Commissioned for the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) exhibition The Future & Other Fictions, this essayistic collage work explores the cinematic world of cyberpunk, from sprawling dystopian megacities to the digital playground of cyberspace.
A fictionalized biography on John Dall who was in two great movies - Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950).
"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." Daedalus weaves a tale of ambition and caution through an ancient myth, set in a nation below sea level. Shot in just seven consecutive days during the summer of 2023, it concludes the first volume of Bliss, a playlist of sounds and shapes. As the master craftsman gifts his son wings and wisdom, the film delves into the perilous dance between striving for greatness and the suffocating pull of stagnancy. This chaotic exploration bridges the warnings and epiphanic thoughts of 20th-century thinkers with the responses of today's dreamers.
Wild Flowers Plants of Palestine follows journeys of observational tours solicited by the Palestinian Museum and conducted by two professors from Birzeit University to collect photos of and information on the Palestinian Flora. The title is adapted from a collection of 123 images (circa 1900 to 1920) of wild flowers in Palestine found in the Matson Collection in the Library of Congress. Despite the tendency to trace the wild plants, the text in general aims at questioning the territorial extension of what is meant by the term “Palestinian”, while standing on insignificant topographical features of the (postcolonial) landscape in West Bank. Furthermore, it addresses photography as a practice and a tool of distributing and restricting information at once.
This visual essay sets clips from Robert Bresson's "A Man Escaped" to a reading of "Functions of Film Sound," a chapter from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's book "Film Art." The chapter analyzes the sound design of Bresson's masterpiece as a means of discussing the use of sound in film.
Enclosed by a civilised landscape, society reduces the problem of human survival to a minimum. The sidewalk, the fence, the clearing, demarcate a treaty between man and nature whereby neither one of us shall pass these thresholds lest we become subject to the law of the other.
The Present Situation is a half narrative, half video-essay film about a small group of “extremely online” budding revolutionaries who kidnap a hedge-fund manager. Peppered throughout the narrative is a spectacle of video clips from a wide variety of sources (PBS documentaries, YouTube explainer videos, TikToks, old and current News Magazine programs, etc.)
Near Munich, in Bavaria, Germany, is the Schleißheim Palace, where French filmmaker Alain Resnais shot his film Last Year at Marienbad in 1960. Nearby is the Dachau concentration camp, where thousands of people were killed between 1933 and 1945. An essay about the present and the past, beauty and horror, life and death.
An experimental video essay which uses circles and waves to explore neurodivergent experience.
Letter to My Tribe started with a question: Why don’t more Jews and Israelis speak out about Palestine? Over many years my mother, who represents a more messianic perspective, and I have had numerous arguments, some recorded, some not. These form the backbone of this video essay in which Israelis and Jews, journalists, activists and a rabbi are interviewed, and in which documentation of actions on the ground, in the West Bank, are woven with more personal family histories and journeys to Iraq and to Poland.
A visual essay about Benjamin Christensen's 1922 "Häxan," released as part of the Radiance Films limited edition Blu-ray on 11/11/2024.
A desktop documentary that focuses on the Golden Record that NASA sent into space in the late 1970s. The piece reflects on issues such as the power of scientific discourse to produce revisions of the world, the evolution of the concept of the archive and the resignification of borders in the rhetoric of space colonialism.
Joan Crawford's close-up in Humoresque. Michelangelo's David and Boticelli's "Birth of Venus". Stendhal was overwhelmed by the cultural overstimulation in Florence, which Graziella Magherini described scientifically in 1979 as Stendhal syndrome. Mark Rappaport describes his fascination for the Austrian actor Turhan Bey, who made a career in exotic roles in Hollywood in the 1940s. A very personal essay about the effect of close-ups, the canvas idols of the dream factory and the role of their admirers and fans.
Swimming, Dancing examines audiovisual representations of the Yangtze (1934–present), from silent film to video art to the contemporary vlog. Inspired by the city symphonies of the 1920s, Swimming, Dancing pieces together a “river symphony”, evoking the images, sounds and contradictions that make up the river’s turbulent history.
Divided into 26 parts, an attempt to remake James Benning's film, YouTube (2011) with similar internet footage after 13 years.
A fictional biography of Hollywood actors Martin Kosleck and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, both of whom fled Hitler-era Germany to live a long-lasting relationship.
YouTuber Jeffiot goes digging for the origins of skull trumpet / doot doot / mr skeltal, and ends up taking a trip to the early web heyday of animated gif art, and ruminating on creativity and legacy.
