G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!

An abstract representation of an erotic relationship.

Otherworldly frequencies and textured, fluctuating images beautifully visualize the distress of people who suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and who must live in exile from cities in order to find solitude from the noise.

Exquisitely filmed in black-and-white, this experimental narrative follows four friends on a road trip as they discover the complicated arena of unseen desire that arises when ecstasy and sexuality mix.

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

A re-photography in video of material that was originally used in a performance during which Karl Lemieux, painted, scratched and burned film loops from an old western 16mm film. Traces of an impossible past and future collide in a trajectory where the present unravels.

All images and sounds of Unearthed were captured during a residency in the Arctic in Nikel, Zapolyarny and Prirechnyi in the Murmansk oblast in Russia, one of the most polluted areas in the world. True to his experimental cinema aesthetics, Karl Lemieux pursues his exploration of unusual locations as well as his long-term collaboration with musician and composer, BJ Nilsen. Unearthed is based on a work commissioned for the project Dark Ecology (2014−2017) curated by Sonic Acts and Hilde Methi.

Some 12,000 oil and gas platforms remain at sea. What happens when one reaches the end of its life? In an experimental audiovisual journey to the shores of Scotland, acclaimed filmmaker Karl Lemieux (Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Quiet Zone) documents the painstaking process of dismantling these industrial behemoths. Metal creaks, excavators crunch and workers weld against desolate landscapes, captured on 16-mm film manipulated with photochemical processes, and amplified by Swedish artist BJ Nilsen’s haunting sonic landscape. The result is a ritual that seems both alien and undeniably Earthbound.

When the fireworks inflame the memory of a war survival.

Mouvement de lumière (Motion of light), which is comprised of noise music and lines hand-painted directly onto the film, attempts to break free of a visual and sound-based order through abstraction, thereby initiating a process centred on inner sensation. A radical proposition of power inherent in film. Music by Olivier Borzeix.

Karl Lemieux's first project, a video interpretation of Lee Ranaldo’s talking sound-piece “The Bridge” (1985), made while attending high school in the Nevada desert, foreshadows Lemieux’s recent projector performances with live musicians.

Optical print film that was constructed from 16mm images that filmmaker Richard Kerr entrusted to Karl Lemieux.

During the winter of 2015 Karl Lemieux travelled to China with BJ Nilsen and a small camera crew to make a piece about the country's infamous ghost cities. The work presented is made with images shot in the city of Yujiapu, near Tianjin where ancestral fishing villages have been destroyed to make way for a multibillion-dollar real estate project that was to become the new financial district of the area. The entire city was developed but never finished and has been left uninhabited for over six years. The film uses the lines and frames of the buildings of Yujiapu and the lines and the frames of the film strip to create abstract elements that slowly reveal an incredible desolate urban landscape.

During a stay in the Death Valley desert in California, Karl Lemieux encounters a demolished house wall, standing alone in a void and whose windows are only open gaps, washed out by light. Fascinated by the incongruity and poetry of the object, he films it. This segment of film, later, he (...) will re-film it in a variety of positions and situations; off-center, oblique, fixed, in motion, and above all hot under the effect of heat. This work will yield the film Halo Getters. The act of burning the film, like under the magnifying glass, doubles the effect and the memory of the light and the intense heat of the desert, the place of origin of the image. An orange circle dotted with bubbles forms in the image, resembling a "sun" which adds to and destroys the image. This circle burning the film in Halo Getters, forms a blind spot which masks and destroys the image, making visible the fragility of the support.

Hand-painted film on 16mm by Karl Lemieux. Music by Visions.

Film super-8mm shot for the One Take super-8 in 2009. Music by Maussade.