Film Categories: cameraless

  • La noirceur souterraine des racines

    Shot in Quebec (Canada), La noirceur souterraine des racines (The subterranean blackness of roots) is a 16 mm film triptych which uses several processes specific to analog cinema (hand processing, optical printing, photochemical alteration). The film seeks to show the sensory experience of the invisible life of stones, plants, and the nature that surrounds us.

  • A Fiscal Life

    Capital is unavoidably ingrained into every day life. Influenced by the quote attributed to Fredric Jameson; “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” A film created from the frustration and struggle of how it’s nearly impossible to imagine surviving without money in the world today. It’s such a necessary part of living that that you could say it’s part of our DNA, and for art it’s no different. It’s physically, violently, part of everything we do and see.

  • Rabid Beach

    This psychedelic and traditionally animated music video for hardcore band Pig Pen was created out of 600 hand painted animation frames.

  • Endless Thirst

    Endless Thirst is a deep dive into the otherworldly and misunderstood bog biome. Filmed in Canada, it draws attention to the harm inflicted on these ancient wetlands. An aerial view of a bog in its natural state suddenly sinks into the unimaginable, then appears to evaporate into ghostly images of Sphagnum moss (a bog’s keystone species) imprinted on 16mm film. Endless Thirst alludes to the bog’s reliance on water for survival and humanity’s unquenchable desire for resource and supply. It examines the entanglement of human and more-than-human processes that link to the climate crisis.

  • The Perfect Human

    Inspired by Jørgen Leth’s Black and White cult classic The Perfect Human (1968) which raises many simple yet philosophical questions about who the perfect human is, what it means to be human, or perfect, this work applies unsupervised machine learning and experimental filmmaking techniques to reexamine and question the contested notion of perfection in the eyes of artificial intelligence. Later the remake of the computer-generated moving images are transformed from digital recreation to an analog artifact of transparencies which completed the cycles from analog film to digital video and back to 16mm format, from motion pictures to still images, and…

  • The Flower and The Flood

    Following the seasonal cycle of a saffron farm based in the Fraser Valley, the film explores unmechanized labor through harvesting the delicate crocus stamen by hand. After an atmospheric river decimates the flourishing saffron crop in 2021, the flood waters temporarily return Semá:th Xó:tsa to the valley more than a century after its forced draining. The film traces the interconnected history of this sacred lake with the rebuilding of the saffron crop; cultivating community and the most expensive spice in the world. Collaborating with the saffron crocus and other plants through eco-processing and analogue processes, the family garden offers us…

  • Marked

    Marked is an experimental film that merges Super 8 and 16mm formats to examine the presence of queer intimacy. At its center are two shirtless men, locked in an embrace, dancing — a quiet yet radical act. Overlaid with hand-inked 16mm film, their bodies become both seen and obscured, highlighted and erased. Through this layered process, Marked reflects on how queer love is shaped, celebrated, and scarred by the society that surrounds it.

  • Horseman, the Woman and the Moth, The

    A long myth drawn directly onto the film’s surface, which is painted, dyed, treated so that it will grow controlled crystals and mold – as textures of the figures and forms of the drama – some images stamped thru melted wax crayon techniques, some images actual objects (such as moth wings) collaged directly on the celluloid… so that the protagonists of this myth (as listed in the title) weave thru crystalline structures and organic junglesof the colourful world of hypnogogic vision – edited into “themes and variations” that tell “a thousand and one” stories while, at the same time, evoking…

  • I …

    “Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.” – William James, The Principles of Psychology This is a hand-painted double-step-printed film (i.e. each frame repeated once) which begins with some ephemeral forms and pale tones reminiscent of the “blues” of frothing ocean breakers, the dun “yellows” of the beach, and a complexity of fleeting inter-mixed various other colors and lines suggestive of a variety of vegetable and animal life such as might appear within a sea scape.…

  • I Take These Truths

    This film is entirely hand-painted and is composed of such an evolution of variably coloured shapes that their inter-action with each other should constitute a purely visual “self evident” (as prompted by the title): everything beyond the title is as far removed from language as I could possibly make it: and thus it is, to me, practically impossible to describe. Each frame is printed twice, so that its effective speed (24 fps) is 12 frames per second. A variety of organic and crystalline painted shapes (painted on clear leader, thus as if brilliantly back-lit in a blazing space of light)…