Film Categories: media studies

  • lay claim to an island

    Texts from the 1969 American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and letters from supporters propel an exploration of political yearning, emancipatory architecture and failed utopias. What does it mean to claim land that has more value as a symbol than as a potential home? And how does that symbol function beyond the boundaries of its geographic limits?

  • Hand-processing

    A campfire for warming eyes and sight, somewhat akin to TV static. Produced by accident and chance, all the images in this film are achieved via tactile impact, the soundtrack acoustically interpreting the same abrasions.

  • Recomposition

    A short visual study of repeating layers; dissolving forms reemerge and return. Composed of thousands of animated still images, Recomposition is an early experiment in polyphonic image processing techniques developed by Browne over the course of a decade. Images of the urban landscape and its technological interventions on space merge with decaying natural forms and the tactility of human flesh, suggesting an erotic sensuality lurking beneath the surfaces of the material world.

  • memento mori

    A meditation on (im)mortality, mediated by a lifetime’s compendium of images, memento mori is a layered time-lapse exploration of the total photographs captured over the course of the filmmaker’s life – over 120,000 in total. This all-seeing archive is blended into permutations and combinations of subjects, objects, percepts, dreams, and experiences, to form an encyclopedic index of the possibilities of sight. “A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies,…

  • Between The Bullet and The Hole

    ‘Between the Bullet and the Hole’ is a film centred on the elusive and complex effects of war on women’s role in ballistic research and early computing. The film features new and archival high-speed bullet photography, schlieren and electric spark imagery, bullet sound wave imagery, forensic ballistic photography, slide rulers, punch cards, computer diagrams, and a soundtrack by Scanner. Like a frantic animation storyboard, it explores the flickering space between the frames, testing the perceptual mechanics of visual interpolation, the possibility of reading or deciphering the gap between before and after. Interpolation – the main task of the women studying…

  • Chromatic Aberration

    ‘Chromatic Aberration’ is a film which explores the early technologies of colour filmmaking drawn from the archives of George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Featuring vibrant close-ups of eyes from fledgling archival experiments in colour film, Chromatic Aberration turns the cinematic lens in on itself: from the prosthetic recording eye of the camera, to an evocation of the abstract inner screen of one’s eyelids. Satz has drawn inspiration from a scene in Powell and Pressberger’s 1946 film ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, where the transition from the reality of colour to the black and white of the afterworld is…

  • Doorway for Natalie Kalmus

    ‘Doorway for Natalie Kalmus’ is a film centred around the use of colour in moving image technology, exploring the disorienting technicolour prismatic effects of the lamp house of a 35mm colour film printer. Through minute shifts across an abstract colour spectrum, punctuated by a mechanical soundtrack, the film evokes kaleidoscopic perceptual after-images (bringing to mind Paul Sharits, Dario Argento and the Wizard of Oz). Natalie Kalmus was the ex-wife of technicolour inventor Herbert Kalmus, and was the colour consultant for hundreds of colour films, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, the Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and many…

  • Oramics: Atlantis Anew

    ‘Oramics: Atlantis Anew’ is conceived of as an artist’s film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958. The film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum in London.
Oram used drawn sound principles to compose ‘handwrought’electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. The film brings this obsolete technological fantasy briefly to back to life, enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences. The…

  • Sound Seam

    ‘Sound Seam’ is a film which gives voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The soundtrack’s musical composition is interlaced with a voice-over which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a gramophone needle. The overlapping voices of the narratives tell a forensic love story of yearning, encryption, inscription, decoding, memory and erasure. The film uses microscopic photography, scanning electron microscopy, and sounds of…

  • Nude Descending

    A video reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting, “Nu descendant un escalier n° 2”, that updates the work’s inter-media and temporal concerns into a contemporary frame, one century later.