Experimental Film

Standing on the brink of elimination, the suspense threatening to fracture their composure, contestants wait and see if they will be going home. The audience at home is also waiting... Part two of Bearing Witness Trilogy.

What Farocki Taught is literally and stubbornly a remake — that is, a perfect replica in color and in English, of Harun Farocki’s black and white, 1969 German language film, Inextinguishable Fire.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

This are the scattered fragments, the scattered mineral fragments in its oceanic evolution, an intermittent becoming of geological massiveness. The mineral geology under the spell of an scattered dance. This is the mobilized fossil. Part of the Scattered Geology Audiovisual series.

Formally eclectic but heartfelt tribute to the holiday home movie heritage of low gauge formats.

Shot over 3 holidays, and including a dream I had about rescuing a cat from Norway, Stay … is my attempt to pay homage to 8mm’s home movie heritage. It’s pre-digital, so originally cut and shown as sticky tape spliced celluloid. Though rough hewn it’s a film that I still maintain a great fondness for.

p.s. The Wales section is shot on Single 8.

Company Line is a film about one of the first predominately Black neighborhoods in Mansfield, Ohio. The title, Company Line, refers to the name historically used by residents to describe their neighborhood, located on the north side of town close to the old steel mill. The Company Line began during the post–war migration of Blacks from the south to the north in the late 1940’s. The neighborhood was purchased in the early 1970s and its residents were scattered throughout Mansfield.

Irradiation is the thermal emanation of vital heat, the ancestral support that immerses beings in the solar blood. This is the immersion of beings in the bloody solar flow that gives the intense color of our present time. Part of Tonalli.

Altamira is the paleolithic and post-human experience of the bloom of cinema. The cinema in a cave, the lightning of his presence, the fire of his birth. The paleolithic and post-human intermittence of the life of cinema. The sacred and contingent permanence of cinema. Part of the Hyperkinetic and Hauntology series.

This is the apparition, the ghostly flight over our present time of the infamous conqueror Pánfilo de Narváez. The exterminating angel of our times. Part of the Hauntology and Post-Covid series.

The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past. Evoking the ritualism of Aztec cosmology, this experience recalls lumbreras – circular excavation holes in archeological sites, such as the recently found Tzompantli (skulls ceremonial rack) at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The use of obsidian crystal as a nuclear filter in the chamber is also essential.

As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven. They walk unseen. They Live.

This waltz is a set of circular and fragmented compositions, in which a rhythmic and haunted dance hides an eroded lunar landscape. The microscopic rubble of our contemporary civilization. Part of the Lunar Films series.

This is the path from the snake’s perspective.

A two-headed calf died when one head atrophied. It became a trophy that the artist used as a source for this 16mm film transferred to video.

This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.

Sensemayá is a shamanic composition, an ecstatic dance, and ritualistic spell which distills and exudes the kinetic motion of the ancient snake that inhabits our present dislocated times. Shifting from the poetic to the unsettling and the foreboding, Sensemayá contorts and repeats its patterns, pulsating images that feel out of time, encompassing the past, the present and the future.

Performers throw themselves into an underground passageway. They exit through the mirror, a symmetrical mirror world which exists because of the placement and angle of the mirror as an upside-down place.

Performers: Ellen Krueger and Monica Wilson

This is a gaze of the body and a notion of spectator that the 90´s decade constructed, this is the audiovisual legacy of the 90's for our actual audiovisual control world.

After the ominous attack that the paramilitary and police corporations carried out on September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, the student Aldo Gutiérrez Solano remains in a coma until today. A brief homage to the resistance of the body fighting against power.

This film was made from The New York Times newspaper articles. The semi-automated animation process resulted in sentence recombinations that sometimes made sense while randomly emphasizing certain words and images.

The computer animation was transferred to one 100ft roll of 16mm Tri-X reversal film and then hand-processed. The reversal negative is the original.

Producer/ Director: Sabine Gruffat
Hand Processing: Matthew Kelson

Lead is a tale of an early 20th Century Robin Hood, based on a story by James Williams, involving jumping trains and throwing coal off for needy Southerners.

Cast: Chris Barkley, Hassen Mahamud, Kenny West, James Williams. Cinematography: Jonathan Taee. Sound: Ayesha Ninan.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the Ancestors documents the dream lives of the territory’s inhabitants as the borders of consciousness dissolve and expand. Equal parts documentary, ethnography and dream cinema, herein is a world whose borders are constantly dematerializing.

There has to be a way to win is the refrain. Three women fold clothes, stroll and shop as they discuss jealousy, murder and dead bodies. An enquiry into the generosity of women.

Players: Trina Vester, Karin Westerlund, Lise Kelleman.

Shot on location in Kobenhavn.

Done To (alternately titled It Is, Done To) consists of simple still-frames accompanied by a complex, incongrous soundtrack, or silence. There are instances where image and sound coalesce; however, the majority of the images are overwhelmed by the at-times symphonic, at-times cacaphonous soundtrack, displacing the normal film viewing experience. The standard film format of going from frame to frame — and then and then and then — is what this film is concerned with.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.