Film Categories: film studies

  • Recipes for Reconstruction: The Cookbook for the Frugal Filmmaker – Institutional Sale

    Special Book and DVD Set Veteran animator and filmmaker Steven Woloshen introduces a variety of simple artistic strategies to create decay and to re-assemble damaged film prints into new experimental visions. This book includes a special DVD (NTSC) with nine short films created specially for this do-it-yourself, “hands-on” manual. An excellent resource for film production courses and workshops. Featuring nine chapters & accompanying films: 1. Chronicle Reconstructions: Creating Reconstructions 2. Zero Visibility: Reproducing Decay and Damage 3. La Dolce Vita: Hasty Archaeology 4. Scrapbook: Correcting Correlations 5. Fleeing Rotland: Revitalizing Obsolete Gauges on 35mm Film 6. The Homestead Act: Using…

  • Generations

    “Generations” is a film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking. Seventy-year-old acclaimed director Barbara Hammer hands her camera to Gina Carducci, an aspiring queer filmmaker. The women, each shooting her own footage during the last days of Astroland at Coney Island, find that the inevitable fact of ageing echoes in the architecture of the amusement park. Separately editing their respective footage, the filmmakers ultimately blend their work, thereby creating a true generational, experimental document. World premiere at MoMA; winner of the Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the Berlin Film Festival; and winner of…

  • Zero Visibility

    An experimental film about the Victoria Bridge and the relative possibility of being seen under the conditions of distance, light, and atmosphere prevailing at a particular time.

  • François Miron: Experimental Films / Films Expérimentaux 1985-2009

    Curated by Etienne Desrosiers. This DVD compilation brings together thirteen films by iconoclastic filmmaker François Miron. Without belonging to any artistic school, Miron has forged a unique style, one that combines a great variety of techniques and materials: found footage, live action, animation, collage, scratches, and flicker. Like Paul Sharits, François Miron sees film as a laying bare of the drama of celluloid. This drama is not psychological, but that of the violence of spatial and temporal ruptures in the film material, an experience more sensorial than emotive. With Miron, this cinema takes form convulsively, out from the clash of…

  • Tableaux Vivants

    A rumination on cinematic time reversals as versatile continuums. Re-discovering the outdoors as (a stage) set where the natural is made to pose as the artifice. Selected screenings: Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival (Chicago, USA), 2011; Views from the Avant Garde, New York Film Festival, 2011

  • Cropping of the Spectacle, The

    “The Cropping of the Spectacle” began as a live cinema performance investigating the birth of the Television Spectacle in 1954 McCarthy’s America. Based loosely on the classic anarchist documentary “Point of Order” (Emile de Antonio/Dan Talbot, 1964); a film which at once deconstructed the hearings and re-invented documentary strategies – “The Cropping of the Spectacle” integrates archival movie and audio clips in chronicling the strange temporal evolution of our understandings of recent history. The original film and its many revisions ultimately reveal an odd continuation of a hegemonic framing process begun with the original Army-McCarthy hearings, which continues to the…

  • 10-17-88

    Optically printed collage of found and archival footage, with audio collage by John Shaw. (Chicago) “You are never alone, because you are full of all the memories, all the conditioning, all the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is never clear of all the rubbish it has accumulated. To be alone you must die to the past. When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging to any family, any nation, any culture, any particular continent, there is that sense of being an outsider. The man who is completely alone in this way is innocent, and it is this innocence that frees…

  • Genesee

    Shot in the Genesee Valley of New York State on regular 8mm to commemorate the last rolls of Kodachrome. The colours of the leaves and the film stock are augmented by orange colour filters, boosting the contrast and highlighting the rich saturated yellows, reds and orange of stock and season.

  • Off Route 2

    The scene of a car accident serves as a backdrop to an exploration of trauma and the often-anticlimactic aftermath of personal tragedy. A woman hangs inverted in silence, inhabiting the space of wildlife in the forest. This is as much a performance of endurance as it is a fictional construct; the execution of the film demanded that the artist hang upside-down from a seatbelt for extended periods of time in sub-zero weather.

  • Burning Star

    Dedicated to my father, who asked that I make a more colourful work. Made during my residency at the now defunct Experimental Television Center, “Burning Star” is a colourful implo/explosion of the twelve sided star. The title refers to Kenji Onishi’s “A Burning Star.” – Joshua Gen Solondz Winner Chris Frayne Award for Best Animated Film, Ann Arbor Film Festival, MIchigan, U.S.A. (2013)