Aaron Michael Smith

Playland is a boundary-pushing, transdisciplinary, hybrid film centered around the raucous activity of a time-bending night in Boston's oldest and most notorious gay bar, the Playland Café.

Exploring the musical concept of "release," this film is a haunting found-footage study in the plurality of visual and auditory meanings of the term. A series of collaborative works pairing artists working in visual and auditory mediums, the Études meditate on individual musical concepts through experiments with sound and film. Étude 1a: Release (I) is the first in this series and is directed by filmmaker Russell Sheaffer and composer Aaron Michael Smith.

Three scenes reflecting on paradise, lust and hell. In 'The Garden of Delight' beauty and evil go together like in a dream. We dive into a world of erotic derangement, inhabited by dancing lovers, lustful mutated baboons, tropical birds, deformed pin-ups, butterflies and body-builders. This hand-manipulated collage film, made entirely out of 35 and 8mm found-footage, explores the marriage between heaven and hell, our irresolvable endless conflict that goes with human nature. Inspired on the triptych 'The Garden of Delight' by Jheronimus Bosch.