After receiving a VHS tape claiming she's a disciple of an alien species known as the "True Mothers," Amy joins a local UFO cult, donning the name Celisse and befriending a number of other members while under the watch of the cult's peculiar founder, Ascensia.
This live, vintage magic lantern performance tells the colourful story of a reluctant outlaw, a scavenger, a visionary. It is a science-fiction fable for the Anthropocene told with the delicate light of the magic lantern. It is a work of pre-cinematic moving images, with slides that are handmade...
"Sandy Ding's WATER SPELL is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure... and back. For me, this film is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This is not an easy film, but it is a powerful...
The film takes its title from chapter three of Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking-Glass. This play of observation makes use of magnifying glasses, used by both entomologists and filmmakers alike. The magnifying glasses can be seen as a visual metaphor for the cinematic process. Yet the insects of...
A metaphorical exploration of Tenniel’s illustrated edition of Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Through careful illumination, the book’s illustrations retreat into the fibre of the page, and a fleeting light dissolves into the chemistry of the film’s emulsion, revealing and yet...
A dirge, a dance. A portrait of stillness and silence disturbed by the urgency of sadness. The film is composed of paintings from the Northern Renaissance, collaged and combined with hand-painted, hand-processed and optically manipulated images of seashells, hands and dolls. The Ave Maria is sung...
Concerning Flight: Five Illuminations In Miniature
02004HD
A kinematographic film comprised of five brief fictions in which the mystery of insect flight is explored. Interpretations of a mythological and fantastical nature are illuminated in motion and time. Includes: Thin Breath-quivering, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Departure from the Garden,...
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...
Three Miniature, Illuminated, Heliographic studies of plants, observed and imagined. Fragile leaves and very fine threads of fungus string together in Charlotte Pryce’s three plant studies. Plants and images of the plants, and their envisioned environments, are intertwined. The title is taken...
Pwdre ser is the Welsh name for the mythical substance star jelly that has been observed since the 1400s. 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,...
An intoxicating flower; a metaphorical insect; a longing reach across the centuries. The Parable of the Tulip Painter and the Fly is a philosophical search drenched in luminous colours and sparkling light. The film was shot on colour reversal, entirely hand-processed and re-printed on the optical...
and so it came about (A Tale of Consequential Dormancy)
02023HD
A mythological tale, retold and recast, unfurls on the periphery of a common. The entangled intrigues of the seen and the unseen conspire to disclose an underland at once enticing and threatening. But what are the consequences of such trespassing between worlds? The title of this allegorical story...
Charlotte Pryce's innocent observations of striders dancing on the water's surface in "Of This Beguiling Membrane" conceal darker glimpses of what lurks beneath. Inspired by Scottish folklorist Robert Kirk's "The Secret Commonwealth" (1671), Pryce arranges a meeting with the mysterious spirits...
The film takes the form of an ecorchee: an anatomical drawing in which the outer layer of skin is pulled back to reveal an embryo. Images flicker and pages are turned creating an unfolding of layers in time. The film is entirely hand processed.
"As a filmmaker, I spend many hours examining the world through a lens. When asked to reflect on the collections at the Huntington, I was instantly drawn to the 1665 edition of Micrographia, a seminal work of observations made with the aid of a microscope by the great natural philosopher Robert...
A live performance with vintage magic lanterns and handmade lantern slides tells the tale of famed naturalist Hudson's spellbinding recollection of birds seen as a child from the pampas of his native Argentina. But the magic lantern also brings out other, hidden layers, including an encounter with...
