andrea Fatona) and writer (Nalo Hopkinson). The conversations begin with a cultural history of violence, ethnographic display and…

  • Small Fish

    Laurie is an artist who wants nothing more than to become a professional painter. She paints beautiful fish but when her paintings don’t sell she is overwhelmed by the rejection and the feeling that she will never be successful. Losing her sense of self and artistic voice, this is when things get fishy. With the help of a fellow artist, she tries to find her way through this vast ocean too big for such a small fish.

  • At Midnight Plays a Dance Tune

    During his mother’s illness and after her death, Roy went through an intense period in his life, in which he felt attracted to the fringes of society. He raced in his car, roamed the streets at night and indulged in sex and drugs. He always had music playing in his appartment, no matter what time it was. During this period of extremities, the memory of his former neighbour Antoine suddenly came back. As a child Roy had been fascinated by the man and looking back now it seemed like Roy’s current life mirrored that of his former neighbour. Even though…

  • On the Line

    “On the Line” is inspired by Isa Shimoda, a butch gender nonconforming immigrant who served meals to Japanese American tuna cannery workers in her restaurant on the docks of San Diego in the 1930s. She was known for her masculine attire as well as her skills at naginata, a sword-based martial art practiced by Japanese women. Her restaurant was a refuge for the women who endured gruesome hours cleaning fish and lived in meager housing shelters known as “fish camp.” Shimoda has two sets of wartime records from the incarceration camps—one identifying her as female, the other as male. “On the Line” uses…

  • Wayward Emulsions

    Fleeting cinematic impressions of a wayward woman are captured in the oblique wanderings of emulsion lifted from stray reels of 35mm film. Winner, Experimental Short Grand Jury Prize, Slamdance Festival 2019

  • Sworded Love

    Fleeting cinematic impressions of star-crossed swordsmen are captured in the oblique wanderings of emulsion lifted from a stray reel of a 35mm kung fu action film.

  • Lift Little Tokyo

    Maps and memories of Little Tokyo’s historical district of Los Angeles are uplifted via scotch tape transfers.

  • TSSP

    In T.S.S.P., the 11th installment of the CHRISTEENE Video Collection, CHRISTEENE Turns, Stares, Shakes and Poses through Toronto performance collective HOTNUTS’ mega-dosed acid ass cracked world in search of the one thing she really needs. Tha’ Dick.

  • Aktion Toilet

    In ‘AKTION TOILET’, the 10th installment of the CHRISTEENE Video Collection, electro pulses lure CHRISTEENE back to the woods to amass sacred cults of Mystics and Queerdos against the darkness of the world as we know it.