In an increasingly digital era, it's easy to lose sight of film's long history as a deeply material art form. Film is projected light, the chemistry of emulsions and developers, silver nitrate colloids and dichromate bleach, the mechanics of film reels in motion. The filmed image is a true imprint of reality, a kind of ghost with an expressive power held by few media. Once it was considered a machine for generating emotion, nowadays it helps us to understand how the brain processes visual information. This issue pays homage to the medium of film itself, not only its origins and classical techniques for fixing images of the world, but to present developments, changing technologies, and future applications. As one of our youngest art forms, it remains be one our most dynamic: this multifaceted portrait of film up to 2019 is a but a snapshot of a system ever in transition.
Against all odds, Sophia Baker just scored her dream interview at the world-famous Semaphore Animation Studios -- who'd have thought a fan edit of one of their hit films could land her a shot at a job? But when she meets arch, mysterious executive Anne Palladon, she soon learns all is not as she exp
Delicate threads of energy spiral and transform into mysterious microscopic cells of golden dust: these are the luminous particles of the alchemist's dream. Prima Materia is inspired by the haunting wonderment of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. It is an homage to the first, tentative photographic record
Seeing his faithful friend quietly losing the battle against the disease, Jean- Pierre doesn't let things go. Knowing that his friend is a true believer of the Catholic religion, he decides to invent an appearance of the Virgin Mary.
A group of young women in rural India are being trained to make videos. When they turn their cameras on their everyday lives, we get an unprecedented view of life as it is lived today in many Indian villages. But this is also an uplifting film which tells the extraordinary story of how these women a
Lunar Almanac initiates a journey through magnetic spheres with its staccato layering of single-frame, long exposures of a multiplied moon. Shot in 16mm Ektachrome and hand processed, the film's artisanal touches are imbued with nocturnal mystery.
The second in a series of "quilt films" that pay homage to the work of pioneering female artists, "Athyrium filix-femina" reimagines Anna Atkins' founding work in photography as a moving image. In 1843, Anna Atkins published the first book of photography, "Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imp
Framelines is a scratch film for the 21stcentury made by laser etching abstract patterns on the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm colour film. The result of the laser burning layers of emulsion produces a pixelated language of colours and textures only possible through this process. The st
Filmed through a microscope, this piece superimposes footage from Anna May Wong's performance in the silent film "Piccadilly" (1929) unto a magnified strand of my hair. The film sampled is a scene from "Piccadilly" (1929). Anna May Wong plays a dishwasher in the London theater. The theater director,
Chronogram is a photomontage that explores stillness, motion, and memory. Using a 35mm still camera, multiple exposures were composed and edited in-camera, creating frameless sequences of images printed on 35mm filmstrips. When projected, these images become a non-linear, non-synchronized collage. T
Sample of semantic decoding from fMRI brain activity elicited by natural movies. The open access paper is: Huth, A.G., Lee, T., Nishimoto, S., Bilenko, N.Y., Vu, A.T., & Gallant, J.L. (2016). Decoding the semantic content of natural movies from human brain activity. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
Here are the playful recordings of a naturalist - the observations of a difficult object. As the study accelerates and numerous cinematographic strategies are employed, the information gathered becomes noise; all these measurements become scribbles.
The Manufactured Science series explores the boundary between realistic and imaginative portrayals of science in film. While many films hinge on science for their success, they often stretch the possibilities far beyond reality. And yet the imaginative nature of science in the movies can often serve
This filmic essay focuses on a former movie studio of which no trace is left. On the site where the studio was built, in Saint-Maurice, on the outskirts of Paris, we now find a modern residence, Le Panoramis, built in the 1970s. The images and sounds of films shot at the studio resurface, while two
Hypnotising slideshow of weathered images presents itself as a relic of an imposing event. A village's inhabitants flee into the darkness of a cave to refresh themselves with projected images. Ultimately, they will pay a high price for their wonderment.
Painted 16mm film undergoes a monstrous transformation becoming neither analog nor digital. A film about uncanny valleys and the space between.
Primate Cinema: Apes as Family is a drama made expressly for chimpanzees – and the chimps' reaction to its screening at the Edinburgh Zoo. Chimpanzees watch television as a form of enrichment in captivity. But no filmmaker had made a film for a specifically ape audience. Commissioned by Arts C
IN, OVER AND OUT is a film experiment in the tradition of structural cinema. It is made up of a limited number of carefully planned motifs, each of them shot simultaneously with twelve cameras from different technical periods. An homage to the Lumière Brothers' WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY, th
The Decelerator Helmet offers the user a perception of the world in slow motion. It is a experimental approach for thinking about our increasingly fast moving, globalized society.
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
The debate over the future of the world's film archives in an era where analog celluloid movie strips are quickly disappearing.
Ralo Mayer´s film deals with the oikos – with the house that is wanted, and therefore home, and haunted, and therefore not a home. In the absence of a foundational nature and in the presence of various post-human bodies – both more insistent than existent in their traces and remain
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
A documentary about the Irish scientist Charlotte Keppel who in the 1930s invented a machine that could see into the past.
AgX is an art-science project about material memory and forgetting; it features time-lapse photography of photographic negatives being chemically destroyed.
The left clip is a segment of a Hollywood movie trailer that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this segment from brain activity measured using fMRI. The procedure is as follows: [1] Record brain activity while the subject watches several hours of movi
The internet in Cuba is very slow. Movies, television, and information are exchanged through a black market system of media distribution via external hard drives known as "el paquete semanal. Shot over the course of a day in the town of San Antonio de los Baños, the film combines narrative, d
The early avant-garde filmmakers believed that the cinema had the function of a machine, made to generate pure feelings. The main part of this "machine" was the celluloid, which has disappeared along with the flickering ghosts inside of it.
"To be amazed is to interrogate". THE AMAZED SPECTATOR is a kine-investigation about spectatorship, a continuous conversation between different kinds of spectators: Which is more cinema? - Citizen Kane on a mobile phone or a football game projected in a cinema theatre? What is the Cinema of Uncertai
Some people say that analog film is a dying technology. A relic of Hollywood past that is all but relegated to museums, and aging archives, awaiting digitization. But Steve Cossman, founder and director of Mono No Aware, a non-profit cinema arts institute in Brooklyn, New York, believes that analog
Mill+ and the BFI have collaborated to create a thought-provoking new film, 'Film is Fragile', encouraging people to support and donate to the cause of preserving and restoring the national film collection which has been looked after by the BFI National Archive since 1933.
Among other things Anna Vasof´s working method was influenced by precinematic devices stemming from her fascination with the movement of photographic images. These only appear animated given our persistence of vision. Vasof cites the Zoetrope as an example of this phenomenon, a device that fil
In this animation film, Fabienne Audéoud has several characters talking about gender issues in relation to artificial intelligence. Starting from her own experience as a child and quoting historical scientific figures such as Turing, as well as cultural and film references, she asks questions
Filmed inside a series of empty museum galleries across Paris, Ali Cherri's Somniculus (the Latin word for "light sleep") articulates the tension between the lives of objects and the living world that surrounds them.
'Films to Break Projectors' glues, scrapes and splices 35mm, 16mm and 8mm film to create unprojectable celluloid collages. Reanimating the material reveals traces of ambiguous narratives that emerge from the complex loops.
A short film painted with Lara Salmon's and Mari Walker's blood.
A dreamy animated documentary about the dangers of early cinema. The atmosphere of old film theatres is recalled through a mixture of handmade techniques. In the back of the story moves Mr Sand, a mysterious character. Real or imagined.