Film Categories: cameraless

  • Linear Dreams

    “The sound of a heartbeat pumps life into ‘Linear Dreams’, a scratch animation film that moves from the simple lines of the unconscious to representational realism.” – Toronto International Film Festival, 1997 The word “Linear” is composed of two words: “line,” as in drawing and “ear,” as in hearing. The film was produced by drawing both sound and picture directly onto 35mm motion picture film.

  • Loom, The

    A multiple-superimposition hand-painted visual symphony of animal life on earth. “The Loom” might be compared to musical quartet-form (as there are almost always four superimposed pictures); but the complexity of texture, multiplicity of tone, and the variety of inter-related rhythm suggest symphonic dimensions. The film is very inspired by George Melies: the animals exist (in Jane’s enclosure) as on a stage, their interrelationships edited to the disciplines of dance, so therefore one might say this hardly represents “animal life on earth”; but I would argue that this work at least epitomizes theatrical Nature, magical Creature, and is the outside limit,…

  • Loud Visual Noises (Sound Version)

    Hand-painted (closed-eye) film envisioning optic feedback in response to sound. Collaborative sound track compiled by Joel Haertling with sound contributions by Die Totliche Doris (W.G.), Zoviet France (U.K.), Nurse With Wound (U.K.), The Hafler Trio (N.L.), Joel Haertling (U.S.), I.H.T.S.O (W.G.).

  • Mothlight

    Essence of lepidoptera re-created between two strips of clear mylar tape: an anima animation. What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black. “Brakhage made ‘Mothlight’ without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine.” – Jonas Mekas “‘Mothlight’ is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter’s struggle to assume…

  • Naughts

    A series of five hand-painted, step-printed films, each of which is a textured, thus tangible, “nothing.” A series of “nots,” then, in pun, or knots of otherwise invisible energies. 1) The first begins with a semblance of fog clouds rising vertically, an upward lifting waterfall likeness which screens an ephemera of painted shapes that come, at end, to a rhythmic and formal hardness. 2) A progression of blue surreal shapes vanishing in forward movements. 3) A gathering of crystalline forms in primary colors emitting upward-moving flares of multicolored lights, all gradually suggesting an outward momentum. 4) An orange rock-beseeming wall…

  • Night Music

    This little film (originally painted on IMAX) attempts to capture the beauty of sadness, as the eyes have it when closed in meditation on sorrow. (SB)

  • Autumnal

    This is a film composed of two elements: (1) simple hand-painted frames and brief strips of hand-painting, and (2) strips of blank colours, which appear as overall hues or colour tones filtering light itself rather than any pictured scenes. These two elements are interposed in editing so as to suggest the seasonal changes of tree-leaf (from greens to golds, reds and browns) and the sky (from varieties of warm-to-cold blues).

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • Reruns of the Glow and Noise

    A pail of soil, spread on plastic, becoming grains of light.

  • Linea ver

    Spring sculpts their fierce emergence. Aspen, cedar, red oak, lichen (and others) phytograms on super-8mm tri-x film. Language: plants