SEATTLE, WA • NOVEMBER 8-10, 2018
Engauge Program #1
The Aura of Uncertainty – November 8 – 7pm
a sprocket – driven shorts program, showing works finished on 35mm and 16mm film
Welcome En Gauge
Devon Davonte
An 88 second two thousand frame 35mm incantation summoning all cinematic goddesses & cavemanic deities to prepare thy retinas – yea verrily thee very inner eyes: To Behold! Entirely handcrafted & no cameras were harmed in the making thereof.
2018 1:30 35mm | silent
Aura of Uncertainty
Ryan Marino
Ominous passages of time and light provide a fleeting glimpse into the unknown.
2016 6:09 16mm | color | sound
Theoria
Josh Weissbach
A Greek man, once a guide on the island of Delos, started discussing what the word theory meant. The ensuing conversation was the initial inspiration for this film, entitled theoria [theh-oh-ree-ah].
5:46 16mm | color | silent
I Am Learning to Abandon the World
I. Moon
This silent found-footage film cuts together eventless moments from a trove of vintage 16mm films discovered at a salvage house with new intertitles to create an elusive anti-narrative of absence, desire, self- loss, and hidden threats.
2016 10:00 16mm | color | sound
Contact
Rhys Morgan
Digital and physical worlds make contact with each other and with us via their contact with the film. Created “out of camera” using a variety of techniques: inkjet printing, DIY contact printing, photograms, scratching. Guy Sherwin’s Newsprint (1972) updated for 2017.
2017 2:50 16mm | b + w | sound
My Earth’s Eye
Paul Turano
A portrait of a pond near my childhood home, a personal inventory of a place where I explored nature and the nature of being on the earth and of the earth – this pond taught me how to look and listen. Shot with a mix of analog film mediums and devices, through scientific and poetic lenses.
2016 8:00 16mm | color | sound
Mujer
Sofia Canales
Three Latina women of different generations take pleasure in helping each other bathe, dress up, and cook a meal for themselves. “Mujer” flows like a dream, guided by the small mutual generosities of domestic life. It is less of an observational analysis and more of an up-close intimate experience.
2013 10:00 16mm | b+w | sound
Our Summer Made Her Light Escape
Sasha Waters-Freyer,
A wordless portrait of interiority, maternal ambivalence and the passage of time: the beauty and quotidian cruelties of nature right outside your door.
2012 4:30 16mm | color | sound
A wordless portrait of interiority, maternal ambivalence and the passage of time: the beauty and quotidian cruelties of nature right outside your door.
Minong, I Slept
Vera Brunner-Sung
On the remote wilderness island called Minong (Isle Royale), remains of human industry are absorbed into the forest and shoreline. An inquiry into the push and pull between people and nature, land and sea, intimacy and vastness.
2012 5:00 16mm | color | silent
A Study of Fly
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu
“A Study of Fly” is a reflection on the relationship between insect, human, environment and the universe. The fly in this film can be approached as a living being, a metaphor for human desire to reach beyond, and a state that demonstrates the capacity to move between the realms of life and death. Artifacts from hand-processing and color filters are emphases of our physical intervention, manipulation and violence against nature.
2018 12:45 16mm | color | sound
Framelines
Sabine Gruffat
Framelines is a scratch film for the 21st Century 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 strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms. The soundtrack filters and layers the noise made by the laser etched optical track. Working in the tradition of artists who have hacked or detoured technologies for creative purposes, Gruffat has discovered an entirely novel process for making moving images. The inventors of the laser cutter did not have filmmaking in mind as an application for their technology. In these waning days of analogue filmmaking, Gruffat’s film thus suggests an innovative approach to filmmaking and one possible future for materialist image-making in the digital era.
2017 10:14 35mm | color | sound
Program running time 75 minutes
Engauge Program #2
Films to break projectors – November 9 – 7pm
short films from the region, country and world. including Portugal, Lebanon and Australia.
Lost in a Forest (All Alone)
Nicole Baker
The perceptual slip when we find ourselves alone in the forest in the dark.
2015 1:34 color + sound
XCTRY
Bill Brown
Brown re-works 16mm footage that he shot years ago during a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Las Vegas.
2018 6min color + sound
Broken Tongue
Monica Saviron
“Broken Tongue” is an ode to the freedom of movement, association, and expression. It pays homage to the diaspora of the different waves of migration, and challenges the way we represent our narratives.
2013 3:00 color + b/w + sound
Film to Break Projectors
Tim Grabham
Films to Break Projectors’ glues, scrapes and splices 35mm, 16mm, standard and super 8 film to create defective and unprojectable celluloid collages, made from a combination of found and self shot footage. Hi-res scanning and digital stop motion reanimates the material and reveals its potential motion and colour music within, where traces of ambiguous narratives emerge from the complex loops.
2016 5:07 color + sound
Gitpu
Nicholas Kovats
“Gitpu” is Mi’kmaq for eagle. My cousin Lorne’s spiritual connection with nature did not prepare me for his passing. Super 8 film.
2018 5:55 color + sound
Bodyshutter
Sam P. Kessie
“bodyshutter” is a hybrid dance for screen piece that experiments with 16mm film and digital video editing techniques against a distorted soundtrack to explore a body in motion against the element of light as it transforms into a camera shutter.
2017 4:44 b/w + sound
Frack
Grayson Cooke
“Frack” is an art/science project that combines environmental critique with material enquiry. In this project, chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing are used to dissolve photographs of sedimentary rock.
2015 8:41 color + sound
Splintering
Luz Olivia
“Splintering” is an examination of the emotional isolation that occurs post sexual assault. By deconstructing traditional narrative on hand processed 16mm film, Splintering aims to form an alternative account of subversion & resistance.
2018 6:49 b/w + sound
Fire Escape on 34th Street
Aylon Ben-Ami
An arguably boring roll of black and white super 8 film shot entirely from a fire escape in new york city, is duplicated and multiplied to create a video tapestry of city life, highlighting the repetitive yet individual characteristics that compose our modern day metropolises.
2018 1:41 b/w + silent
On Familiar Waters
Rita Mahfouz
Originally extracted from film scenes revolving around a ship or the sea, the sentences—now an assembled voice-over— portray a city, drowned.
2018 7:44 color + sound
Spatial
Miles Sprietsma
The streets of Portland become a physical adventure through the collapse of cinematic time and space.
2015 4:35 b/w + color + sound
No Personal Checks
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
From a Super 8mm diary film that I shot decades ago and recently found in the basement. I re-photographed, sunbaked, re- edited, and otherwise distorted the film footage and added layers of audio.
2018 4:52 color + sound
Fifty Feet Near Wendover
Kate Lain
An interplay of landscape, concrete, and light, this sculptural homage to Nancy Holt was edited in camera on a single roll of super 8 film at Holt’s Sun Tunnels, a concrete, steel, and earth sculpture in the Great Basin Desert in the U.S.
2018 3:18 b/w + silent
Memory, Female Noun
Luisa Sequeira
“Memory, Female Noun” rescues my family’ s super 8 movies, with new Super 8 footage from a movie I was doing about Barbara Virginia, one of the pioneers of Portuguese cinema and one of the first women to be present in the 1st edition of Cannes Film Festival in 1946 with a feature film.
2016 7:24 b/w + color + sound
Pwdre Ser . the rot of stars
Charlotte Pryce
The film depicts an encounter with a mysterious, luminous, electrical substance. Inspired equally by medieval accounts of visionary experiences and by 19th century photography of the invisible, Pwdre Ser joins Kirlian photography with hand-processed images.
2018 6:44 color + sound
Engauge Program #3
“Astro Trilogy and other works”
An expanded cinema performance by Kerry Laitala
with live sound by Wobbly
Friday, November 9 at 9 pm Northwest Film Forum
film still from “Chromatic Wheels” Kerry Laitala (2016)
On Friday night, we’ll experience
a mind-boggling cinematic show from San-Francisco based filmmakers and performers Kerry Laitala and Wobbly.
Engauge Program #4
The Open Window – November 10 – 4pm
A collection of short films, many of which feature hand-coloring and -processing, scratching, eco-processing, found footage and/or other analog processes.
Film Loop 31: Shisendo
Michael Lyons
Photographed on 16mm film at Shisendo temple in northeast Kyoto and hand-developed using matcha (powdered green tea). The soundtrack is an excerpt from ‘Eunoia’ by Stefano de Ponti and Elia Moretti recorded in Torino, Italy.
2017 1:30 b/w (blue) + sound
Self-Portrait, Post-Partum
Louise Bourque
Auto Portrait/Self Portrait Post Partum explores the devastating ramifications of the breakup of a romantic relationship. A triptych made of self-portraits are intercut with short excerpts of altered footage from a B movie trailer and punctuated by quotes reflecting on romantic love, viscerally scratched into the filmstrip by the artist.
2017 13:00 b/w + sound
Nutrition Fugue
Peter Lichter
“Közért” (translation: “for the public”) was a government owned chain of stores in Hungary, during the communist era (1948-1989). The word Közért is still used in the Hungarian language. Our film was made from the 35 mm celluloid raw footage of its advertisement: the film strips were digged in the soil, rotten with food and cut up in pieces.
2018 4:00 color + sound
See Weeds
Dawn George
An examination of three weeds – coltsfoot, dandelion, and goldenrod and each weed’s direct effects on film stock via hand-processing with eco-processing techniques. T
2017 3:20 b/w + sound
Big Agnes Ascent
Kevin Obsatz
“Big Agnes Ascent” was made with a primitive, hand-cranking 16mm pinhole camera developed by Robert Schaller at the Handmade Film Institute in Colorado.
2012 3:35 color + sound
End of an Era
Parker Thiessen
An old media format accepts the inevitable.
2014 1:25 b/w + sound
Erased Etchings
Linda Fenstermaker
“Erased Etchings” documents a place of memory and the collisions between past and present. .
2017 8:45 color + sound
T is for Turnip
Kiera Faber
3,467 hand painted 16mm frames metaphorically explore three siblings’ collective childhood trauma. Repetitive and ritualistic acts provide structure amongst perceived uncertainty while compartmentalization offers a false sense of security and abets forgetting.
2015 2:42 color + sound
Cuentos Para Los Ninos #1
Michelle Trujillo
La Llorona transcends from the world of the living to that of infinite waters. Images were all created on 16mm film through alternative techniques.
2018 3:21 b/w + sound
Pulse
Matthew Pell
The rhythm of a city. The rhythm of life.
Pulse is a single-screen triptych Experimental Film that utilizes looped images and sounds to reflect upon the human condition within a cityscape.
2015 1:34 color + sound
The Four Five Bleed
Ingrid Stobbe
A celluloid reaction to e. e. Cumming’s “Buffalo Bill’s.” The film explores the unique relationship of Cumming’s word choice and syntax, and visual and sonic parallels within the visual medium of film.
2011 3:27 color + sound
Principle Meridian
Nathaniel Cummings-Lambert
Principle Meridian is an experimental 16mm short exploring the terrain of Harney and Lake county of Southeastern Oregon. These lands were the backdrop of the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in early 2016. Invisible divisions of State, Federal and Tribal lands are imagined in reconfigured collaged landscapes created by in-camera matting techniques with a 16mm Bolex.
2017 3:24 color + silent
The Headless Appearance
Bori Mate
The Headless Appearance is a hand painted film made from the negatives of old family photos. It is an abstract memento of the passing time.
2017 2:32 color + sound
SONÁMBULA
Dinorah de Jesus Rodriquez
Aimless wandering through a landscape of sleepwalking… Why do things keep happening to women?
2011 3:25 b/w + sound
Even in paradise it is not good to be alone
Lorenzo Gattona
In memory of Nonno Pierino
2017 8:06 color + sound
The Open Window
Lynne Siefert
Like restless, waiting missiles, pillars of industrial machinery send us to desolate lunar surfaces.
2017 7 min b/w + sound
Love Leaders
Matt Soar
Set to a hypnotic instrumental soundtrack, LOVE LEADERS offers a fascinating glimpse into the ephemeral, aesthetic wonders of the analog film medium’s rapidly receding technical history, from ‘China girls’ to countdowns.
2018 4:40 b/w + color + sound
Crackpot Crafters: “LocalLoops” Expanded Cinema Performance with Live Sound
Saturday, November 10 at 8 pm LoveCityLove
1406 East Pike Street
A Crackpot Crafters performance at The Evergreen State College (2016). Photo courtesy Rob Saecker
On Saturday night, we’ll interact with the Local-loops craziness from the Olympia-based
filmmaking collective Crackpot Crafters
About the Crackpot Crafters:
Emerging from the ground unpredictably like mushrooms from mycelium, LocaLoops is
an immersive manifestation of Crackpot Crafters direct animation gang, a weird, wonderful subversive, DIY, technologically dumpster-diving genre of cavemanic filmmaking presented via multiple projectors, screens adapted from many materials and live sound accompaniment. Join us for this eye-popping event.
