Diary 1: (films from my)SOLID#STATE(drive): November 2024

Now I shall sing the second kingdom there where the soul of man is cleansed, made worthy to ascend to Heaven. (Purgatorio: Canto I)

A person living in Liberty City goes to work, have some food & gets back home.

Landscapes, things, men, women and children taken by an "evil eye" more than a century ago haunt the present in this jagged reverie. A persona voicelessly narrates, via captions, going through colonial photographs, digresses to eating fruit and entering a cave on a tropical vacation island.

Experimental short film by Paul Clipson

Experimental Documentary on Sound & Cannabis

An experimental film created from 3 years worth of abstract pencil drawings with the goal of being a catalyst for unveiling a new mental landscape in viewers.

Man often yearns of a past more innocent and pure. This film disregards that sentimentality and depicts a constant, permanent transformation of the landscape of mountains and rivers. A beautiful and intense image poem made from thousands of pencil drawings.

The first embodiment of (a) concept of structural activity in cinema comes in Kren's Bäume im Herbst, where the camera as a subjective observer is constrained within a systematic or structural procedure, incidentally the precursors of the most structuralist aspect of Michael Snow's later work. In this film, perception of material relationships in the world is seen to be no more than a product of the structural activity in the work. Art forms experience.

The short film introduces a group of 3 dancers as representatives of Afrobeats dance community in Vancouver, Canada and celebrates the passion and vibrance the dance culture brings through inspiration, education and performance.

24 years ago, Nick's parents started a small vegetable farm in Sperryville, Virginia, and he spent his childhood among the farm's fields and flowers. This summer, Nick is back at the farm to visit for a month and a half. And he's trying to make a movie about it.

An experimental short from Oskar Fischinger

Whether it be doing yoga with ants, printing with plants, or considering the travels of an apple: not all teachers are human in a bustling Spanish farmhouse. While instances of interspecies care are enacted beneath the cool stone arches of this rambling structure, the ecological niches (or roles) of various beings shift along with their unexpected environmental relationships. In a heavily altered landscape composed of serrated mountains and meticulously-maintained olive groves, human intervention is readily apparent; however, sometimes trees bear knowledge in addition to green fruits, and humans shape and are shaped by their environment in equal measure.

A young woman under the influence of narcotics finally realizes how she’s been spending her nights.

A stasis work invoking the memory of the lynching of Mary Turner, a young, pregnant African American woman in South Georgia. Publicly demanding justice after the murder of her husband, Turner was kidnapped by a mob, hung up in a tree, set on fire, her child cut out and killed, and shot hundreds of times before being buried on-site in 1918. Returning to the origins of cinema, filmed on the exact date and time of Turner’s lynching 105-years earlier, # 3 uses form, time, light, shadow, and landscape as metaphor to not only invoke the memory of Mary Turner, but to also ponder perspective relating to racial violence, violence against women, our failure to acknowledge our past, and the racial divide that continues to exist today in the schizophrenia of America life.

In an alternate reality where the decline of nations has given rise to corporatist regimes, any trace of culture or tradition is suppressed by these new leaders to prevent the masses from reclaiming a national identity. However, rebel cells have emerged to counteract this agenda.

Latest installment from the on-going collaboration between filmmaker Paul Clipson & musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Paul's Super8 films, shot entirely in New York City, channel the blissed out states of color drenched psychadellia explored by Brakage as well as lovely black and white still life's that reminisce on Ozu's 'pillow shots' & Chantel Akermans monumental portrait of Pre-Giuliani New York 'Letters Home'. Jefre's music is culled from the same sessions that launched his 2007 release on Students Of Decay 'Shinning Skull Breath', (the two share a track in common). Billowy clouds of distorted guitar expand out into long passages of muffled static and fuzzed out melody.

"Ephemeris" (2011) is a conversation of image and sound, between filmmaker Paul Clipson and electronic musician Aki Onda, rendered as if from a fragmented journey of landscapes and memories. Clipson and Onda each investigate very personal, intuitive spaces, through their favored technologies of Super 8mm film and cassette Walkman. Both artists base a significant emphasis of their work on performance environments, where their visual and sonic field recordings interact to create sensory collages born out of the subjective impressions of the audience.

Experimental film using fireworks, often superimposed and in soft focus, printed in negative form with a black image on a white background. Plucked piano strings reversed xylophone and cymbal with an electronic vibrato effect form the background sound effects.

People are punished not for their sins, but by their sins and this is the most severe and proper punishment.

Filmed in Berlin, July 1990. Images of workers taking down the wall and street peddlers selling pieces of it to make a living.