Termite Gumbo

A portrait of a street corner in flux.

Egotistical faded star Hedy Lamarr visits a plastic surgeon to be transformed into the "14-year-old girl" she believes herself to be. She is then caught shoplifting by Mary Woronov and is put on trial, with Tavel as the judge and her five ex-husbands the jury. Hedy remains self-centered and detached throughout, posing and primping and bursting out renditions of "I Feel Pretty" and "Young at Heart."

A short animated feature which Fred Burns created with 2,000 inked, painted, and photographed images.

Babies bouncing in toy chairs, friends competing at the bowling alley: each moment of this found footage collage, composed entirely of home videos shot on September 10, 2001, is tinged with dread for the era to come.

"A good friend of mine died at 9:10 a.m. Saturday, July 21, 2007... my film piece is called "Quiet Chaos of Desire" it comes out of my experience in a sideward glance at my father in-laws passing and the resulting pain for my wife, then the resulting understanding and strength that has arisen from this between us. The flow of blood which creates the bond that is family was broken, bandaged, then coagulated...Life without suffering is impossible. Scars have the power to remind us that the past is real...and although this event is past the sound of death's rattle never leaves." (C.E.B.)

The story is the closure, the film is how pain and anxiety are carried by the wind. There is no use trying to exert control, it only causes the pain/anxiety to linger. It must run its natural course. The Mistral can be beautiful and terrible, if it catches onto you/your soul becomes wrapped in its temper. It dances over the water changing its course to make your light unpredictable, terrible but beautiful ... solo or in tandem. The story is the jazz by which these events take place. To exert any force over the film would not be the story. I am consumed by the flame.

A man is plagued with insomnia due to a recurring nightmare of his murder.

Playful and rythmic self-portrait shot on Super 8mm and 16mm. Colored directly on the super 8mm.

The film appears like a ritual with splendids and crypteds psalms. The Great Master of Order (Marcel Mazé, new fetish actor after Aloual) seduces the young male prey with a running cinema projector which carves Murnau's Nosferatu extracts on their bodies. Metamorphosis, rituals passages, Eros and Thanotos, illusion and reality, film into the film are the themes and images in perpetual osmosis in this Stéphane Marti's opus.

Playtime’s cosmopolitan spectacle, presented in a kaleidoscopic montage across seven large screens, interconnects the lives of its archetypical characters—hedge fund managers and art world players in London; a photographer in Reykjavik; and a Filipina houseworker in Dubai—each of whom is based on a real-life individual directly affected by the market collapse.

Short animation produced in a 3D animation course using the MAYA software.

Fanfare examines links between national identity, celebration, and state power by working with images of ceremonies and sites filmed by Jacques Madvo in the 1970s. Madvo’s films document a moment when traditional military celebrations began to appear against the backdrop of modernizing Canadian cities. The incongruity between modern cityscapes and military marches reveals the coexistence of two vastly different expressions of statecraft. The residue of this unresolved juxtaposition continues to this day, and is taken up in new footage which builds upon the themes identified in Madvo’s images.

Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots reworks Jacques Madvo’s Countries & People: Venezuela to explore labour and migration. Taking the final words of the film’s voice-over as a starting point, Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots pairs Madvo’s film footage with a text-based conversation with young Venezuelan literature scholar and language teacher Angel Said Dominguez Pinto. Dominguez Pinto relocated to Panama in 2014 to make a living teaching English, Spanish and German in Panama City after Venezuela’s economic collapse. Over e-mail, we co-authored a conversational text, exploring migration, labour, exile, and hemispheric relationships.

In 1973, the Shah of Iran commissioned the construction of a paper factory in the lush northern province of Gilan. The arrival of heavy industry in a predominately agricultural region brought with it a series of interventions into this landscape, including the construction of modernist apartment blocks and purpose-built villas to house foreign engineers from Canada and the United States and their families. Their stay, however, came to a sudden halt in 1979 with the Iranian revolution forcing them to flee the site overnight. Chooka unfolds around the site of this factory, returning to the location 40 years after it mysteriously appeared in Jacques Madvo’s 1978 footage. Treating his archival material as a guide, the film moves through a landscape altered by industry, technology and revolution, bringing silent images from the past forward to a location caught within a perpetually uncertain present.

Jacques Madvo’s street photography of Paris in 1961 is a launching point for a reflection on water forms and their distortion of optics.

“Let’s think of nature as a big room. Nature is a room you know you’ll have to leave some day, most likely not by choice”. Heather Phillipson’s hallucinatory video put the goat in the goat boat explores endless declinations of nature—natural, naturing, finding a better nature, the nature construction, nature on loan, nature’s lack of nudity...—while revealing humanity’s ambiguous relationship to it.

Initially commissioned to accompany a Danish production of Alban Berg’s LULU, Lewis Klahr’s cut-out animation refigures the opera's themes in a torrent of images. With an ever-inventive approach to color and symbol, Klahr distills the title character's moral predicament, along with a great many of German Expressionism’s characteristic motifs, in the span of a pop song.

A short film made with unused footage from The Red Light Bandit and Carnaval na Lama.

Crashing waves, the cry of a gull, silence.

A Tibetan Lama. His disciple. The disciple's wife, young boy and terrier. An old tugboat crossing the Mississippi River. A man in his seventh month of solitude. His hermitage built by his own hands. The man's bloodhound; his cat. Clouds crossing the Continental Divide. A mountain stream. A girl. The sun.