Vom Innen; von Aussen
Albert Sackl
(2006, 16mm, silent, 20min, 24fps, Austria)
"This film is a wonderfully unnerving, scrutinized, study of the human body within the context of its environment. Implications of the revolution within man's own self image and man's historic world view seem to be the larger conceptual concerns of the work."
- Noah Manos, TIE

LIGHT TIME!

Whirl
Scott Banning (in-person)
(2007, 16mm, live sound, 8min, 24fps, USA)
"A whirl of carnival lights beckon; stirring memories of the first time you let your feet leave the ground. Ephemera, fear and wonder linger."
(View still here.)

Artifices #1
Alexandre Larose (in-person)
(2008, super-8, cassette sound, 4min, 18fps, Canada)
"Artifices is a visual research that studies the kinetic potential of light. In this super-8 experiment, I attempted to disintegrate static and dynamic light sources into flux."
(View still here.)

Kids & Pets
Frank Biesendorfer
(2008, regular-8mm, silent, 19min, 18fps, USA)
"Images to help me to remember. life and art, or life as art."
- Frank Biesendorfer
"It's kids and pets."
- Micki Tschur

Passing by Harry
Jim Prange (in-person)
(2006, 16mm, optical, 2min, 24fps, USA)
"Jim Prange presents a true enigma to the world of avant-garde cinema with his film Passing By Harry. The film subverts many time-honored characteristics of the branch of experimental cinema known as personal cinema, in a way that is, paradoxically, satirical and wholly sincere. The film exalts a car-based voyage to America’s heartland. The filmmaker’s objective for the trip is to commune with the birthplace of our 33rd president. Prange narrates in the early part of the film in the vein of a local tour guide. We see Truman’s boyhood residence, and the home where he lived out his days after his tenure in The White House. Images of Old Glory contribute to the film’s patriotic tone. The music in Passing By Harry deserves special consideration as it acts as its own character in the film."
-Noah Manos, TIE

Keep the Home Fires Burning
Ryan O'Toole
(2008, 16mm, optical, 8min, 24fps, USA)
This stunningly emotional film is about duty, heroism, pride and loss as seen in the home movies of a military family. The piece takes you on a journey inward, towards family and identity. Although it might seem preoccupied with loss, in its pensive music it is actually a song of hope – a wish for the future.
(View still here.)

Nocturne No. 2
Sheri Wills
(1999, 16mm, optical, 4min, 24fps, USA)
Sheri Wills holds an MFA in filmmaking and an MA in modern art history, theory and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In Nocturne No. 2, wills creates a beautiful and melancholic journey that is both abstract and reminiscent of a warm kindling fire and sparkling Christmas spice.

Clip from Colorado Springs Home of Champions
Jim Prange (in-person)
(1968, 16mm, sound on nagra, 6min, 18fps, USA)
"Peggy Fleming. 1968. Broadmoor Ice Arena. Shot on 7241 Ektachrome Commercial low-contrast stock, hi-speed processed at Hollywood Lab. Recently, Jim polished the film with Pledge. Removed scratches. Now Peggy skates on the slippery, shiny ice, better than ever before. This beautiful 5-minute piece revels in an extraordinary filmic delicacy."
- Christopher May, TIE

PARKOUR

Various works from Film (Parkour)
Cine Parkour (Christopher May (in-person)
(2008, 16mm & Super-8, sound & silent, 24fps & 18fps, USA & Argentina)
"We know that this is the first time in history that this type of Parkour material makes it into film; and this project does an incredible job at highlighting the deepest values that move our lives, leaving behind all superficiality."
-Walter Bongard, founder PKA, Asociación Argentina de Le Parkour
"Triumphant!...capturing traceurs' in their element, playing and human, rather than objects of advertisement ....a slight undercurrent of sensuous intimacy.. the lens found and lingered on the traceurs' genuine smiles, the tip of the ear or the playfulness in both movement and pause."
- Michelle Duer, writer

SECRETS IN THE SURFACE

Metaphysical Education
Thad Povey
(2003, 16mm, optical, 4min, 24fps, USA)
"Instead of using tape splices 16mm wide, this film was edited by turning the splicer sideways to reveal the sprockets and the soundtrack. The long cuts run diagonally across the screen and, as the filmstrip slides by, the highest jumper shows the way to the herd. Gravity and the desire to fly battle for a boy’s soul."
(View still here.)

Transaension
Dan Baker
(2006, 16mm, optical, 7min, 24, USA)
"Heartbeat. Out of a sick morass of reds and yellows, blacks, burns, and direct-to-film scratches, arises the (post) post-industrial terror of our collective oil-stained subconscious. Only three color tones are necessary to conjure up a veritable prehistoric nightmare or The Element of Crime. The primordial fire gives way directly to digital-age carnage and reinforced titanium imperialist ambition. Dripping. Syrupy glimpses of fighter pilots. Glassy eyes. Spindly towers waver in the nuclear breeze. Preparation for battle against comet field super nova background. Image would be clearer without the toxic pyro-fog. But instead, it's heat without season, drought without cycle; this moment is the unforeseen arrival, the final annihilation. Chirp your last, all precious consumer-constituent. Representation becomes survival, as the farce of authority crumbles along with every other vestige of a frantic, deluded civilization. The sun has burst open wide and spills out a thick, sweaty mix of techno-warfare and rich, fleshy industry. This is what man-made hell looks like. Echoes. Sci-fi meets hearts of darkness. It's a vision for rapture obsessives. But ecology replaces old time religion. Only no one's listening. We are the Hindenburg, the Titanic, the World Trade Center. A figure appears in the lower right corner, arms outstretched, a stand-in for humanity: Welcoming?... Challenging?"
- J.T. Rogstad, TIE
(View still here.)

Shudder (top and bottom)
Michael Gitlin
(2001, 16mm, optical, 3min, 24fps, USA)
"The film is a kind of shuddering optical toy, with a dense, collagist soundtrack that rubs against the complicated visual weave of the images. It scratches at the fiction of the original footage, leaving behind, in its phosphene-laden after-image, a throbbing world of lonely danger."
(View still here.)

BEYOND GRASP

A Hallow Kiss
Luther Price
(2008, 16mm, optical, 4min, 24fps, USA)
A song of light goes up a scale to eternity.
The haunted heart is like a honeycomb, a catacomb, unlocked by a stuttering silence, a song of light sung in a skeletal key.

And We All Shine On
Michael Robinson
(2006, 16mm, optical, 7min, 24fps, USA)
And We All Shine On is a machine-eyed vision of a post-apocalyptic paradise. Frequently working with abjected imagery—forgotten television, mid-century
magazines—and overly familiar pop songs, Robinson’s work flirts with a resigned pessimism, yet dares to find hope in the very heart of despair.
(View still here.)

The Crossing
Timoleon Wilkins
(2007, 16mm, silent, 6min, 20, USA)
"The film begins with a brief flash of molten-red grain followed by a long scene of darkest night-blue sea ripples. Hexagonal refractions and spectral rays puncture alluded-to landscapes—rivers, skies, prairies, trees, mountains. Graphic (yet spatially free-floating) imagery slices intently wrought rhythms of light and dark color fields, producing afterimages. The title is derived from Cormac McCarthy's novel The Crossing, the second installment in his Border Trilogy (1992-98). The film was created while under the joyful influence of these sensuous nature/ cowboy/ youth/ coming-of-age adventures, and is a cinematic analogue to McCarthy's major area of exploration: the uncertain sense of scale that permeates life-changing geographic and spiritual crossings."
(View still here.)

Steifheit 1 & 2
Albert Sackl
(1997-2007, 16mm, silent, 6min 24fps, Austria)
A Caravaggio-esque lighted coming-of-age experiment. After 10 years, Albert Sackl repeated the same experiment in front of the camera as in 1997: how long could he maintain his erection?
(View stills here.)

I KNOW; I DON'T KNOW

Cockleash
Jesse Kennedy
(2008, ssuper-8, silent, 4min, 18fps, USA)
Shot in black and white, the film’s inspiration is spun from the following thought: When we become each other’s property we become the property of the night. The dual ownership of a body, or a part of it, begins to put identity in jeopardy.
The gentle 3-minute beginnings of a Sadean vacation.

My Mess
Jesse Kennedy
(2007, super-8, silent, 4min, 18fps, USA)
"The three-minute long super-8 movie, is savage and jittery, depicting anonymous hands jotting sentences that seem suspiciously intended for a former partner or otherwise estranged loved one. Gory imagery (including a mangled rabbit head) is tempered by a tenderness that arises from the uncompromising (even if, tormented) sincerity of the language. The perspective of the camera brings the viewer uncomfortably close to the hands, but withholds the satisfaction of being! Sound is unnecessary: the emotional charge of the piece is blaring. This unrelenting process of incongruity, the clash of image and text, pasting together the pieces of a narrative that add up only to greater tension, is shattering. If a writer could teach us how to read in a film, and a camera could be used to shoot in the most visceral sense, then Kennedy with his Super 8 camera and diverse medley of intellectual interests is ferociously, sensually, and innovatively redefining how we portray and experience the emotive blows of a story."
- Rachel Cole, Dikeou Collection