End Reel (excerpt) from julie murray on Vimeo.
Excerpt of a 7 minute digital work: the last reel of the 35mm Hong Kong action film, The Green Hornet, examined over a light-box on an editing bench with hand-crank rewinds and recorded with a lo-res pocket camera. Sounds moves between sync (creaky rewinds + scraping reels) and added recordings.
An artwork made from the convolved aberrations of two image-making technologies; film and video, that combine here to produce a mostly abstract image from what started as a firmly grounded story (narrative film). The decay on the film’s surface, the blur of its movement on the bench, arbitrary stop and starts revealing freeze-frame images, make unpredictable associations, the pulsing of the pocket camera’s AWB (automatic white-balance – can’t seem to make up it’s mind) and the native 60Hz pulsing pattern between the video frame rate and the light-box’s florescent bulb too…..forensic textures of process, like human imprints in sand.
Above: Astronomer’s Dream; Director’s Cut.
This is the first cut of early material shot for the “Astronomer” interlude in Braden King’s feature, HERE. An edited version of the above occurs after Will’s monologue to Gadarine in Meghri.
It is both expansive and pointed and intentionally loose – allowing its own edit and the rhythm of the speaking voice to be percussive point/counterpoint to the abstracted imagery which combines infinite views of the night sky with microscopic views of natural structures such as insects and leaves. These views are double-exposed on a single strand of film producing uncertain results in the process. This edit – presented here in silent original form was submitted to the director and was further edited for the final release. It was also reformatted to 16:9 aspect ratio with cropping ocuring top and bottom of the image.
About the feature: HERE by director Braden King
“Summary / Logline Measurement and orientation break down in a dramatic, landscape-obsessed road movie that chronicles a brief but intense romantic relationship between an American satellite-mapping engineer and an expatriate Armenian photographer who impulsively decide to travel together into uncharted territory – both literally and metaphorically
HERE contains a series of brief interludes: fictional tales of mythical explorers who map the land in fantastic ways. One imagines the land to be a vast sea and designs ships that might sail upon it. Another devises a navigational method using the clouds instead of the stars. A third creates maps that are actual-size. And so on.
These interludes are the story’s dreams.
They have been illustrated in collaboration with a number of avant-garde filmmakers – explorers themselves – who were sent to a series of extraordinary landscapes around the world to “map” them, using their own idiosyncratic methods. HERE’s explorers included Paul Clipson, Barbara Meter, Julie Murray, Ben Rivers, Daichi Saito, and Gariné Torossian. The Storyteller’s voice belongs to Peter Coyote. Bill Morrison, Naomi Uman, Guy Sherman and Peter Mettler also collaborated at various points along the way and on other platforms of the project, beyond the feature film..”
OTHERREHTO (2001) DV, sound, 3 mins
DISTANCE 16mm, sound, 12 mins, 2010
DISTANCE, the film, shows time spent at two shores, one thinly populated, the other a wasteland, joined by the interluency of various paths taken, each bit real enough, though exact measures being obscurely indicated. Notions of home and its ache are, to borrow a phrase, “not capable of being told unless by far-off hints and adumbrations”
Read Paul Breschuk’s review in his article on Media City FIlm Festival 2010 in Senses of Cinema # 56
ELEMENTs 16mm sound 7.5 mins 2008
A few incidental moving figures related to one another by the rhythm of the snowy fog-bound woods, the movement of the moon and the hesitancy of the clouds.
Or,
When the trees were enchanted,
In the expectation of not being trees,
The trees uttered their voices
From strings of harmony,
The disputes ceased.
Let us cut short heavy days,
A female restrained the din.
She came forth altogether lovely.
The head of the line, the head was a female.
-excerpt: “Cad Goddeu” (The Battle of the Trees) from the 6th-Century Welsh Book of Taliesin.
Rental: Canyon Cinema, USA. Lightcone, Paris
