Leaf Peeper

Seven tales of transformation poetically reimagine Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and paint a picture of violence and catharsis, anchored in mythical landscapes.

A slow iris pull on a reflected interior bulb at twilight triggers mydriasis and miosis. As the interior moon waxes, pupils will wane. Your eyes will move diametrically against the slow increase of circular light in the frame and the film will control your body momentarily.

Three interior perspectives on magic hour in isolation that emerge like muted post horns, pieces of dusk that radiate both glorious impermanence and chaotic entropy.

Clouds migrate dramatically across the cornered façade of an office building as the sun goes down. Dispersed light imbues each of the 137 visible windows with new life between each frame and paints golden streaks that unfold like a symphony against the space's flickering fluorescent lights.

New York, 1927. An aspiring model goes to have her picture taken, but a camera can have a mind of its own.

A man struggles with his faith and is perennially caught between ascension and fall. "Ascending Double Helix" explores the boundaries between the mythologized and the visceral body, blending sculpture with the sublime, and taking as its cue the motif of ascension and the format of the passion play.

A hipster vampire in Brooklyn uses a meditation app to keep from biting people.

A visual essay about Benjamin Christensen's 1922 "Häxan," released as part of the Radiance Films limited edition Blu-ray on 11/11/2024.

In Vito A. Rowlands' "Entre les Images", orphaned 35mm frames from lost silent films are threaded together and interlaced with narration relating a tale of youth, love, war and grief, the conflagration of a world at war poetically mirrored in the burning of nitrate film.

A cryptopolitical forensic investigation of the JFK assassination through acoustic ballistics and signs embedded into 1963 5-cent American flag stamps.

"Flames that Drift" (Laai ende Drift) is an experimental poetry film on super 8mm film that enters into direct intertextual dialogue with Antwerp poet Paul van Ostaijen's 1921 collection "Occupied City," and more specifically his "Music Hall" poems, and set during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in New York. Like van Ostaijen, looking at Antwerp from his voluntary exile in Berlin, Antwerp writer-director Vito A. Rowlands turns the camera on the city that is home to his own voluntary exile, New York City. The film ascertains how his new city, much like his own, has been occupied, if not infected, with viruses that have debilitated Western society for centuries; viruses that we propagate ourselves; that we use to enslave others, in the name of progress; by authorities as much as by aesthetics; by art that towers above us on a daily basis, looking down at us.

If the eyes are the window to the soul, "Immaculate Generations no. 1" presents its viewer with a singular look into thousands of souls. Equal parts Carl Sagan and William Blake, this flicker film is composed of tens of thousands of individual retinal photographs from public scientific databases. Its flickering landscapes evoke the violence of the big bang and balance somewhere between threat and seduction, like the paintings of J.M.W. Turner. Animated between 12 and 24 frames per second, they make for a dazzling rush into the maelstrom of life as we perceive it.