Prisoner's Cinema

Prisoner's Cinema

2012 · 10 min

Essentially a trance-inducing flicker film, Prisoner’s Cinema opens by establishing a simple, yet aggressive, black and white flashing sequence, defined by its frenetic pace and hypnotic pattern. It assaults and entrances the viewer with its rapid optical rhythm; a low-toned droning sound and a high frequency stuttering provide a sonic anchor that augments the hypnotic effects of the flashing imagery.

Directed by Joshua Gen Solondz

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Three years living in Sunset Park, living between the BQE and the Greenwood Cemetery, accumulating footage of junkyard cats, Park Slope strollers, burned out cars, flying birds.

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Joshua Gen Solondz assmbles footage shot around the world over the past decade and manipulates it into a blurred compendium that privileges darkness and abstraction over the picturesque to an intense, strobing degree.

Luna e Santur

Luna e Santur · 2016

Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a series of rituals in which an old trauma is remembered and exorcized.

Keratin Reserve

Keratin Reserve · 2009

Keratin Reserve

A film diary. 673 finger/toe nails saved, a large mess of 16mm rescued from darkroom garbage bins. The former adhered with nail polish topcoat to the latter, optically printed, and finished as a print.

NE Corridor

NE Corridor · 2022

Accumulated over three years, Joshua Gen Solondz’s film is a crowded collage of gurgling paint, jagged splices, errant sprocket holes, and puzzling images that conjure the densely material frames of the late queer avant-garde filmmaker Luther Price. A messy assemblage in purples and oranges, NE Corridor is at once a visceral explosion of color and a tortured object.

Burning Star

Burning Star · 2012

A colourful implo/explosion of the twelve sided star.

Xtended Release

Xtended Release · 2026

Xtended Release

35mm of collaged film material reading like a diary without linear thought or narrative. A hodgepodge of photographic images spliced and taped with ecstatic handmade explosions of colour and texture. A fragmentary experience that revels in the material and provides an opaque and impenetrable portrait of the maker.

Failures

Failures · 2017

A work-in-progress/unreleased film by Joshua Gen Solondz.

Against Landscape

Against Landscape · 2014

Against Landscape

Challenging the romanticization of west coast scenery, Josh Solondz creates a starling work of land art in Against Landscape. Whether political, performative, or both, the artist's plucky gesture and the video's precise framing limn the limits of control.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing · 2012

I made a microphone. I asked for a friend's help to shoot. I asked for a friend to provide a condom. I asked for a film lab that would process the film for me. (the lab tends to ruin my films) I wrap the microphone in the condom, tell my friend to start shooting, and try to swallow what I've made. - JGS

Little Fountains

Little Fountains · 2010

Little Fountains

A meditation on cultural appropriation and nature's myth. Prompted by Roland Barthes' "Mythologies", the videomakers have found a microcosm of the new age wasteland within little fountains. The work is an object focused meditation within a young woman's life is brought to attention.

We Don't Talk Like We Used To

We Don't Talk Like We Used To · 2023

We Don't Talk Like We Used To

Shot between Hong Kong, Japan, and the US, this short is Joshua Gen Solondz’s most ambitious work to date, a portrait of the home and the world that is dense, textured, creepy, anxious, noisy, silly, and confounding, but always tender.

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Perfect Fantasy (Car Movie) · 2014

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FOLLOW FOLD BURY EAT BURN FORGET TAKE

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Nightmare Arson Fire · 2017

Nightmare Arson Fire

Nightmare Arson Fire combines multiple attempts at contact printing a badly decayed roll of film retrieved from a Brooklyn basement after a fire.

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Deviations From The Wheel · 2007

Deviations From The Wheel

Percussive reedit of military tech videos and their heavy metal soundtrack.

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It's Not a Prison If You Never Try the Door · 2013

It's Not a Prison If You Never Try the Door

"Multi-hyphenate Solondz creates a remediated, glitch-filled revision of a monster classic. As pixels melt, stick and stutter, Godzilla arises and the world decays, a startling vision of mutation and destruction." - Chi-hui Yang. Commissioned by Heliopolis gallery for ZERO LAND.

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