Genres: experimental

  • Serena Gundy

    Serena Gundy Park, in Toronto, so named for the late wife of Toronto businessman James Henry Gundy, who influenced the financial character of early twentieth-century Canada. Gundy had owned the parkland as a family estate, and upon his death in 1951, donated the land to the city in memory of his wife. In early spring, the trees remain bare from winter, on cusp of renewal. The film takes her name for its homophonic relation to the nursery rhyme Solomon Grundy (born on a Monday, christened on Tuesday, married on Wednesday…), which cycles through the days of the week that chart…

  • Bridge 1A

    An interstice.

  • Jenny Haniver

    A photographer steadies a Polaroid camera and composes a shot of the sky, flanked by tree branches. Later, a woman wakes from a nightmare. Jenny Haniver takes its title from a cryptid totem sold for centuries at the docks of Antwerp: a Jenny Haniver or jeune d’anvers (young girl of Antwerp) is a disfigured ray or skate carcass, carved to resemble an angel, a devil, a dragon. A series of ten filmed portraits are subject to all manner of alteration. By this they compose the hull of a ship wrecked on rocks sung by sirens. To mirror its namesake, the…

  • Cum Pane

    It’s physically demanding and sweaty. Grandma’s hands are gnarled from years of pain and hard work. Hands knead the dough. She works with rolling-pins, brushes and older baking utensils. She deftly places the bread on a peel and sets it in the stone oven. Grandpa takes care of the wood-burning , watches over it, blows life into it, again and again. He moves the bread around on the hot hearth. They work noiselessly. Close to each other. Crackling and pounding, scratching and clouds of flour. It is hot. The fire blazes. The smell of wood. The aroma of freshly baked…

  • Blue Guitar

    Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.

  • Densen

    Synopsis: A musical voyage through photographs from Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Barcelona, Milan and Buenos Aires. The word for power line in Japanese is densen. Music by the Swedish group Tape. French: Inspiré du mot japonais signifiant « ligne à haute tension », le film Densen est un voyage musical à travers des photos prises à Tokyo, St Petersbourg, Barcelone, Milan et Buenos Aires. Spanish: Un viaje musical a través de fotografías de Tokyo, St Petersburgo, Barcelona, 
Milano y Buenos Aires. La palabra japonesa Densen significa conducto de corriente. Musica del grupo Tape de Suécia.        German: Eine musikalische Reise aus…

  • 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…