Genres: experimental

  • Jacumba Song

    Lucienne Delyle, Tsygan the dog, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and a mantis meet in the desert to take the waters and sing of love. An anarchistic exploration of mythologies and performative languages of romantic love and illusion combining legend, cartoon and dream. Shot in the Anza Borrego desert on Kodachrome and Ektachrome Super 8.

  • Fireland (The Sloko Valley Fire)

    A young man seeks to find adventure, love and work, leaves for the Yukon, finding all three and more as he matures and finds his calling.

  • Submerged Queer Spaces

    Submerged Queer Spaces is a documentary feature that examines queer history through an approach of urban archeology. Our cameras look at surviving architectural details of old haunts as if unearthing ancient monuments. As San Francisco grew and gentrified, communities changed, shifted, and were displaced. Bars, restaurants, parks, alleys, bathhouses, and other gathering spots of the queer community were remodeled, repurposed, rebuilt, or destroyed. Submerged Queer Spaces looks at the architectural remains of historic sites and buildings in San Francisco. Eight interview subjects recount firsthand experiences in these lost environs. Gerald Fabien experienced gay San Francisco before WWII, and tells tales…

  • Entr’acte

    A series of Vaudeville acts inserted between the lines of reality, meant to demonstrate the ephemerality of all things. Music by Wm. Moraldo.

  • The Alicorn

    The film takes the form of a three-tiered hallucination: a dream within a dream within a dream. A pharaoh time travels from the future to ancient Egypt and dreams of a medieval tavern where people are suffering from the Black Plague. In the tavern, on the brink of death, an old crone tells her life story. The woman’s story, narrated in old English song, alludes to her salvation by the appearance of an alicorn borne by her younger sister. Themes of women’s stories, power, and transgression are woven throughout the narrative.

  • Auroratone

    This abstract cut-out animation attempts to create orderly pixel patterns using only hand-cut and hand-arranged materials, without any grids, rulers, or visual guides. A stream-of-consciousness series of abstract patterns dance, transform, answer to one another, and at times evolve into recognizable icons, as if sending subliminal messages from a child’s play session. Back-lit pastel colorscapes reflect the airy, other-wordly transmission of Julia Holter’s song “So Lillies” .

  • Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds

    This solo performance for the camera pays homage to 1970s video art, exploring how the electronic manipulation of the video signal can create a choreocinema for body and machine. Choreographic patterns melding retro moves with a minimalist aesthetic participate in a jagged, pulsing duet with the danceable beats and noisy textures of the track “Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds” by Alterity Problem (Alexander Moskos and Joel Taylor). Effects were created in real-time with a raster-scan device built by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, accessed during a residency at the now-closed Experimental TV Center in upstate New York.

  • A & B in Ontario

    “Hollis and I came back to Toronto on holiday in the summer of ’67. We were staying at a friend’s house. We worked our way through the city and eventually made it to the island. We followed each other around. We enjoyed ourselves. We said we were going to make a film about each other – and we did.” – Joyce Wieland “A & B in Ontario” was completed eighteen years after the original material was shot. After Frampton’s death, the film was assembled by Wieland into a cinematic dialogue in which the collaborators (in the spirit of the sixties)…

  • Angst

    Kynth, a night creature, experiences emotional and cultural shock as she finds herself in love in the twentieth century. Suddenly she is awakened from centuries of deathful loneliness. Her new lover, a filmmaker, re-introduces her to the sights of the daytime world. She discovers too late, however, that this human she has come to rely upon knows as little about living as she, the undead. She finds out that even a vampire can cry.

  • Skeleton Dance

    Have you ever wondered what would happen if you X-rayed a skeleton at a dance club? This experimental cut-out animation offers something of an answer. Besides dancing between abstract shapes throughout the video, the skeleton character cuts out a pair of pants from some paper, tries them on and runs away. The footage is processed using a variety of analog video synthesizers, including a Paik-Abe Raster Scan Device (aka Wobulator). The electronic voltage of the soundtrack by LA’s Dva Damas directs the parameters of certain effects. Artwork, animation, processing and editing done by Emily Pelstring while in residence at the…