A follow-up to the SILENT LIGHTS screening from 2016, this program features a new selection of films projected silent for the first time, presenting an unusual opportunity to experience these works in a different light.San Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance. His work has screened around the world in festivals and at sound & film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival and the Cinémathèque Française. http://www.
Film program (all screened on original Super 8mm reversal or 16mm film prints.):
COMPOUND EYES (2011) Super 8mm, color/B&W, 7 minutes
A series of short film studies, commissioned by the San Francisco Exploratorium, studying aspects of insect , animal life, viewed within a succession of environments in unexpected ways. Filmed in the Golden Gate Park Botanical Gardens, Academy of Arts & Sciences and San Francisco.
ECHO PARK (2007) Super 8mm, 7 min., color/B&W
Automatic-writing on film, using double exposures, macro imagery, dissolves, and in-camera editing to create a dream collage of Los Angeles, from the perspective of a plane and an arachnid dancing between water and sun.
SUN PLACE (2007) Super 8mm, color, 7 minutes
Propulsive in-camera editing sends this nature collage deep into the embraces of dandelions.
CHORUS 16mm (*shot on Super 8mm), color, 7 minutes
Three cities by night become one in this nocturnal journey through images and sounds in which space, color and light pass through the eye of the camera to create thoughts visualized before their conception. Filmed in San Francisco, New York and Rotterdam.
CARIDEA AND ICHTYHES (2011) Super 8mm, color/B&W, 6 min. Water, fish and crustaceans overlay a city at night.
OTHER STATES (2013) Super 8mm, color, 6 minutes
An attempt through improvised in-camera multiple exposure, to capture a heightened, altered state, whether it be anxiety attack, hallucination or vision of madness. Shot in New York and San Francisco.
LOVE AFTER LOVE (2014) 16mm, color/B&W, 7.5 minutes
An impressionistic zoom-collage of a woman’s walk along the Thames at dusk.
LIQUID CASKET / WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS (2014) 16mm, color/B&W, 9.5 minutes
A restless, traveling consciousness flies across lands vast and small, taking note of possible futures that hint at humankind’s folly of expansion and alienation. Filmed in London, Leeds, Glasgow and Scotland
TRAJECTIONS (2014) 16mm, color, 13.5 minutes
Tracking shots of streets, alleys, walls, fences, and city landscapes are superimposed on top of each other moving in opposite directions- a moving collage of spaces passing themselves by.
OVER WATER (2006) Super 8mm, 6 min., color
The light and water of wintertime, viewed at 35,000 feet, over the U.S., somewhere between the East and West coasts.
FEELER (2016) 16mm, color,/B&W, 7 minutes
An imagining of dreams within dreams, conceived within an evolving series of environments, exploring the world: seeing, hearing and experiencing light, space, movement and sound in emotional juxtapositions, felt first, with an impact of presence, of gesture, of echo and explosion. Being experiential, multi-layered, fragmenting and fusing together, a place where there’s no screen, no theatre, no darkness, only moments. Filmed in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Brisbane, Krakow, Sidney, Napa, Oakland and San Francisco.
Total Running Time: 83 minutes
Program screened by the filmmaker.
