The Hemispheres

Christabel is an abstract interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Gothic poem about female possession. Adhering to the poem’s structure the film is presented in four parts – Two digital video half hour segments and then two short 16mm conclusions. The contemporary relevance of the poem’s symbols and themes is underlined using performance combined with heavy image and sound layering.

The story of young sisters in the American Midwest left alone with their increasingly unstable mother while their father is fighting in the Civil War. The film traces the girls’ naturally fraught sibling dynamic and the ways that their father’s absence ignites their imagination. When they meet a stranger in the forest they become enchanted by a world of creative work and nature, a welcome distraction from their volatile mother. Play and the dreamlike space they inhabit provides an expansive and ultimately grounding setting for the girls’ response to war.

Short film from James Fotopoulos

Thousands of years into the future, through the eyes of an alien life form, we see the fossilized beings of Ronald Reagan and William Casey enact their relationship as if in a crude ancient play. Through an array of text, sculptures, drawings, animations and monologues, alternate interpretations of the character’s histories and myths unfold.

An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.

Video (color)

"...the simplest and most beautiful of [Fotopoulos'] early video features, which simply follows the movements of a model whose body is (re)filmed so closely that she appears as abstract swirls of colour and video grain." —Maximilian Le Cain

The origins of the universe told through the lens of an experimental film and video sci-fi horror-show fusion: Alien women trapped in a colorfully hand-scratched film-textured hotel room, genetically mutated men slowly driven mad in a white digital prison, the high contrast landscapes of Mars, and a futuristic tribe of a giant, an elf and a witch in their decaying suicide-home.

Short film from James Fotopoulos

Part 5 of 5. B&W

Part 4 of 5. Color

Part 3 of 5. Color

The past, present and future. Final Obscura is a visionary film that unfolds on a space where the lines between past, present, and future dissolve into a single, phantasmic experience—an Exquisite Corpse of perception, desire, and transcendent imagination. The film submerses the viewer in a captivating, liminal dimension where the waking and dreaming worlds merge, inviting us to reflect on the nature of time, and the anamorphic emerging worlds of the anamnesis expression in seeing the sound

Life in a rural industrial town: a teenage boy, his family, friends and failed attempt at love are investigated through stark black-and-white photography and static long takes. Filmed in a fusion of authentic and staged documentation, with robotic performances by actors and non-actors, the piece meditates on the mundane existence of human and animal life.

Part 2 of 5. Color

Part 1 of 5. B&W