Film Categories: Architecture

  • When the Sun Turns into Juice

    Inspired by a metaphor the filmmaker’s daughter uses to describe the setting sun, the film became an homage to Gordon Webber, a Quebecois animator and architect. A cameraless animation created by painting on film.

  • Maya Deren’s Sink

    “Maya Deren’s Sink” explores Deren’s concepts of space, time and form through visits and projections filmed in her LA and NY homes. Light projections in Deren’s intimate space evoke a former time and space providing entree into the homes of an influential filmmaker we will never know. The film reclaims the spaces that inspired her work in order to share it with audiences. Time and space are collapsed as film locations of the 40’s are re-imagined in the present. Performances by an actor based on Deren’s film and writing as well as overlooked biographical insights reveal a creative personality untouched…

  • Elementary Phrases

    This is a hand-painted and elaborately step-printed collaboration between filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon. After many months of working together step-printing the painted strips of film by Brakhage, Phil Solomon re-discovered the following passage which helped clarify their process and inspired the editing wich then began: “The profound nature of this concept will be better understood, and the positive study of it more successful, if we think of such an organization, in its temporal aspect and scope, as corresponding exactly to what is called in music the phrasing; distinguished both from the melody (which is based on the differences…

  • Synaesthetic Anesthesia

    Synaesthetic Anaesthesia is the product of many long years, experimenting with optical printing, travelling mattes, high contrast manipulation and other film specific techniques and processes. The optical printer is used to manipulate archival imagery from the colonial era, forming a layered tapestry with contemporary images of landscapes, architecture and phenomena. By means of montage and optical recombination the film takes these historical fragments and builds them up to a frantic pitch. The film seeks to depict the frenetic digital information age but entirely through traditional photomechanical methods, a reversal of the norm. The sound design enhances the film’s transformations, and…

  • Submerged Queer Spaces

    Submerged Queer Spaces is a documentary feature that examines queer history through an approach of urban archeology. Our cameras look at surviving architectural details of old haunts as if unearthing ancient monuments. As San Francisco grew and gentrified, communities changed, shifted, and were displaced. Bars, restaurants, parks, alleys, bathhouses, and other gathering spots of the queer community were remodeled, repurposed, rebuilt, or destroyed. Submerged Queer Spaces looks at the architectural remains of historic sites and buildings in San Francisco. Eight interview subjects recount firsthand experiences in these lost environs. Gerald Fabien experienced gay San Francisco before WWII, and tells tales…

  • Underground

    Underground presents a performative and re-staged first person documentary portrait of Westminster Station/London Underground, based on footage captured during the time period leading up to and just after the July 7th 2005 transit bombings. Through re-working the original footage, this short piece sets out to explore and present the contradictory moods of the time, from the more official government position of carrying on as usual, to the sense of anxiety felt in the day to day, while highlighting the intangible effects of trauma which shaped the experience of the city and urban space at this time.

  • BROKEN ANGEL (GEBROCHENGEL)

    In Frankfurt near St. Peter’s church on Klaus-Mann-Platz, there is a memorial with an angel sculpture (aka Frankfurter Engel) for the homosexual men and women persecuted and murdered during the Third Reich. 2013 was a tumultuous year for LGBT rights like the spike in hate crimes in the U.S. post-DOMA, and passing of anti-gay legislation worldwide (most notably Russia and India). On 6 May 2013, the anniversary of Marlene Dietrich’s death and 80th year past the Third Reich, Stephen explores the historical and ongoing queer struggle and gilded apology of monuments in a guerilla performance by colliding the Frankfurter Engel…

  • Arrested Decay

    A film based on a novella of the same name by the filmmaker. A video poem where nations of dilapidated buildings is the focus and the richest peaceful nation lives in substandard housing and has an inadequate food supply.

  • beth olem | house of the world

    two super 8 camera rolls capturing the beth olem cemetery in detroit on the site of GM’s “Poletown” plant, only open 4 hours per year.

  • Evolution: A Theme with Variations

    “Evolution: A Theme with Variations” is a journey through music and art from the Renaissance to the present. We hear and see a musical theme performed in stylized examples from six eras – Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, French Impressionistic, and Twentieth Century – accompanied by images of art and architecture selected from works created in these eras. A final variation combines all the above styles as it retraces its path back to a Renaissance bacchanal or dance. Another facet of creation appears throughout the film: the musician and his/her instrument, often shot alone, surrounded by darkness, to symbolize that art…