Film Categories: Landscape

  • Tracks I-III

    Inspired by phantom rides—films from the late 19th century shot from the front of moving trains—“Tracks I-III” follows old and new technological traces that have shaped movement and representation. Historical landscapes once captured along railway lines are now reimagined through a carefully fragmented scenery, where motion splits, diverges, and advances in all possible directions. Truttmann’s playful exploration of spatial and temporal dislocations is grounded in a specific location and its history: a section of the “Ischlerbahn,” one of Austria’s first major long-distance rail lines, which was closed in 1957 despite strong protests from all segments of the population. Originally a…

  • The Courser

    We see white stone structures and hear the sound of horses at full gallop, snickering from afar. The sound volume increases rapidly and sets the large group of lithic sculptures in motion. Heavy traffic noises eventually mix with the animal sounds and just when they are about to take over the soundscape entirely, images and sounds introduce the actual location: Shanghai, at the intersection of Yan’an Elevated Road and Inner Ring Elevated Road, two major, multi-leveled, urban freeways. Amidst the massive architectural structures and immobile horses underneath it, we may remember Eadweard Muybridge and his early moving image studies.

  • Critters Chorus, Cycle 1

    Whirring and flashing in the night sky. Wild foliage on a moist forest floor, rapidly passing by. Nervous encounters at a redwood tree, gurgling chatter with turkeys at dusk. Casually coiffed horses, unpredictable flying objects and flapping rotors. Speckled skin scrabbles, covered in lush ferns. Swirling fog, dripping haze, old man’s beard, light – diffracted. Sassy badgers, strings and figures. Critters Chorus, Cycle 1 is the first part of an ongoing project, developed while delving into unfamiliar habitats. Lead by questioning the so-called “species problem”, Truttmann investigates the (im)possibilities of taxonomic categorization of living organisms from an artistic point of…

  • Flamme dans l’eau

    A film exploring the poet Franck André Jamme’s journeys to Rajasthan and Nepal to seek out the origins of Tantric paintings used to awaken heightened states of consciousness. The film merges dream and legend in an exploration of these images that are made by anonymous painters, not to be bought and sold, but as tools of inner practice, as thresholds.

  • Buses don’t stop here anymore

    Buses don’t stop here anymore is a chronicle on Super 8 of the closure, abandonment, and demolition of the Greyhound bus station in Ottawa, Canada. Once an important site for coming and going, an emotive epicenter, the camera observes the building’s erasure, dismantled by machines that writhe in the dust of demolition. Optical printing translates the act of observation into a requiem for a building, once so present and vital, now a ghost of the past. Filmed on Ektachrome Super 8 over a three year period from the sudden closure of the Greyhound station in April 2020 to its demolition…

  • Letter from Blackhawk Island

    From her home in Blackhawk Island WI, the poet Lorine Niedecker traded lively and impactful letters with numerous peers, most notably Louis Zukofsky and, later, Cid Corman. After a brief sojourn in New York, she lived alone in a one-room cabin for much of her adult life, walking several miles to nearby Fort Atkinson to work as a copy editor at a dairy industry newsletter until failing eyesight reduced her to menial labour. Niedecker connected to the outside world by post, and among the small shelf of books she kept for herself were several collections of letters, including those of…

  • Passengers

    In 2024 I decided to visit some places I had been to before, places near where I am in the present and places I’ve never been to in the past. As I travelled from here to there, filming this and that I was reminded once again that nothing stands still and nothing stays the same. One of the things that I always wondered about was the intention of the occupied places I would see and what determined the way in which they were expressed. Sometimes it seemed clear while at other times it didn’t appear clear at all. I was…

  • Precipice

    Moving images & Music: Kent Tate 4k Humans create narratives about themselves then make great effort to conform reality to that narrative. This wasn’t a threat to planetary survival 10,000 years ago when we were scattered in small bands worshiping local deities and relying on nearby gathered foodstuffs with only stone tools. It’s quite another thing when we are packed into mega-cities with nuclear weapons and ambiguous connectivity with relationships imbued in instruments that far exceed an individual’s capacity to fully comprehend or to reliably navigate our various systems. The earth spins around the sun at 30 km/sec. The habitable…

  • Trespass

    In September 2024 I went on a filming trip to southwest Saskatchewan and southeast Alberta. To get there I travelled the TransCanada Highway from my home in BC. On the way there and back I took some short stops to take a closer look at some places that appeared interesting. Often these places had restricted access or no public access at all and the longer I stopped somewhere that is not open to the public the greater the chance I would be told to leave. One such place is in the Rocky Mountains where I setup my camera outside their…

  • Symbiosis

    Occasionally I’m able to spend time in a place where I can observe how the natural world takes shape outside the anxious time frame of our hurried species. In this world relationships seem to have evolved to perpetuate balance over long periods of time as opposed to short cycles of calm interspersed with brief periods of chaos. Overruns and schedules don’t appear to exist there as they do in our manufactured world. Symbiosis is defined as a close, prolonged association between two or more different biological species. This relationship can be symbiotic (mutualistic), where both parties involved benefit from the…