The Journey Into Darkness Compilation:

The Adventure Parade - 16mm Black, White & Blue, Silent, 5 minutes- 2000

Listen to our Bullhorn recitation. Our procession imparts the darkest of reveries for you to recoil from or embrace as the origin of our entrapment. However, the sprightly buttress overshadowing this cinema submerges it further. As we see fit to excoriate our visage to you the audience, we reveal everything. We present to you an unveiling and beguiling presence.... Now that we have exposed our deepest innermost thoughts, what do you have to offer in recompense?

Orbit - 16mm, 9 minutes, hand-made soundtrack-2006

Candy apple light emissions create a series of photic stimulating events that tickle the retinas. Orbit takes one into the realm of the mistake…. a playful pulsation of mis-registered images made when a lab accidentally split the film from 16mm to regular 8. This format was then reconstituted on the optical printer making the colors and contrast further blow out into the atmosphere. Kodachrome color fields create tremulous vibrations whose flickerings hypnotize. The hand-made soundtrack is comprised of the flutterings of optical noise reverberating to the splices of the film, intermixed with extensions of the visual plane onto the soundtrack area. Crackle! Pop! We enter through the oval window, while the Gravitron spins eternally.

Out of the Ether- 16mm, 11 minutes, sound- 2003

“Brilliant found-footage film about extraterrestrial aliens, fear and microbes.” – International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Out of the Ether re-assembles disquieting images from decades-old hygiene and science films, merging them with the filmmaker’s own Bolex camerawork. It was re-photographed on the optical printer, toned and tinted to bring out pulsating hues of oozing greens and yellows.

Awake, But Dreaming- 16mm, 8 minutes, sound-2000

"To proceed from the Dream Outward...." (Carl Jung)

This completely hand processed 16mm film was shot in the Hirschgang Oberer, an extended arched hallway at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, where I was in residence intermittently from 1998-2001. Awake, but Dreaming recreates a sense of an endless cyclical dreamscape that is conjured up from the deep recesses of the imagination. The images are coupled with a mysterious soundtrack producing uncanny associations: the flapping of wings, shrill cries of birds, a revolver fired off following unseen footsteps. A disembodied hovering presence evokes a menace that is intimated through the sonorous resonance, but never manifests itself. The dreamer never reaches the apex of consciousness, only lingers repeatedly in the periphery of alchemically enhanced light and shadow.

Conquered - 16mm, B&W & Color, 15 minutes, sound, 2000

Collaged entirely at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, this film comes from the depths of a submerged self. Elements include found material from a German industrial film about a youth prison, a British mountaineering documentary, and my own footage. The mountain film The Epic of Everest condenses an attempt to reach the ultimate summit by George Mallory and Sandy Irvine in 1924. 53 years later, Mallory's body was discovered below the North face. Killed after a fall, his innards were subsequently eaten out by Goraks. I used this Everest imagery to portray a frozen, catatonic state analogous to the darkness and the snow-covered quietude of the Schloss Solitude. Cracking the emulsion yielded a fragile, encumbered palatte- a veritable testament to the forces of organic catalysts in motion.

Running Time: 53 minutes