Still Life #02

Experimental short documentary

"Ad Vice consists of a succession of colored projection surfaces with segments of text from the worlds of advertising, sport and popular culture." - Anita De Groot

In this meditation on contemporary race relations, two black men discuss in voiceover certain “casual” events in life and cinema that are unnoticed or discounted by whites—gestures, hesitations, stares, off-the-cuff remarks, jokes—details of an ideology of repressed racism.

This engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift. Cokes asks, “How do people make history under conditions pre-established to dissuade them from intervening in it?”

'Still Lives' comprises a trilogy of films by Patrick Sheard; Lamenta, Libertas and Exitus, anthologized here in their entirety.

We live with stories. And it's hard for us to give up on these stories, which provide us our identity, a way of understanding ourselves. Reflections from three successive generations are dusted off and presented as remaining fragments. An attempt to archive thoughts on familial history, narrative traditions, human perception and "the story" from known and unknown sources. "There is history behind it and the history becomes the story and the story becomes the pattern and the pattern becomes rigidity."

This is one of those abstract animated films in which colored, richly textured light moves in a black, three-dimensional space. The pictures and the electronic score are unified in a strict structure made of three main sections which progressively develop three subsections. This film may look like it was made using computers or video to the uninitiated, but only animation and much optical printing are to be seen herein. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.

Two different women, from opposite sides of the country, look for distractions from the mundane and the malaise of modern life.

"The evaporation or the centralization of the self. Everything is there." —Charles Baudelaire A sensorial approach to landscape In the deep contemplation of landscape the senses are altered. We feel a sublimation experience where the mental image of landscape undergoes a metamorphosis. The actual space is distorted, time flows in a different way: it stops in our consciousness. It is the connection at the "full instant," the idea of "durèe" of Henri Bergson, where the intensity of the experience makes the image of landscape expands.

A languid, beautifully shot collection of landscapes, edited into a whimsical and touching film.

Using only nature and his immediate surroundings, filmmaker Brandon Wilson creates an experimental documentary that ignites the imagination of wandering in nature, and creates a loving portrait to the woods he calls home. Over the course of a year, Wilson set out to document— and accentuate—his surroundings through camera filters, angles, repetition, and audio. The end result is a hypnotic journey through the hidden wonders and beauties of the Northwest forests, in vivid colors and immaculate black-and-whites.

This documentary interweaves celluloid and voice recordings by Maya Deren, and colleagues who knew her firsthand: Jean Rouch, Jonas Mekas, Alexander Hammid, Cecile Starr etc. Maya Deren (1917-1961) was an experimental filmmaker. In the 1940s and 1950s she made several influential avant-garde films, such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Images from this and her other work are used in this documentary. You can also hear her voice, as well as accounts by contemporaries such as Jean Rouch and Jonas Mekas.

An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories. 

Games with muscles, games with power, SM games. The naked body employed as a prop. Perceptions of one's own body are the focus of Body-building, and it leaves the good-girl role far behind, sometimes in striking poses, sometimes in martial dress.

This film was provoked by a trip on the overhead railway through the centre of Chicago in 1991. I filmed a twelve minute piece facing forwards in the direction we were driving. Three years later I came across the film material once more. The memory of it had faded, and its images were just as vague. So I worked on the material using a bleaching bath. The complex, cuboid-like architecture of the city came out in a test of the substantial and then sank back into the minority - dissolving to a lump of cosmic dust. I was first able to identify a projection of the experienced, within the undercurrent of disintegration. (Jurgen Reble)

A day in the life of Swedish poet Karl Holmqvist.

RIPPLE, 2020. HD digital video loop & steel & hardware, duration: 5 minutes. Soundtrack by Kevin Carey.

"The details of the script for Alma were modeled from data that the artist collected from her own digital devices. The film describes a woman who enters into a private contract with a room. The objects in the room monitor how she feels as they respond to her in real time, comforting her with their physical presence and touch. The room tracks the character’s steps and her screen time, but it also monitors impossible data points, like what she would have accomplished if she had lived a different life. The first half of the film celebrates the unreality of her wishful thinking that technology is capable of solving any problem. In the second half of the film, these optimistic ideas are traded for a catastrophic vision of her digitally connected self. In the end, she is immersed in a space that describes what it once was like to be among other people. While physically separated, she waits indefinitely in a digital rendering, surrounded by a phantom of human presence." — Jane Lombard Gallery

Images of the Church of the Sagrada Familia by Antoni Gaudí confronted with brief flashes of housing projects and industrial areas. The furious display of a effervescent imagination is opposed to a grey functionality.

1996 Peter Rose short work. A magician-like figure delivers a peculiar speech that is embedded in extravagant arrays of time-delayed images that reflect and refract ideas about memory, time and language.