Film Categories: cameraless

  • 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…

  • Auto Portrait/Self Portrait Post Partum

    SPPP is an autobiographical experimental film exploring the ramifications of the devastating breakup of a romantic relationship. The film examines my own emotional responses in the context of how this experience is culturally represented. Painstakingly handmade, the visual and sound treatments evoke different phases of the relationship (from passionate attachment to escalating conflict to inexplicable breakup) and the various phases of the grieving process – from denial, to yearning, to anger, to final liberation: a healing release effected through the making of this film. A triptych of self-portraits-entire camera rolls, each subjected to different methods of extreme interventions on the…

  • Arrhythmia

    Footage from a cardiac catheterization, intertwined with a recording of a telephone conversation and old 8mm home films, tell the story of a mother’s conflicting desire to escape a poor marriage by returning to her homeland, despite the possibility of being victimized at the hands of the government upon her return due to a past incident. “Arrhythmia” is an intimate piece about family, distance and identity.

  • My Last Words

    My Last Words takes a look at the process of writing a Last Will and Testament. The film experiments with this legal document and personalizes the process. Working in darkness the filmmaker wrote out his Last Will and Testament onto unexposed 35mm black and white film using a flashlight.

  • Solstice Moon

    A glamour girl is lost in a play while trying to identify herself sexually in a male dominant world.

  • Ephemeral Solidity

    This is one of the most elaborately edited of all the hand-painted films of late – a Haydenesque complexity of thematic variations on a totally visual (i.e., un-musical) theme. This film is composed of 35mm hand-painted images reduced to 16mm film, single-frames, shots of two, three, four frames and, occasionally, slightly longer shots, all interspersed with a variety of calculated lengths of black leader which cause a flickering of abstract patterns in rhythmed darkness.

  • Far From

    Constructed with repetitions and variations in reference to the musical form of a nocturne, Far From is an accumulation of the layers, density and noise of existence. The film evokes the ghosts of lives lived and the traces of lives being lived, rising. French Synopsis: À l’instar d’une nocturne, les variations et les répétitions du film « Loin de » agencent les couches, la densité et les bruissements de l’existence – les fantômes de vies passées et les traces de vies toujours présentes, en devenir.

  • Former Models

    A public and private history undo themself(ves) as they mutually encounter the trials of Labor, Love, Loss and Planned Obsolescence. A body desires its Other: a simulation is transgressed and the ultimate price is paid- “No-body is above The Law.” In this docu-narrative, the tragic story of Milli Vanilli’s Robert Pilatus and his descent into a post-racial and post-gendered pure image is told through appropriated video footage. A fabricated narrative conceived by the artist collides with Pilatus’ public biography in a technologically mediated flash of desire and information. This video is dedicated to the very real life of Robert Pilatus, 1965-1998.  

  • The Lost World

    With the aid of a USB microscope and X-ray scanners, this time-based media installation peers into the surface structure of decayed and rotted 35mm celluloid film like a drone flight reconnaissance mission flying over unknown enemy territory. Inspired by electronic surveillance data and Second World War Allied bombing raids on Dresden, the microscopic camera behaves as the trained eye of the bombardier, looking manually into the active areas of the film frame.

  • Visual Music for 10 Voices

    In Barthes’ essay, “The Grain of the Voice”, the concept of the “genosong” was evoked to separate the sound of the voice from its language. Visual Music for Ten Voices distinguishes the physicality of the optical vocal track as having a unique identity from its actual resonance in sound films. Designed as a 10-foot black box projection loop, this film focuses on the rhythm and materiality of ten 35mm optical soundtracks. Each musical passage maintains its original length and linear harmony with the other tracks, collectively creating a new sense of motion and repetition.