Film Categories: Anthropocene

  • Upwards Tide

    A magical lunar reverie filmed over four years on the days and nights of the full moon, this shimmering moving-image poem fluidly combines images of the saltwater Loch Carron in the Scottish Highlands and leafy Viennese forests. The two locations blur and bleed into each other, just as the film itself (shot on gloriously outdated analogue stock) wanders freely among human bodies and bodies of water. Transcendent, transfiguring, transformative. (Neil Young)

  • Pressure & Release

    Pressure & Release is a multi-layered story drawn from memories of my paradoxical sleep, a sub-conscious response to the recognition that we are amid the “Anthropocene period” and the “Holocene extinction.” Certain ideologies combined with well ingrained cultural practices are driving this rapid transformation into something we may or may not yet imagine as this era’s lasting presence unfolds.

  • Turbulence

    Turbulence is a meditation on various places in the Canadian Prairies, places that are part of an ancient Precambrian seabed rebounding from the last ice age. This is a region that once had a dynamic range of plants and wildlife supporting ancient cultures that flourished here for millennia.

  • No Rest for the Restless

    Some stories appear complete, while others do not. Some stories are remembered, while others are forgotten. Some stories obscure, while others reveal. Even though somewhat different in shape and form “No Rest for the Restless” is in some ways a subconscious re-imagining of an exhibition I had many years ago of the same name. At that time, I found the human project to be astounding and baffling. I continue to be astounded and baffled today.

  • Nautilus

    Unlike its close relative the octopus, the Nautilus has a poor memory and yet it has managed to exist for half a billion years. Our ancestors have been on Earth for about six million years, while modern humans evolved in the last 200,000. Civilization as it is generally understood today began approximately 6,000 years ago, and the industrialization of the natural world began its accelerating trajectory in the past two centuries. According to fossil records the chambered Nautilus has remained fundamental unchanged for about five hundred million years. What I wonder will the records show of our presence on planet…

  • Sightings

    During my childhood I spent countless hours daydreaming. Often about boarding an alien spacecraft where they would ask me about life on Earth. I would enthusiastically tell them my thoughts and observations about this or that, which the space aliens always seemed to find interesting. In retrospect I was engaging in a transference of my frustration that no one on this planet seemed particularly interested in my opinions. At that time, I was a voracious reader of science fiction novels, in particular Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov. After watching Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” I was certain…

  • The Sea [is still] Around Us

    Rachel Carson is dead, but the sea is still around us…This small lake is a sad reminder of what is taking place all over the land, from carelessness, shortsightedness, and arrogance. It is our pool of shame in this,’ our particular instant of time.’ E.B. White, 1964 A postcard usually enhances the reality. The contrast is more stark in Corinna, Maine, a former woolen mill town on the shores of Lake Sebasticook, where years of dumping industrial waste contaminated the water. In 1964, the author E.B. White mourned the death of fellow Mainer Rachel Carson and the altered ecology of…

  • Folds of Stone

    Rock is subject to constant change. Natural forces, geodynamics, and anthropogenic interventions shape the supposedly rigid matter as an extended organism, which can only be perceived in geological thinking of time. In their short film “Folds of Stone” Nicole Krenn and Lisa Truttmann continue these thoughts: We see breathing stones, pulsating furrows, trembling rocks, material that vibrates. Microscopic landscapes dissolve in the image. Surface, materiality and structure oscillate between jagged rock edges and soft, silky fabric folds. The two artists translate a multimedia installation from an old sawmill at national park Gesäuse into the cinema space, showing the process of…

  • kauaʻi ʻōʻō

    Hawaii 1987, the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō sings its final serenade.

  • How amazingly unlikely is your birth

    What could a cosmology of one person’s life look like? A daughter examines the life and premature death of her father, who had a troubled relationship with the psychiatric medical establishment and was passionate about ecology, politics and space travel.