Cinema circa 1895 as it was with Louis Lumière… Four single-shot vignettes photographed with a vintage hand-cranked 35mm movie camera. These are the first in a series of 35mm observational films created without the assistance of a motion picture laboratory. Hand-processed and printed by the filmmaker, the project acts as an anthropological document of a neighbourhood in transition while celebrating the textural beauty and analog simplicity of early motion picture technology.
Filter Films
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I have no memories from that time… before kindergarten, before solid food, before any idea of what lay ahead. The images were shot a few hours after my baby boy had traversed the great divide between the warm rumbling universe of his mother’s womb and the morning light of our bed. (JP)
ten thousand dreams
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The housecall in “Filth” doesn’t go quite as planned when a simple cleaning job becomes a nightmare. A pixilated tale which combines both the action in the film and the action on the film.
filth
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Shot on Super 8 and blown-up to 16mm for a dreamlike effect, “Critical Mass” is a strange, poetic vision of childhood. From its first vision sequence to its consequential conclusion, the film follows one boy’s wanderings, both internal and external, as he tries to make sense of his world. Life, death, time and place become interchangeable when he happens upon a dead crow, a barren hilltop, and a small boy who serves as a catalyst for his actions. “A low key tale of guttersnipe mysticism… ‘Critical Mass’ is heavy on mood and symbolism, with Cannizzaro drawing some beautiful compositions. What’s most intriguing about the film is the connection it makes between spiritualism and ennui.” – Paul Malcolm, LA Weekly (Nov. 22, 1996)
Critical Mass
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Held hostage by her dolls, a girl is forced into a showdown between good and evil in this offbeat stop-motion film. Originally made for LA Flicker’s “Attack of the 50 Foot Reels” (one roll of Super 8 film, edited in camera, sound created without seeing the footage).
Gulliver’s Travels
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This stop-motion homage to the silent, Russian classics takes a twisted look at the on-going war between film and video (imagine Jan Svankmajer remaking Potemkin!). Originally made for LA Flicker’s “Attack of the 50 Foot Reels” (one roll of Super 8 film, edited in camera, sound created without seeing the footage). Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival 2004, Best Animation; Athens Independent Film Festival 2004, 2nd Place Animation; Humboldt Film Festival 2004, Honorable Mention
Fifty Feet that Shook the World
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A poetic video collage about light, air and language, the materials and processes we use to communicate and survive; exploring the translation and regulation of data by the body and technology; the aesthetics and consequences of error; the relationships of transparency and difference; problems of image order and presentation, identity, authenticity, feedback and loss, copyright and ownership, access and denial, time, space, speed and memory. Composed of recycled sequences of abstract animation and performance video (sourced from Cold Tape, Myeyeye, Enter, Island, Walk, Play and Letters), together with documentation of the imaging process, and incidental, ambient and appropriated material. Originally shown in a spoonful of water, then as a multi-channel video installation, and then as a single channel projection. With electronic music by Norman Shaw. “Earlier film and video works are sampled, along with documentation of installations. The surface, material and apparatus of film and video are all in the mix, including the brief appearance of the notice encountered in editing software when a video sequence is played back unrendered. This casual database of material is reprocessed and manipulated into a video of multi-dimensional self-reflexivity and layered recycling, video keying, saturated colourful fidgety pixellated abstract mosaics in an excessive megamix: what Iacono refers to as “babble… the language of languages”, the piece is a kind of abstract metadata, data about data.” Steven Ball
Universe Energies Sustain Us
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Sam, a young black man, is trapped inside a wooden cube, and is faced with the challenge of finding a way out. He reflects upon two projected memories from his past, and explores a mysterious bar code that appears on the cube wall. He finds himself struggling against a system of machines whose only goal is to manufacture racial profiles.
Selections
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A home’s movie. A 153-year-old home collects and reveals the traces it inhabitants have left behind. A contemplation of the home-movie genre, “Nocturnal Admissions” explores the idea of home as a vessel of remembrance, silently collecting and holding the experiences of those who have lived there. An assimilation of old and new , it meshes past and present homes, film and digital technology, and a nostalgia which invokes the future.
Nocturnal Admissions
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A two-screen projection exploring the alternate and simultaneous interplay of light and dark, silence and sound. Composed by optically manipulating abstract hand-painted film. Complimented by a haunting soundtrack by David McKenzie in which the human voice was digitally processed to reflect the movements of light on the film surface.
Double
