Terra Incognita

by Ben Russell

10 min, 16mm, Sound, 2002

Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Texts from ancient and modern explorers about Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.

Removed

by Naomi Uman

8 min, 16mm, 1999

In Removed, Uman physically erases the female body from old 16mm porn using nail polish remover and household bleach. This gorgeous attack of beauty and domestic product on celluloid results in a series of animated white 'holes' writhing orgasmically in the place of porn stars. The leering men are captured in various inadequate poses and the original dialogue tracks remain, complete with badly dubbed exchanges. The hole in the film becomes an erotic zone, a blank on which a fantasy body is projected. This brilliant work is unusually precise: it is politically subversive, pornography in its own right, sassy and extremely funny.

Kiss Kiss

by Lea Donnan

4:13 min, digital, 2005

As humans become more intimate with machines, machines become more intimate with us. They are intrinsic to our experience. Despite the fundamental evolution of mankind into a world where technology holds such great importance and power, there is in everything an innate underlying primal urge. Metal valves drive our ailing hearts and pixels forming language symbols convey information that elicits emotional response and action. With the click of a button we can own interactive structures detailing personal and public soliloquies available to anyone who might chance upon them. “Kiss Kiss” amplifies the found intimacy of two young women playing out another person’s fantasy.

Léa Donnan is a French born, Australian artist now residing in the United States. She investigates found and manipulated imagery with video, photography and mixed media on paper. She has exhibited at PS1 Contemporary Art in New York, has been an artist in residence at the International Cité des Arts in Paris and at Artspace Sydney.

Caesura

by Leeanne Williams
3:35 min, Betacam SP, 2004

The intuitive act of pausing to breathe.

Leeanne Williams is a 2004 Animation graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. Growing up in a small country town in Connecticut meant that she was surrounded by cows, cornfields, and apple orchards. Leeanne comes from a family of artists, including painters, sculptors, dollmakers, art educators, illustrators and stone carvers. Leeanne is now living in Boston, Massachusetts, continuing her own personal animations and working as an artist for a video game company.

Untitled (Silver)

by Takeshi Murata

11 min, 2006

In Untitled (Silver), Murata subjects a snippet of footage from a vintage horror film (Mario Bava's 1960 Mask of Satan, featuring Barbara Steele) -- to his exacting yet almost violent digital manipulations. The seething back and white imagery constantly decomposes and reconstitutes itself, slipping seductively between abstraction and recognition.
Soundtrack: Robert Beatty, Ellen Molle.

The Amateurist

by Miranda July

14 min, 1998

A “professional” woman monitors an “amateur” woman (both played by July) via video surveillance, as she has for the last four and a half years. She has never had direct contact with the amateur, but creates a sense of communion through numbers, knobs and careful language.

Precious Portion

by Denise O'Malley

3:45 min, super 8, 1991 Precious Portion

The irony of law or the law of irony: How much is too much, and how little, too little? The answer, if there were one, would only echo the impossibility of the question, an impossibility to which this film bears witness.

In [the] play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable.
Jacques Derrida, of Grammatology

Oona's Veil

by Brian Frye

8 min, 16mm

Whispering Hope, or Grace and How to Get It.

I know of only one film-record of Oona Chaplin, this screen-test made for a film in which she was cast and never appeared, having met and married Charlie Chaplin before shooting commenced. Some say that Chaplin himself directed her; history says otherwise. To hell with history. Hers was quite possibly the briefest film career ever. But then again, brevity is no obstacle to greatness.

I rephotographed the original screentest, doing 20 frame (as I recall...) lap dissolves from one from to the next. The idea was lifted wholesale from David Rimmer, though I've never seen the film(s?) in which he used the technique. Sailboat, I think, for one. I liked the brief transition from still to motion in Chris Marker's La Jetee, and wanted to extend it somehow. Anyway, I didn't like the result at first, as the image shifted a lot. So I made a duplicate negative and did some damage to it to obscure the hiccups. Ultimately, it was exposed to chemicals, buried, and left on the fire escape for a year. What remained I untangled, spliced together into something approaching a continuous strip of film, and had printed. The result became the master positive. The sound consists of a beat-up 78 of a song called "Whispering Hope," played at 33 rpm.

"As I now beheld the robe, it seemed to me suddenly to become a mirror-image of myself: myself entire I saw in it, and it entire I saw in myself, that we were two in seperateness, and yet one again in the sameness of our forms..." The Hymn of the Pearl (Hans Jonas, trans.).

Brian L. Frye is a filmmaker, curator, freelance journalist, and lawyer, living in Fairbanks, Alaska. He is co-founder of New York's Robert Beck Memorial Cinema and has published numerous articles about independent and experimental filmmaking in publications including: Film Comment, Civilization, Cineaste, the Independent Film and Video Monthly and Millennium Film Journal, among others. His work has been shown in the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Radiowaves

by Andrew Shea

2:44 min; Analog; 2006

Radiowaves is a music video made for UV Protection, a Boston-based band.  It includes footage of elephants, water, and commercial segues that join two clips or scenes.  I’ve always wanted to capture these .10-.50 second TV segues because their purpose is to end a scene and begin another.  These playful transitions carry a lot of visual power and have come to play such an important part in the way that television and advertising is presented and, in turn, impacts our expectations of the visual world. 

UV said this about the song, “we originally wrote it thinking about ghosts and haunted houses, how maybe they're just frequencies we can't understand, like radiowaves, they're mysterious and invisible, but we know they exist.”  I edited the video while thinking about these creeping unseeables, and used the TV segues to lure and reveal these mysterious invisibles. 

COLORS of the world

by Keita Suzuki

8 min, digital, 2005

“Pictures an early morning sunshine quietly filling a room. The video begins as a simple composition of darkness with the objects on a desk show in outline. Tone is heightened little by little with the slow rise of the early morning sun. "The essential components of existence (shape, color, and texture) appear gradually in the increasing morning sunlight; a strong though serene impression." -Keita

The Hong Kong Showcase (a case study)

by Michael Byrnnup

3:20 min, digital, 2005

The world is everything that is the showcase.”
Living in a globalized world - a case study.
(loosely based on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, sentence no.1)