Depicting the sun rising on a midwestern winter landscape filmed over 1 hour and 10 minutes, this film explores the relationship between natural light and the illusion of passing time through superimpositions and high framerates.
Wavelength is a groundbreaking experimental film that takes place entirely in a loft, as a continuous zoom slowly reveals the room's contents and the events that unfold. The film explores themes of perception, time, and reality.
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.
Manakamana is a documentary film that takes viewers on a unique journey. The film follows the lives of various individuals as they take a cable-car ride to the Manakamana Temple, a Hindu pilgrimage site located high in the mountains of Nepal. Through a series of observational shots, the film explores themes of religion, culture, and human connection.
Lemon is a one-shot avant-garde short film that explores minimalism and lighting techniques. It focuses on a lemon as a still-life subject, showcasing the play of light and shadow. The film is considered a museum piece and part of the structural film movement.
A film consisting of alternating black and white frames.
"Serene Velocity (1970) created a stunning percussive head-on motion by systemically shifting the focal length of a stationary zoom lens as it stared down the center of an empty institutional hallway – thus playing off the contradiction generated by the frames’ heightened flatness and the compositions’ severely overdetermined perspective. Without ever moving the camera, Gehr turned the fluorescent geometry of this literal Shock Corridor (in the then – new State University of N.Y at Binghamton) into a sort of piston-powered mandala. If Giotto had made action films it would be this." – J. Hoberman
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 condensation of a handful of sunsets with various visual moods. Red and blue as opposites that still find a way to cohere. Concrete silhouettes over an ever-changing, expanding canvas. Every movement is collective, molecular. With an invisible horizon, a chance presents itself to meditate on the “speed” of water and the sea and also for a more fluid kind of editing.
H Is for House (1973) is a mesmerizing avant-garde short film that explores the concept of a house through the perspectives of multiple narrators. With its unique narrative structure and artistic approach, this film takes viewers on a thought-provoking and visually stunning journey.
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.
The corner of a street is matched and mixed with the chant of a bird recorded on that same street. A symbiotic relationship is triggered: the rapid and successively repetitive montage cuts between the image of the street and the corners of the video frame itself produce new textures and shapes in our brain, whilst the sound follows the same rhythmic movements by emphasizing different “corners” (frequencies) from the bird’s singing. The energetic potency stemming from the junction of these elements creates a new image that is almost tactitle, maleable and rippling. The result is a somewhat humorous operation of the portuguese word "corner" throughout the different stages of making the piece, finally unveiling a piercing physical and kinetic experience for all the corners of our eyes and ears.
“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.”
Repetitive abstract experimental film. A bearded man flickers past a hundred times.
A nostalgic exploration, comprising fragments of reworked 9.5mm home movie footage. The deterioration of the original film, like memories, contributes to the film’s meaning.
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.
The passing time is displayed as a series of still frames, or a rapid sequence of moments, ever flowing like the waves that break on the shore, like a repeated chant with no beginning, middle or end.
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.
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?
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.