J.

J.

2008 · 6 min · ★ 5.8 · History, Documentary

Found memories decayed by the shock patterns of childhood trauma. This films is made mostly with footage found in the bin of an ophanage. The white progressivelly disolve within a darknest more and more dense. Faces progressivelly disolves within one another.

Directed by Solomon Nagler

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Gravity and GraceGravity and Grace · 2012
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Hannah is about to have her third miscarriage. Working as a social worker at the Mission to Seafarers, she discovers a stowaway drifting aimlessly in the harbour, and decides to give the young man shelter in a decommissioned, cold war era nuclear fallout bunker that is being redesigned by her partner Antonia to serve as an archive dedicated to hagiographic graphology (the study of the saints through their handwriting). Hannah then retreats to a secluded cottage deep in the woods to confront pain and illumination alone.
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The everyday life of a couple at the twilight of their lives.
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Polish land taking in the Jewish dead. Beneath the streets of Warsaw, under the garden of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, are the lost writings of The Ash Kodesh (the holy fire), Rabbi Klonimus Kalmish Szapiro, a Chassidic master who was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. His lost aphorisms float through the hallowed trees and shadow architectures that sheltered jewish fugitives during the Shoah. In the forests, unmarked graves await commemoration; through glitch and balagan we are pulled into subterranean landscapes that emerge as fragmented archives of silence.
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Drawing on issues of memory, decay, palimpsest and the rubbing together of archive, fiction and situations, pilgrimage was constructed from found strips of 8mm amateur footage gleaned during a residency in Sydney, Australia. The original footage—a tourist’s voyeuristic, filmed impressions of a pilgrimage in a crowded urban space, where the faithful painfully stumble before the entrance of a temple—was reworked using an optical printer and other hand-made techniques.
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Silent 16mm loop made for the situated cinema project at ArtSpace in Sydney, Australia. Composed of old footage from the directors' families.
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"Like a world seen in sleep - a paradox of wakefulness and delirium, part lucid dream, part sunshine through sleep-heavy lids - the treated footage in Solomon Nagler's perhaps/We follows a cycle, with motifs of the ever-present twilight in a steel-blue Warsaw set against what could be (but probably isn't) archive footage, of an old woman asleep on a day-bed and an overgrown, forgotten Jewish Cemetery. Found sounds and field recordings join scratched records to create a soundtrack as plaintive as Nagler's manipulated film stock, a lone voice introducing and concluding the film: I float/ Above the world/ In my sleep/ In my dreams / And every time I dream, I loose half my body. A rumination on loss and memory, or memories half-forgotten, whilst perhaps/We isn't figurative, it offers and account of humanity, peopled by ghosts - undoubtedly the ghosts of the Holocaust: mournful yet never peevish, never mawkish." - Adam Pugh, Programmer Aurora Film Festival, Norwich England.
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Silent 16mm loop made for the situated cinema project at ArtSpace in Sydney, Australia. Filmed in an unlit abandoned music hall in Sackville, NB.
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A Visual essay of indexical failures that examine the bliss of ineffable gestures…

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