Our last issue of the year is an analogic trip down memory lane. In the book with the same title, the author Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa examines twentieth-century behaviorist films that captured animal experiments, revealing the central role of cinema in generating psycho-social definitions of species, race, identity, and culture that continue to shape our contemporary political and scientific discourses.
Our focus here is on the very nature of the specimen. It instantly becomes a contradiction when it is imprinted on celluloid: living, non-living, preserved, damaged, natural, artificial - all at once. A specimen encompasses the animal, plant or organic fragment that collectively serve as evidence for an existing, forgotten or future species or ecosystem. A specimen is often a (proto)type for scientific study or display.
Welcome to our Cabinet of Curiosities : our collection of beautiful film-sensitive by-products that have evolved since the first light exposure. The frames feels like a genetic code that have mutated into new forms and shapes. Traces of animal life, landscapes that appear frozen in time, subliminal images with signs of wear and tear, all existing on the black and white or color-sensitive film stocks. They're calling on digital age for protection and have landed in the Science New Wave.
Are the individual pieces found footage or archive? Is the ensemble seemingly curated or perhaps a jumble that provides us new meanings and viewing experiences?
Curated by Alexis Gambis
Building walls along lines on the map is the perfect way to do politics by managing fears. That is why the fairy tale about the Great Defensive Wall On The Border is still told and still eagerly listened to. This film is an expression of anxiety about living in a restricted space. High walls with mu
In Island Flyer: A Postcard from the Isle of Wight , the filmmaker takes us on a journey to an island in the English Channel in pursuit of summertimes gone by.
The Lovers is the second part of a small trilogy, dealing with the extinction of memories. In the first part, The Bathers , the two protagonists were subject to the chemical decomposition of the film material. The Lovers , on the other hand, transforms an old Super8 porn film into both a tragic love
Digital projection takes over the movie screens world wide. As celluloid slowly disappears from her workplace, the director, a movie projectionist herself embarks on an investigation into what makes the material special. Digital projection is taking over the movie screens world wide. As the material
Italian director Riccardo Palladino 's first feature-length film, The Mount of Ants , world premiered as part of the Filmmakers of the Present competition at the 70 th Locarno Festival. Despite the title of the film perhaps leading you to think of a nature documentary investigating the micro-reality
Time-lapses of cacti and succulent over the course of a year. Environmental data drives the tone and filtration of the sounds while the rising and setting of the sun illuminates the growth of plants moving in and out phase with one another.
Billionaires Gnaw Their Tongues From The Pain aka Lost Leaders #22 (2021) is another handmade short created in collaboration with sound artist Jackie Gallant, drummer for Montreal band Lesbians on Ecstasy. Billionaires... combines 16mm and 35mm 'found' footage, hand-woven elements, bits and pieces f
Among the arguments made in favor of cinema as a source of scientific knowledge, the most obvious one right from the start was that film not only records movement, but in many cases makes it perceptible in the first place. Magnification reveals cellular processes; time-lapse and slow-motion effects
A hypnotic parable about coming of age in a shifty world of slipping terms, "found" in the optically mesmerized fragments of a home market movie about a chimpanzee`s high adventures at Coney Island. A new story is rendered from the filmic vocabulary of the lighthearted original by moving in on backg
I'm on the island, thinking of you, trying to find something familiar that will make you feel less far away. For centuries, a surveying method using triangulation has been used to find the location of a point too far away to measure. By determining the relative angles between near points of a triang
In bed, looking up at a cracked ceiling. Voices are heard. A few shadowy figures gather, but the wind in the trees outside the window is distracting. This may be the last chance to take a look around. An elegy to textures, memories, details and organic matter from the point of view of a soul on its
The materiality of reversal-film material is being portrayed. This analogue technology, with its exposed chemical skeleton is clashing in an anachronistic filmic gag with contemporary digital animation. Colour is presented not as a natural, but a highly constructed medium in the expierence of film.
Imagining possibilities of disembodied being — a cow becomes meat becomes man becomes angel — while a surveillance balloon hovers overhead.
If his father had lived beyond the age of seventy-four, the following may have been the cinematic response to the city wherein 1944, he last saw his family. Filmed in the mid-1980s, Lodz, Poland. Constructed in 2012, Florence, Massachusetts.
A color explosion sparkles, bubbles and fractures in this hand-crafted 16mm film. Reeves utilized an array of mediums and direct-on-film techniques to create this boisterous, psychedelic morsel of cinema as material. Reeves' soundtrack mixes samples from rusty, dusty old machines, records and electr
Created alone in the desert, imaginary structures are built and destroyed through seeking out the edges of an unknown landscape. We keep finding ourselves at the center of something. Shot on a LomoKino, 35mm to digital
P L U M E responds to a 2019 State of Canada's Birds Report issued by Environment and Climate Change Canada alerting that the diversity and abundance of Canada's birds are in sharp decline. Thinking about this report and the effects of climate change and our interconnectedness with the natural world
Sasha Pirker´s conceptual experiment Closed Circuit, 2013 is a meeting of two analog formats – Polaroid and 16mm film – as well as of the predetermined units of time and the aesthetic aspects inherent in each material. In this work, the development time of Polaroid images correlate
A film about time, memory, fear, and the challenges of holding onto joy.
The debate over the future of the world's film archives in an era where analog celluloid movie strips are quickly disappearing.
…..the moment the shadow swells is the moment the image is realized…. "....as the visitation began to manifest itself visibly in the room, at first only as a quavering illumination, like that from a guttering candle, and then as the shape of a woman. She shimmered, and her light shook.
A moving discovery is made while walking through the streets of Paris. Part documentary, part loaned archive, but completely a declaration of love.
Medial triptych through time as stunning journey of discovery: a photographic landscape scenario starts to become animated to the rhythm of crickets´ chirping; hops back and forth and over the course of the work runs through mutations that originate, on the one hand, in the filmic medium, and
Inspired by Karel Doing's phytographies I foraged plants, placed them on a 16mm black and white filmstrip, and exposed them to sunlight. The cameraless film Plant Lights, composed in a little village in Lower Austria, Friedenstein, in August 2022, is an attempt to develop a photochemical practice th
The Lilac Game is a celebration of springtime and a game that audiences can play. Volume I of Films for a Future, a series of handmade and hand processed 16mm nature films, intended for future viewers living in a time when the natural world no longer exist as it does today.
In an Indian village, about 200 km from Calcutta, various inhabitants are working diligently to produce by hand colourful and inventive toys: rattles, flutes and merry-go-rounds. Hundreds are made everyday, and the primary material used is old 35mm film reels full of Bollywood titles. The almost mon
"Humans become through a saturated, situated engagement of thinking and feeling with things and form-generating materials" - Lambros Malafouris
The Philosophy of Horror – A Symphony of Film Theory is a seven-part abstract abstract adaptation of Noël Carroll's influential film theoretical book of the same title (published in 1990), which is a close examination of the horror genre.
Exploring the tactility of nature and a filmmaker's desire to capture the essence of the forest floor onto film. A bizarre animation that places the viewer in front of a TV set one Saturday morning some time in the early 1970's. New memories are recorded as a super 8 camera and a roll of Kodachrome
Spectacle of change Gradual deterioration Annihilation of beings and things Attempt to escape it
Three continuous zooms towards a landscape are deconstructed into a discontinuous appearance of single frames. The panoramic view is obstructed, the organic movement of the hand dissolved into structural variation of the basic units of film. Indexical content is inevitably present on the physical fi
The voices of five women gradually fill the sound space of the film, weaving a pattern: a tarot card reader; a woman surviving one of the most horrific cases of sexual violence and homicide in Italy in the 1970s; a woman accused of the homicide of four people; a woman who's obsessed with the idea of
In order to think and study about happiness, I chose to make my film by going through and re-elaborating the "home movies" of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, dated between 1938 and 1944, images of a private life, far from the clamor of the war and rich in moments of family joy, those that the "intimate
Drawn from Super 8 films in the artists' personal archives as well as found amateur 8mm footage, Events in the Tunnel presents an absurdist abbreviated retelling of Canada's colonial history as defined by that great colonial trope, the cross-country train trip. In the transitional void of a train tu
Super 8mm and 16mm footage and expired cartridges found and shot in Quebec reflect on words written in Beirut to create a melancholic postcard between both worlds.
Guillen's poetry combined with 8mm landscapes and interviews with Cubans in and around Havana brings to the forefront the chilling realities and the absurd to fashion a zoo of natural and humanmade wonders alongside a wealth of social and political issues.