A Short History

False Expectations is a 3-channel 16mm expanded cinema with a scored live noise performance by Shrine Maiden. Finding and preserving memories of connections and tenderness in dead flowers, in between blinds, slants of shadows and hand processed film frames.

I transcribe a relationship on film with what I find at home: the flower baby’s breath, love letters my father wrote and sun print papers my lover gave me. This film is a dedication to Shadow Film: A Woman with Two Heads (Nito-onna: Kage No Eiga) (1977) by Shuji Terayama - Erica Sheu

Notes for a film about birthday are deconstructed, cropped and stuck to clear film leaders to project in loops. As if an endless umbilical cord pulling out from a womb, this "interior scroll" is filled with unrecognizable writing that becomes simply moving images continuing to advance.

Everything was not planned. We started the day, in a basement in Queens, New York, watching a Japanese cult film, Rainy Dog, which was shot in my hometown, Taipei, Taiwan. Hand-processed and solarized the film to hide the anxiety of unsureness. This film is a part of the Camera Rolls series by Erica Sheu.

Almost forty years after its first appearance in You The Better, the house returns as a character in Beckman’s new work Reach Capacity, now symbolising real estate. The economic and political elements and the structure of the film are closely associated with the most famous of all board games dealing with real estate, Monopoly. Its origins go back to the early 1900s, when Elizabeth Magie created a first version of what she called The Landlord’s Game. Magie’s game had two sets of rules, a Prosperity set and a Monopolist set (only the latter was kept by Parker Brothers when they further developed the game without her). Magie’s aim was to illustrate how society as a whole thrives when monopolies are banished and income is distributed equally. Beckman takes over Magie’s dual game structure by having her screen flip over when a monopoly is reached.

An animation scratching on 16mm black leader.

Inspired by Jonas Mekas's essay, The Diary Film, this film raises a question of what a person is looking at out of the window. The three-act structure gradually reveals that the focus was drawn to the domestic life of the Asian neighborhood - a visual connection to the hometown. This film is part of Camera Rolls series by Eria Sheu.

This split screen film is a note on my recent readings as a self-realization. This is a part of the Camera Rolls series by Erica Sheu.

The cat I don't own runs through windows between different spaces and times, and it disappears before finishing a sentence. Using outtakes and rushes (what "fur film" means in Mandarin) to redeem the affects in these images we produced for. The film is the first volume of an ongoing exchange diary project between Erica SHEU and Tzuan WU. From the filming exercises and hand processing from the very beginning, we collaborate and experiment with different workflows of audio and visual between Taiwan and USA.

A half-moon on the blue sky. A quiet offering connects the unreachable world with the physical ground. An elegy for the filmmaker's grandma.

Is it a reconstruction of memory in the silence, or rather, notes before the memory disappears? The voice cannot be heard again, but one can still feel it through the eyes. The camera turns tactile into textile. The filmmaker connects with her grandma from her own craft to hers.

When we were hiding from the bomb at night, we could only light our way with incense," a childhood friend of Sheu’s father said. Through one physically extended loop of 16mm film, the artist projects an image of burning incense. The long exposures create “time” to allow reimagination and meditation on her father's childhood.

On the subway, a woman asked me how to go home. Distantly, we talked about our home on our way home.

This film is a travelogue in Chicago, which is also a study on color and black and white, the expired and the fresh film, and the fast and the slow pace. I was looking at the city in the snow through the Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero’s installation, Alphabet, on the window at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and wondering what the difference would be between shooting this grey scenery with color film and with black and white film. As Herrero creates a landscape with color blocks, what landscape would I create with my two rolls of film? - Erica Sheu

Today i took a walk alone, around the theater we hung out next to a chinese funeral house. This film is part of Camera Rolls series by Erica Sheu.

A film student's note.