Obscura Camera

"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)

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.

Images from an aerial tram leaving Manhattan are followed by images of a nearly static bird, of bugs fighting, and of light bending as it passes through glass. Near the film's end the tram lands in Manhattan, as if it had reversed direction; as in all of Murray's films, the images and the editing can pull several ways at once. There are no absolutes, and even the light by which we see is altered by the material it passes through. – Fred Camper

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.

A liebestod from the secret life of slugs.

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

A 16 mm. experimental film.

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.

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.

Microfilm model airplanes and their people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.