X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
9 key moving image works created by filmmaker Christian Lebrat over a ten-year period (1976-1985). Each film focus on an aspect of his experimentation with the use of color in cinema.
A film consisting of alternating black and white frames.
cloud film meditates on the calming effects of watching clouds, while also demanding action to combat our impact on the environment. It calls attention to a loss of control as the clouds turn into a storm, reflecting the momentum of climate change. As clouds float on screen, fluctuating between different frame rates, this film calls attention to its handmade form through the use of cameraless techniques such as ray-o-gramming, optical printing and hand processing.
A meditation on the inevitable deterioration of certain traditional values that have been established (or destroyed) throughout civilization. This elegiac account uses symbolic representation from natural elements in order to convey the inevitability of remembering the social and cultural erosion, and places a layer of texture in front of the elliptical glimpses of imagery, separating the viewer from the past. The re-occurring image of flames remains untouched by the erosion aspects of reticulation, ultimately alluding to nature's powerful quality.
A glimpse into a visual representation of memory; A Christmas-time series of meals, coffees, and movies, with friends, lovers, and housemates. Faced with the compounding of faces and places, each moment begins to collide with one another: voices are muddled, and faces are broken. How is memory created? How are they separated from one another?
A Sunday walk in a forest turns into a poetic journey on perception.
Light begins to illuminate the small, nipple-like end of a lemon on the right edge of the frame and gradually spreads until the entire lemon is clearly visible. Then the light recedes across the frame.
A silent dance documenting a brief visit to Minneapolis in the fall of 2022. A reflection on the sleeping city's tumultuous recent history through a recollected interaction and a plea for continued disturbance. An entry in an ongoing video and film series, Twin City Twist was shot on Kodak Tri-X reversal super 8 film with kaleidoscopic lenses. The film was scanned and edited digitally.
Ellie Epp’s 12-shot study of a soon-to-be-demolished public bath in London, which “maps another way out of structural film toward a cinema of delicate implication".
Serene Velocity stares down the center of an empty institutional hallway while shifting the focal length of a stationary zoom lens, transforming the basement corridor into a nexus of visual and conceptual energy.
A glimpse over the Diguillín River through the mechanical eye of an old digital camera. Light’s trail presents itself fortuitously over the reflection of the sun on the water, tracing infinite threads of concrete luminous information.
“This film was a gift to me. I make no claims for it, nor do I offer any apologies. It comes from work on The Thoughts That Once We Had. There was one shot we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo Station from Ozu’s The Only Son (1936). So I decided to make a film around this shot, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 scenes or shots from movies, 1904-2015. It has a simple serial structure: each black & white sequence in the first half rhymes with a color sequence in the second half. Thus the first shot and the final shot show trains arriving at stations in Japan from a low camera height. In the first shot (The Only Son), the train moves toward the right; in the last shot, it moves toward the left. A bullet train has replaced a steam locomotive. So after all these years, I’ve made another structural film, although that was not my original intention.”
The six-decade transformation of a block of houses, shown by means of artfully featured archival shots, highlights the beauty and sadness of human-made decay. In the blink of an eye 66 years pass by and a savings bank replaces a church.
Two women in a living room: smoking, playing cards, listening to the radio. As often in Dwoskin’s films, the use of masks, make-up and costumes allows the characters to playfully transform themselves. Shot in colour film, C-film exuberates swinging London energy. In the second part of the film, the women appear to be watching the rushes of the film on an editing table. ”We are making a movie” we hear them say. As Dwoskin points out, “C-film asks how much is acting acted”, an ongoing question in Dwoskin’s cinema. Produced by Alan Power, with Esther Anderson & Sally Geeson.
This audio-visual tone poem uses the language of filmmaking to offer a first-hand evocation of the turbulent psychological effects one can experience due to prolonged lack of sunlight.
A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).
Dave Jones prototype modules (keyers, color field generators, output amplifier), black-and-white camera, microphone and Serge audio modules (voltage controlled oscillators, filters, sequencer)
A corridor of an apartment is transformed into a claustrophobic and vertiginous vortex that swallows and imprisons you in an infinite fall through a mise en abyme: it’s a pure enclosure inside the image world, it’s the Descent into the Maelstrom.