Eye Music

While working on a documentary on his old neighborhood, a young film school graduate shifts the focus of his production onto the disappearance of a local resident and the strange characters who are conducting the search to find him.

A documentary team gets a grant to do a film on a rare fatal disease that is attacking homeless people. However, they quickly find the film too depressing. Ducking into a nightclub, they discover a young Manhattan comedienne and decide instead to follow her as she makes the circuit of auditions in L.A. as she tries to get a TV pilot. Unfortunately, she has failed to tell her boyfriend of this move. He decides he will trail her out west. There, the boyfriend runs into an old friend who has already made a break on a TV pilot. Seizing the opportunity, the actress turns her attentions to the established actor. However, the actress goes nowhere in auditions, but her ex-boyfriend is suddenly noticed and becomes the next hot prospect.

American experimental filmmaker Joel Schlemowitz here pays tribute to Joe of Swiss Camera, a friend who repaired all of his Bolex 16mm cameras. A collage of images and sounds playfully portraying the technical process of capturing and displaying film, Schlemowitz is perhaps sardonically directing his camera upon us, the audience. Simultaneously a portrait of precision and a celebration of the coarseness of film itself, FOR JOE evokes the rhythms and spectacle of capturing image in an earlier era of filmmaking. - Stela Jelincic

A garden portrait for Doris Kornish.

A Bacchanalia, kindly provided by the Aesthesians, and set to the music of Saint-Saëns from an old 78 record.

FOGG was inspired, in retrospect, by Marie Menken’s BAGATELLE FOR WILLARD MAAS.

A three minute roll of film shot by Joel Schlemowitz of Brooklyn, NY and mailed to Nicole Koschmann in Nederland, just outside Boulder, CO. The two collaborators shot images on the same undeveloped film, fusing together images from New York and Colorado.

A film-portrait of the Loudmouth Collective and Ugly Duckling Presse. These poet-provocateurs are the creators of the infamous "Anti-Reading" series, a carnival-like alternative to the traditional poetry reading. On the film's soundtrack we hear how the Anti-Readings were started, descriptions of various Anti-Reading activities including the Poetry smokable poems known as "Poetry Cigarettes", the memory tester called "I Forgot," and the "Diary in the Shape of a Bunny". The film includes footage shot at Anti-Readings, with time-lapse, double exposures, distorting lenses, and frenetic non-traditional camerawork evocative of the playfully chaotic spirit of the events.

A short and lively 16mm portrait of comic book artist and performer Dame Darcy, seen through a filmic tour of her comic book, “Meat Cake,” and ending with the artist herself. On the soundtrack, a turn-of-the-last-century recording from a 78rpm Victrola record.

A film in the manner of the Symbolists. A cascade of dream images in a gothic setting. The dreamer imagines flames and fur, Gustave Doré’s depictions of Dante Alighieri and a clutter of objects on a Victorian desk, all amid a web of Rebecca Moore’s haunting music.

Charged ambiguity in a sado-erotic setting.

This film is a collaboration with filmmaker Joel Schlemowitz, on ALL SAINTS DAY 2001 we each shot 100 ft of film, at the same time of the day, 3000 miles apart, and we did not tell each other what we shot. The film was hand processed and cut up into 2ft length’s and then cut back together alternating from Joel’s footage to Jon’s until all the film was gone. This film is the follow up to ALL SAINTS DAY which was done using the same techniques the year prior soundtrack for this film was done the same way.

A tableaux vivant. The sound of the victrola employed "live" for screenings, utilizing the Vitaphone sound system. Created as part of Residency Unlimited: Special Features.

A camera roll. Forty years celebrated in four-thousand frames.

A short film consisting of “Little Nothings,” a poem by Wanda Phipps, read by her with the accompaniment of in-camera superimpositions. The poem was picked through chance operation, by throwing Wanda’s poems into the air. The superimpostions were done in-camera, thus the synchronizations of word and image were also determined through chance operation. By superimposing in the camera over a sync sound shot the images in this film are presented as they were filmed, without editing.

A filmic analogy for the elusiveness of the past. The operations of unconventional printing techniques representing the processes of memory. The film begins with 8mm home movies laid in a jumble over 16mm stock and exposed with a flashlight, and ends with the home movies run through a 16mm contact printer.