Film Categories: Flicker + Strobe

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…

  • Loathing

    The film depicts a society controlled by an autonomous system. While plebs are unhappy with their Designer overlords, a smart assistant takes part in a Luddite conspiracy against them. The conspiracy fails. The assistant recounts the events of the revolution in a court of law

  • Blue Cigarette

    When filming smoke, in color, cinematographers must avoid the “blue smoke” phenomenon. “Blue Cigarette” is a direct cinema experience on 16mm film, it takes the same time of a cigarette burning and is filled with cigarette burns. The strip was tortured, scratched, punctured, erased, colored, and animated: an exploration on the volatility of the film medium, as if it was itself a cigarette and one could smoke it all the way.

  • everyday star

    Everyday states of being and decay are observed through the infinite scope of the cosmos and the restorative light which emanates from it, driving cinematic and photographic impulses.

  • the framing of perception

    “I saw the light…” Sun, light, darkness, shadow — from time immemorial all weighted with significance and wonder. What mastery over nature, over others, to grasp the sun, control light itself! Know its speed, its heat, its colour, its radiation, its nature – is this not the power of the gods? Cinema is messaging with light and shadow. Figure and ground. Light, onto which we project significance, now transports our information. Perception shaped by our experiences, our interpretations, our projections, our illusions. Frames of drama and comedy, journalism and documentary, propaganda and advertising, all combined daily and edited, reproduced for…

  • Letters From Vancouver

    Letters from Vancouver (1973) comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself. Together, “the politics of perception” (33min)and “the framing of perception” (33min) form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.

  • forwards, backward

    Compiled from unused images of a half-shot and perpetually delayed documentary, this film is an illusory visual and sonic reflection on a stagnant film career. Simultaneously moving forwards and backwards and not at all. Driving 100mph and standing still. One step forwards, two steps back.

  • Lines of Force

    The law of general relativity states that all matter is condensed energy. In its purest form, energy is light. Perhaps matter cannot go faster than light because all matter consists of light. (For Paul Clipson.)