Film Categories: found footage

  • Away

    “The story of a man’s search for a long-lost brother set against the backdrop of a famously deranged movie production, ‘Away’ draws from everything from Conrad and Chris Marker to Coppola and daytime TV for its inspiration. Yet, given the diversity of these influences, it remains a sharply focussed and emotionally intimate work: Steve’s search for his brother is after all a search for something like home or self, a truth that rings with perfect clarity through the din of craziness swirling around it.” – Geoff Pevere “An addictive mixture of fact, fiction and found footage, all whipped – through…

  • 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…

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…

  • La dureté du mental

    “It’s a distraction for many, a profession for a few, when for me sport is my whole life. And if fighting is the reason you’re living. If every muscle clamors : train me, exercise, put on a sprint. Find a competitor or at least fight against a pole. It’s hard to get started but it’s otherwise difficult to stop. Even with your back against the mat. Never mind. You have to stand up and go further. You will now have to fight against yourself.” Transforming Olympic wrestling and pole vaulting Soviet films from the 1980s into expressive, painterly imagery, the…

  • How To Burn A Cross

    A Super 8 experimental film transforms the ritual of cross-burning into a stark meditation on violence, spectacle, and inherited American terror.

  • E.C. Roe Expressway

    A Super 8 experimental film and a meditation on living in Windsor, Ontario under the influence of American television, blending dancers from a Detroit TV station with a quiet sense of hometown memory.

  • Danny in the Airship

    Danny in the Airship is a Super 8 experimental film test that blends home movies into an early meditation on space, time, and the memory of my brother Danny.

  • Custom Trailer Series: Austin Powers

    Exploring écriture feminine and the patriarchal biases still present in commercial cinema, “Custom Trailer Series: Austin Powers” reimagines the original Hollywood film through the structure of a starburst quilt pattern. The work exists both as a material object and the visual representation, drawing attention to the materiality of the filmstrip This is the first in a new series that reimagines Hollywood trailers as film quilts. Previous films made from quilts include c: won eyed jail (NYFF 2005) and Athyrium Filix Femina (For Anna Atkins) (NYFF 2016).

  • A Heap of Broken Images

    This is a film about dreams: analogue, machines, anima and reanimation, nature, decay, and, if we are lucky, something new. Shot on 16mm and 35mm film and hand processed using many different analogue techniques.

  • A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear

    What does our culture dream? How can we locate that dream within the logics which govern our lives? Half collage, half essay, half serious, “A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear” is a busy, referential riff on the political moment.