Julie Murray

"It shows my interest in materials, medium, and apparatus of cinema. The sound will be produced from the visual on the optical soundtrack – for some parts, I used a 35mm still camera to expose the soundtrack area, and I scratched off the film emulsion directly for other parts. This is my senior thesis project at Binghamton University, and Julie Murray was my advisor." (Tomonari Nishikawa)

A 16 mm. experimental film.

A liebestod from the secret life of slugs.

A cardboard box with a pinhole in one end and a sheet of vellum on the backside, so that the sun fluttering among the trees is projected onto it. This moving image edit is derived from about 4 or 5 takes on the day venus was to cross the sun's path. As it turned out I got the day wrong, but it wouldn't have mattered as the image that formed on the vellum was so soft and wispish and the trees were in the way that there was no chance whatsoever venus could be seen passing by.

The enormous carcass of the Michigan Theatre, a ruin among ruins, now serves as an inner-city car park and home for ghosts.

Microfilm model airplanes and their people.

The most striking thing about observing Niagara Falls is that they don’t seem to be falling at all. Being so vast they give the impression of doing just the opposite. This idea comes to mind and the body to feel elevated and rotated with its force. Like as ‘look’ is to ‘leap’, naming this portrait of Niagara’s water-ous site, “Fl.oz” is descriptive by way of a metaphoric matrix of bubbly spit volleyed from the tip of the tongue to contribute to all the world’s great oceans in a barrel-suited outfit of onomatopoeic humor, is an attempt to allude to all that is other than looking that has to do with apprehension.

IN AN EYE/EAR DUET, MOVEMENTS AND CUTS IN THE IMAGE ARE IN CONTRAPUNTAL MOMENTUM, FIRST WITH SATIE’S DANCE DE TRAVERS AND THEN WITH TWITTERING BIRDS AND BEES IN A FIELD.

Various reels of found 35mm movie film are pulled over a light box under the fixed gaze of video capture. Through veils of apparent motion, the movements of characters can be discerned and their motivations artfully speculated upon. An oblique tribute to Pere Portabella's Vampir-Cuadecuc, narrative and plot in UNTITLED (TIME) are progressively subsumed in a switching and swaying abstraction to percussion rhythms crashed out on cymbals.

In this montage a melding of camera original and found material hints at a realization which is evident only in the fissures of splintered associations. Obscured among visceral absurdities and lightweight witticisms there seeps a viscera, an acrid recollection, coiled in the intangibles of puzzled shadows.

Much of the footage that comprises Orchard is of a 19c ruins that included a walled orchard in and area known as Rostellen in southwest Ireland. It is set deep in the woods and the crumbling brick and mortar of the broken walls has become the anchor for the roots of slender trees, so uninhibited for all this time that they reach twenty feet in height and have thick roots that follow like slow lazy trickles of water and in other places branch and wind over the brickwork in an arterial arrangement reminiscent of the human body. Some footage of Central Park is in there, as well as Niagara Falls, the main Dublin-to-Cork road and a thin smoking woods on the outskirts of Rosslare, Co. Waterford These are facts may be incidental to the film’s eventual form, which winds the images into an arrangement of continuous wandering. All this is attended by environmental whispering sounds until a voice calls out toward the end, in dream-bound recognition, to a figure from the far, far past.

A camera attached to a microscope facilitates the trawling of spaces shaped by small dead things in tiny chambers between the naked eye and the mansions of molecules. Infinitely devisable focal planes denote the topography and tilt of an insect limb, large and tortuous as a conifer, or a torso brown as maple syrup, which repeatedly emerge and dissolve through the lens as if composed of vapor.

A duet of found film material and video. The 35mm movie film image is unraveled without a shutter and filtered through video capture electronics. Still recognizable, although hazy and drifting in soft pink abstracts, figures in character emerge and fade, passing through the American desert landscape like phantoms.

Otherrehto is a short digital video construct of re-agitated film frames of a roiling rorschach set to the rhythm of the rolling text of a small excerpt from S.T. Coleridge's “night-conversations” in which he speculates upon the “force of suppressed Instincts stirring in the heart & bodily frame” of St. Theresa of Avila. All unfurling to voices risen in praise and the tuneful glissando of a record grinding to halt.

Convolves the aberrations found within two image-making technologies; film and video, which here combine to produce a heap of dichotomies and forensic textures of process, like human imprints in sand.

Frequency Objects, a photogram, creates a rhythmic friction between a chaotic animation of old family photographic negatives and the smooth motion of found movie images. Through imprecise stops and starts image fragments appear. The glacial motion of figures falling half in and half out of the frame and faces suddenly happened upon amid the abstract patterns of fabric and opaque objects producing faithful shadows of themselves.

Hidden among the pounding of animal hides, All tamped into maps, their shapes Explicit replicate butterfly wings, lie the motives of Lír. The king who paid improper attention to his children. From that first fascination And it’s lascivious gaze, Came the gorged desire for substance, Among the skins, Nets, shadows and milk bottles Pried from the stomachs of metal fish, Steam, smoke and things that won’t stay, Speared, dangled, measured, divined. All dreamed through wallpaper, Or dowsed from something they drowned in long ago. Snowed in on either side, The swans, Lír’s beloved children, Begin their 800 year journey. From lake to sea A thousand more. – JM

Cyan is assembled from numerous 16mm film workshops. Some of the footage is found, most is made, much of it filmed by participants themselves. Accumulated between 2004 and 2014.

Tr'Cheot'My P'y is a hiccuping audio news segment to which footage from many sources is loosely choreographed. The film is intended as a portrait of the body and embodiment, systems of information and representations of the body itself.

This atmospheric landscape is largely un-peopled but nevertheless expresses the busy presence of ghosts that reside in the snowy fog-bound woods, the movement of the moon and in the hesitancy of the clouds. It is an exploration of location/place both macro and micro, visited by a few incidental shadowy figures related to one another through the rhythm of their gestures.

"The film’s haunting images are accompanied by the continuous sound of a helicopter circling overhead, which at the close gives way to the distant sound of police sirens. The beams of light, which seem to emanate from above, could be confused with helicopter searchlights, a reading whose symbolic significance evokes both security and baleful scrutiny. These sounds, however, are not only immediately associated with the events of September 11; they have also become a ubiquitous presence in the urban sonic landscape. Murray reveals the subtle disconnect of sound and image only gradually, allowing conscious recognition to develop slowly in viewing the film." -Whitney Biennial catalog, (2004). Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

A Legend of Parts presents a history of civilization in a less-than-historically-accurate manner where the actions of the prehistoric animals changing into those of sociopolitical "man" careening towards the organized chaos of ultimate annihilation become hopelessly confused and reversed; where the random energy of lightning itself is endowed with the colors of the flag.

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”.