23rd Psalm Branch

Film ist. 1-6 is an avant-garde collage from Gustav Deutsch, using found footage from various scientific films to explore the properties, impact and nature of film.

1-channel film installation (21‘20‘‘). 2.00:1 aspherical widescreen, stereophonic sound. A wife waits for her dead husband. An adaption of three japanese poems in three different translations. An examination of waiting and the slowness of time. An exercise in slow cinema.

Impressions of New York City. Experimental short.

A gang of outlaw bikers pull a home invasion on a disgraced Anthropologist hiding a secret locked in his cabin basement.

Hymn to nature, song to the cosmos, Mâyâ builds a world where the camera generates a new type of representation in which the depth of field is reduced to the essential. Everything happens, in a way, on the same surface.

Optical sound film by Guy Sherwin

One of my first 16mm films, made without a camera as an experiment in how to visualize rhythm. It equates four simple shapes with four simple sounds, made by punching shapes into black film and scratching into the film's optical sound track. The film uses a bar structure similar to a music score. Each bar lasts one second (24 frames of film) and is divided into 2, 3, 4 or 6 aural and visual beats per second (bps). These are used in alternating patterns such as: 2/3, 3/4, 3/4/6, 2/3/6 In each section of the film an arbitrary relationship is established between image, sound and beats per second, for example: circle = 12 scratches per frame (high pitch sound) at 6 bps rhombus = 6 scratches per frame (mid pitch sound) at 4 bps triangle = 3 scratches per frame (low pitch sound) at 3 bps rectangle = 1 scratch per frame (percussive sound) at 6 bps A print of the film was hand-painted in 2006 G.S.

A film made without a camera: A newspaper glued onto clear film is projected as audio-visual typography. "For NEWSPRINT I glued a newspaper onto clear 16mm film then punched out the sprocket holes to enable the film to run through the projector. Using a strong light I printed ‘newspaper-film’ to copy it onto another strip of film. This shows up the letters and words clearly, which can also be heard as they pass over the sound-head in the projector. Newsprint #2 is a live projection event for two 16mm projectors and two loudspeakers [...] Two identical prints are shown superimposed onto the same screen." -GS.

Railway tracks seen from a speeding train are converted into optical sounds.

One of a series of films that uses soundtracks generated directly from their own imagery. I shot the images of a staircase specifically for the range of sounds they would produce. I used a fixed lens to film from a fixed position at the bottom of the stairs. Tilting the camera up increases the number of steps that are included in the frame. The more steps that are included the higher the pitch of sound. A simple procedure gave rise to a musical scale (in eleven steps which is based on the laws of visual perspective. A range of volume is introduced by varying the exposure. The darker the image the louder the sound (it can be the other way round, but Musical Stairs uses a soundtrack made from the negative of the image.) The fact that the staircase is neither a synthetic image, nor a particularly clean one (there happened to be leaves on the stairs when I shot the film) means that the sound is not pure, but dense with strange harmonics. – G.S.

"One of a series of films that investigates qualities of sound that can be generated directly from the image track. The images that you see are simultaneously scanned by the optical sound reader in the projector, which converts the into sound. This particular film makes use of the aural effect of visual perspective; the steeper the perspective on the railings, the closer the intervals of black and white, and the higher the frequency of sound. I also wanted to find out what freeze frames and visual strobe would 'sound' like. Visual strobe is created both in the camera (camera shutter v. railings) and in the printer (printer shutter v. slipping frames)." -G.S.

Optical sound by Guy Sherwin

Optical sound film by Guy Sherwin

Optical sound film by Guy Sherwin

Optical sound film by Guy Sherwin

Film by Guy Sherwin

A film made without a camera in which both image and sound are the result of the same chemical process. Raw film was spooled onto a spiral and partially submerged in developer, so that only half the film is developed, leaving the trace of a time spiral in the image and (optical) sound. The film can be projected in either direction. Outwards, from the centre of the spiral, we hear a decelerating sound like someone regaining their breath. G.S.

Optical sound film by Guy Sherwin

A love story recounted not by them, but by their belongings and surroundings.

A young man and his dog encounter a sinister force while on a walk through the woods.