Film Categories: environment

  • Axis

    Axis is an experimental film made through entirely photomechanical and photochemical means. The film fits into the experimental sub-genre of “optical printer film.” Some practitioners who have inspired me include Jordan Belson, John Whitney, David Rimmer, Pat O’Neill, Al Razutis, Gary Popovich, Bruce Elder and Norman McLaren. Axis takes as its subject matter the mundane, faceless urban landscape with its gleaming towers and factories. The workaday humdrum… drones to the hive. So I take to the streets, with my homemade Bolex robot, affectionately known as “BOLBOT.” It is a time-lapse motion control machine capable of smoothly spinning through X-Y-Z axes…

  • Semper Porro (Ever Forward)

    Semper Porro is a rhythmic composition of abstracted images derived from nature and droning -generative sound derived from the film-material itself. Shot on location in Wellington North County, Ontario, at the Film Farm – the film’s title is also the motto for the county, a Latin term meaning always forward or ever forward. While implicating the linear and temporal nature of film as a medium the title simultaneously makes reference to the geographic origin of the films content. The film is a process-based work, created using high-contrast 16mm black and white film that has been heavily manipulated by optical duplication,…

  • Brimstone Line

    Three grids are placed along the Credit River in rural Ontario. They become devices through which the stationary camera, pointing upstream, delineates the landscape. They motivate the movement of the zoom, which intensifies our sense of the field of view, narrowing vision and flattening space. The river, framed momentarily, flows past. Financial assistance provided by the Toronto Arts Council.

  • Schuh Schnell Service

    A simple intersection in Wuppertal, Germany becomes a microcosm of the patterns of everyday life. Cars trace the angles of the streets, pedestrians forge new paths and Wuppertal’s famed Schwebebahn turns our expectations upside-down. Shot on Super 8 in Wuppertal April 28, 2009, while making Phantoms.

  • This Film Has No Commercial Value

    Film made by John Kneller with a sound design by John Shipman. It focuses on the environment using time-lapse cinematography as a means to capture phenomena that is impossible to see with the naked eye. Automated pan, tilt and zoom mechanics were custom-built by the filmmaker to augment the time-lapse techniques. The resulting imagery is a hyper-reality of landscapes transformed by means of the camera’s mechanical mediation. The sound design was created from naturally recorded sound phenomena and musical performances. The Romantic musical elements are reminiscent of lyrical depictions of nature and environment. The deliberate mediation of the sound and…

  • Synaesthetic Anesthesia

    Synaesthetic Anaesthesia is the product of many long years, experimenting with optical printing, travelling mattes, high contrast manipulation and other film specific techniques and processes. The optical printer is used to manipulate archival imagery from the colonial era, forming a layered tapestry with contemporary images of landscapes, architecture and phenomena. By means of montage and optical recombination the film takes these historical fragments and builds them up to a frantic pitch. The film seeks to depict the frenetic digital information age but entirely through traditional photomechanical methods, a reversal of the norm. The sound design enhances the film’s transformations, and…

  • Jacumba Song

    Lucienne Delyle, Tsygan the dog, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and a mantis meet in the desert to take the waters and sing of love. An anarchistic exploration of mythologies and performative languages of romantic love and illusion combining legend, cartoon and dream. Shot in the Anza Borrego desert on Kodachrome and Ektachrome Super 8.

  • Fireland (The Sloko Valley Fire)

    A young man seeks to find adventure, love and work, leaves for the Yukon, finding all three and more as he matures and finds his calling.

  • Submerged Queer Spaces

    Submerged Queer Spaces is a documentary feature that examines queer history through an approach of urban archeology. Our cameras look at surviving architectural details of old haunts as if unearthing ancient monuments. As San Francisco grew and gentrified, communities changed, shifted, and were displaced. Bars, restaurants, parks, alleys, bathhouses, and other gathering spots of the queer community were remodeled, repurposed, rebuilt, or destroyed. Submerged Queer Spaces looks at the architectural remains of historic sites and buildings in San Francisco. Eight interview subjects recount firsthand experiences in these lost environs. Gerald Fabien experienced gay San Francisco before WWII, and tells tales…

  • Une Terre familière

    Where is there to belong to? To not feel strange? To not ask permission? Ground. Home. A familiar land. Une Terre familière is structured as a series of long-take vignettes, each centered around a site purposing a collision of nature and artifice. Within highly manicured environments, these sites attempt to imitate natural processes and un-peopled ecosystems and to preserve and manage elements of nature. The figures in Une Terre familière struggle to do their best with what they have- to find their own sun at the tanning salon, their own clouds in the steam room- to improve, to connect, to…