Film Categories: Capitalism + Economics

  • Queer Camp Trilogy

    The Queer Camp Trilogy is a series of experimental films exploring the hidden dimensions of queer Japanese American wartime history. This trilogy, made up of Looking For Jiro (2011), Warning Shot (2016), and On the Line (2018), was inspired by first-generation Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by the US government during World War II. These subjects left subtle yet discernible traces of same-sex intimacy or gender nonconformity in the archive, despite the enormous pressure put upon Japanese Americans to accept their imprisonment quietly, prove their patriotic loyalty, and smile for Ansel Adams during their unlawful imprisonment. I approached their enigmatic…

  • Ambient Walk #3

    In his series of site-specific installation works, Janzen navigates the back alleys of the city on foot with a video camera focused down on the walking surface. As surfaces rapidly pass by the lens, an unusual perspective of the city is captured. The visual result is highly animated with an endless variety of pattern, line, and colour. The rhythm of the artist’s footsteps and surrounding human and machine activity adds an ambient sound mix. Back alleys present an alternative for travel through the city, outside the traditional grid of streets and sidewalks. They offer a more private view of the…

  • Cathedral Bluffs

    “Cathedral Bluffs” is a satire about the interrelationships of consumerism, religion, and fine art. Consumers stream en masse through a shopping mall. The action freezes and the title of a Renaissance painting is superimposed on the resulting still. The film then cuts to the actual painting, superimposed with contemporary advertising copy.

  • War Movie

    Two close friends leave a movie theatre after having seen a war movie. One is set off by it, and the other is ambivalent. This seemingly innocuous disagreement spirals into a larger point of contention between the two, unearthing deeper truths.

  • Quimsacocha

    For the downstream communities of the high mountains of Quimsacocha, water is sacred. So when the giant Canadian company set their eyes to mine their land for gold and copper, 30-year-old Bolivar and 73-year-old Isaura were not happy. Isaura and Bolivar rely on water for their livelihood. Isaura owns four cows and Bolivar is in charge of the community’s water system. For them, water is life, and mining will jeopardize the future of their communities. Quimsacocha takes an honest look at these indigenous communities, their cultural traditions, and their lives in this picturesque landscape of the Western Andes Mountains in…

  • ∆ (when the cities burn)

    “Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.” [Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451] [note: in this case, ∆ (opt + j) is defined as it is in chemistry: ∆ = the addition of heat in a reaction and also references the general definition in math & science: ∆ = the change of any changeable quantity]

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”

  • Livestock

    “Livestock” is a documentary study of one stage in the production of motion picture film. Most of the animals at the Warren Livestock Auction will be sold for industrial meat production. Their bodies will be slaughtered and processed, their bones prepared for rendering into gelatin that might one day suspend silver halide on a strip of acetate.

  • The Dandelion Club

    A gang of queer kids stylishly loiter about town. Pollinating. A collective resistance that collects at the margins of society and develops even on its fringes. No patch of concrete too solid to bloom through. An existence as a pest. A nuisance. And a fabulous one at that. Negotiating identity as: weed or flower?

  • Abandoned

    An unfinished housing complex has been abandoned. The imagined future from the past is taken over by foliage and wildlife.