Film Categories: cameraless

  • After Bed

    Pulsing flashbacks from the summer of love reawaken a queer California classic.

  • Orbiter

    A short visit to the surface of a desolate planet, or an inspection of a damaged film print. This film experiment is a continuation of “The Lost World”, examining the physical surface of celluloid film.

  • NE Corridor

    Accumulated over three years, Joshua Gen Solondz’s film is a crowded collage of gurgling paint, jagged splices, errant sprocket holes, and puzzling images that conjure the densely material frames of the late queer avant-garde filmmaker Luther Price. A messy assemblage in purples and oranges, NE Corridor is at once a visceral explosion of color and a tortured object.-Leo Goldsmith

  • Canada Park

    I walk on snow to fall unto the desert. I find myself on unceded indigenous territory in so called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli Occupation Forces in 1967. Canada Park is an experimental video poem exploring the politics of dis/appearance of Palestine as narrativized, mapped and imaged in Google Streetview and early 20th century colonial landscape photography of the ‘Holy Land’, namely at the site of the village of Imwas which is theologically conflated with…

  • As close as your voice can call

    A film about language, about the way trauma inflects grief, and about learning to speak with the dead. This work engages a personal archive of children’s books owned by my late mother, many of which feature her signature. I had encountered Deanna Bowen’s “sum of the parts: what can be named”  (2010), which attuned me to the lasting power of these traces, so I began to think of the signatures as a connection to my mother. I decided to use them to perform a kind of ad-hoc seance where I learned to copy her signature exactly. This forgery opened me…

  • Whispers Mary

    As Venla documents plants in solitude, she slips deep into the fantastical world she observes and begins to question her own reality. Whispers Mary is a Canada Council for the Arts-funded short experimental digital/analog film.

  • Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti

    Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist’s autobiographical experience as an immigrant. In three movements, the film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of moving between multiple countries and their temporalities, through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and, using fragments from anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced…

  • Skyscraper Film

    Can I use the film strip structure as an architectural element? Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement? Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else? Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves? Can I melt skyscrapers? Skyscraper Film was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist’s relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA) etc. Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage,…

  • Negative / Positive Film

    Negative / Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges together both positive black-and-white film and its negative black-and-white counterpart – on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and, the other negative. The film is an abstract remediation of female bodies dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body…

  • Self-Portrait in Hell

    Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman. The first layer is from a 1970s 8mm home movie titled Woman Dancing with Dog and was found in an antique shop. The second layer is an 8mm film belonging to an unknown archive, which the artist buried for a…