Genres: experimental

  • 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.

  • Controller

    A fly compresses time and captures itself on video by triggering a motion-activated surveillance webcam.

  • Phase Transition

    A disk of butter melting in a pan creates a mini-spectacle.

  • 6 Permutations

    A trial-and-error attempt to reconcile presence and absence.

  • Fiori Della Mia Vita (flowers of my life)

    Fiori Della Mia Vita is a memorial to lost love that is based on the true love story of my mentor Gianpaolo Barbieri and his partner Evar, who died a quarter of century ago. GPB + EVAR

  • 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…

  • THREE BORDERS

    “Three Borders” is a found-footage film reminiscent of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” (1962). It consists of family photos of the artist and other anonymous found (family) photos. In the style of Magic Realism, the video narrates anecdotes from the families of Alisa Berger’s Jewish father and her North Korean mother. The ten stories narrate the meeting between Koreans and Jews from Galicia. They address the overcoming or the construction of inner, outer, national, ethnic, spiritual or emotional borders which span three generations.

  • The Astronauts’ Bodies

    When his two mature children Anton and Linda start leaving the house, after graduating from school, father Michael stops taking care of his body as a protest. His son Anton takes part in a bed-rest-study to contribute to space-traveling, while his sister Linda is in search of her first sexual experience and is drawn to a suspicious young man. The film is a poetic story about the progression of dreams to go to space and about the organic beauty of the human body, its desires and longings.

  • May 35

    A haunting commemoration of the Tiananmen Square uprisings made from fragments of censored archival imagery transferred onto film using razor blades and scotch tape. “May 35” speaks to the difficulty of remembering in the absence of memory, especially when June 4 histories have been censored and obscured. It is a tribute to the thousands of lives devastated by this upheaval. Sound Design: Kadet Kuhne