Film Format: 16mm

  • For a Woman in El Salvador, Speaking

    Claudina Calderon, pregnant, with a small son, disappeared in San Salvador, abducted by government security forces. Her plight generates this filmic meditation, creating the voice of her mother through poetry, music, and murals to dramatize the story of one woman who stands for many. This film was made for the Women’s Association of El Salvador (AMES). With Susan Freundlich, sign artist, and the voices of Carolyn Forche and Yanira Chacon.

  • For Marilyn (Original IV)

    This film which has no title – only a dedication – won’t be burdened with more description other than that it is the longest hand-painted work to date. Note: Those films designated by 18 fps may also be shown at 24 fps: I am in all cases designating a preference, not an absolute. (Stan Brakhage)

  • It Matters What

    Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework of practical and critical human relationships with other-than-human-species elucidated by the theorist Donna Haraway. A fragment from Haraway’s essay “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” is reworked here as a poetic manifesto. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction.  The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant…

  • Audrey’s Beard

    “Audrey’s Beard” was shot on my beloved Bolex camera. The film was conceived as a time-lapse documentary film experiment with shots of this once butch dyke filmmaker’s beard growing in over a 21-day period in the early 1990’s. At the time it felt like it was a very transgressive act as an artist, transitioning gender, to grow the beard I had felt ashamed of for so many years, using my body to tell a story, coming to terms with the shame of being born Intersex in a creative and empowering way. Ten years later, in 2001, a potent voice over…

  • vulture

    “vulture” sets its sight on farm animals and their surrounding flora. Static shots and slow-moving zooms, follow the grazing animals in their minute inter-species exchanges. When left to roam together the sensibilities of these “beasts” are allowed to surface. The film was shot and processed with various means including flower/plant processing carried out as blooming occurred, from 2016-18. In some cases a salt bath was used for fixing the film which was left soaking in the dark for three days. “Vultures hover over the barn, from high, with razor sharp eyesight, and a keen sense of smell. Together, they stalk…

  • Forgotten Mother

    “Forgotten Mother” is a personal and sensitive exploration of the relationship between Alice, a black domestic worker, and Adrienne, the white child she raised. This half -hour documentary follows Adrienne’s return to her birthplace, now Zimbabwe, where she is reunited with Alice. In what was formerly white-ruled Rhodesia, it was common for black women to leave their families in rural areas to seek jobs as domestic workers in the city. These women would live on the premises of their white employers and take care of the children. Although they worked for the same family for long periods of time they…

  • Dear Grandpa

    Using my grandfather’s old eight-millimetre film camera, I explore the deteriorating relationship I had with my grandfather during his final days after being diagnosed with cancer.

  • Great Dismal Swamp

    Contact and underwater microphones are combined with 16mm film to portray the landscape of the Great Dismal Swamp. Once upon a time, George Washington drained it. Then it became the largest refuge for escaped slaves in the US. Edgar Allen Poe hung a picture of it on his wall. Robert Frost went there to commit a romantic suicide, but didn’t.

  • Untitled #1 (sun vision)

    There were two initial impulses for the film: Turner’s almost-not-there paintings of light (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) and the swirling, spirit-filled paintings of Emily Carr. Sun-light-film- Untitled #1 is a film of liminal thresholds, borders, amorphous states – sky, clouds, fog, lake, snow. A film in motion – camera gestures and emulsion activity. People and seasons pass in the daily repetitive cycles- repetitions and reprises and beginnings again – sameness amidst the fleeting. Blurring, merging, dissolving boundaries,- the world as it is forming and disappearing…Not nothing, everything. “Everlasting and powerful is the theatre of life, without substance, but…

  • May Waves Rise From Its Floor

    “May Waves Rise From Its Floor” follows in Hallé’s career-long practice of researching and building custom-made projection devices to be used in collaborative shows. For this project, Hallé continues his method of using live manipulation of candle light with broken pieces of glass and breathing to illuminate 16mm film. The ability to spontaneously create and adapt the visuals has led Hallé to perform this show with a diverse range of renowned improvising musicians. The 16mm film that plays on the projector was made by Hallé specifically to be projected using this custom-device. The subtle, slow-moving, and often abstract imagery of…