I, Apostate

Notes on the Circus

May 1967 •English

The short film is a montage of sped up clips of The Ringling Brothers Circus in action set to a musical track. The film is separated into four segments, each segment which focuses on different acts within the circus. The later segments often incorporate clips from earlier segments, mostly as background to the featured acts. The speed of the clips match the tempo of the soundtrack music.

Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung

January 1997 •

Experimental short made by Olivier Assayas for Fondation of Contemporary Art and starring Maggie Cheung.

Maniac Summer

December 2009 •French

Maniac Summer consists of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer of 2009. It is a sprawling triptych without a beginning or end and with no specific subject or topic. The camera is positioned in front of a window and left running. It observes movements, registers noises coming from the street or nearby park, captures Chantal Akerman going about her business in her apartment: smoking, working, talking on the telephone. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are featured in the installation’s central video, while the adjoining panels are more symbolically charged; in them, various images from the former have been isolated, modified and repeated. These abstract afterimages act as a kind of memory, looking back to the images in the installation’s centrepiece as so many shadows of its reality.

Genova Genova

April 1984 •French

A song of love to the city of Genoa. The film wanders the streets of the city center and explore the beautiful cemetery and then climb the hills which offer an amazing view over the old town crossed by a highway and port.

Expiration

July 1976 •

Short experimental film.

Im Reich Des Squatters

April 2020 •German

Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head

January 1991 •French

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.

Alvoroço Nas Escolas

May 2009 •Portuguese

This is a mix of documentary and fiction. Making of the project carried out by the producer ALVOROÇO FILMES with the support of the MUNICIPAL MUNICIPAL DE ALVORADA and SMED.

The Magic Sun

January 1966 •English

Multi-faceted artist Phil Niblock captures a brief moment of an interstellar communication by the Arkestra in their prime. Black turns white in a so-called negative post-process, while Niblock's camera focuses on microscopic details of hands, bodies and instruments. A brilliant tribute to the Sun King by another brilliant supra-planetary sovereign. (Eye of Sound)

Twilight

May 2021 •English

Feeling lost, a holidayer takes a vacation, only to discover a world that is as banal as it is hyper-real. A found-footage essay film. A home-movie. A music video. An experimental documentary about the fantasy of air travel. Taking a tour of the global centres of accumulation - New York, Dubai, Burning Man - Twilight documents the unreal, the mundane and the spectre of ecological collapse.

Oblivion

October 2024 •Russian

A lone passenger is reflected in the windows of a train crawling through layers of textures towards Minsk. During his absence, the city has not changed: all the streets are frozen, long-gone voices can be heard in the empty rooms and around the corner you can find yourself in a video game from your childhood.

Dilema I: Burundanga Boricua

January 1990 •Spanish

Combines animation, documentary footage, and hand-painted film as well as slide projections, a painted 12" x 24" backdrop, and sculptural palm tree to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Puerto Rican psyche.

Spectrum

September 2019 •

A 1963 timelapse recording shows the effects of air pollution during an entire day on Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles. A machine interpretation of an unstable version of the original file is divided into slits and rearranged in time, giving rise to a time panorama that mirrors an uncertain, abstract future lying ahead of us.

Pineapple

May 2020 •Romanian

A short made during quarantine. - "I feel like I'm coming out of hibernation. I did not learn anything, I did not developed personal growth, nor qualities. I was smart for one day and read challenging stuff, and then for three days watched persisently TV series. I couldn't write. I found a handful of indispensable people. I didn't really understand much of this whole quarantine story; but I'm analytically only retroactive, so maybe it's going to happen. This movie made me feel alive for a few days."

Ozu: Passageways

December 2012 •English

People constantly appear walking through passageways in the films of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu (1903-63). His art resides in the in-between spaces of modern life, in the transitory: alleys are no longer dark and threatening traps where suspense is born, but simple places of passage.

Spectres of Shortwave

September 2016 •English

A mysterious web of international shortwave radio towers once dominated the Tantramar marshlands near Sackville, New Brunswick. For almost 70 years the RCI shortwave towers broadcast around the world. Due to budget cuts, the site was decommissioned in 2012 and dismantled in 2014. Examining themes of identity and memory, the film captures images of the towers over four seasons in various weather conditions, accompanied by the voices of residents and technicians narrating accounts of hearing radio broadcasts emanate from their household appliances.

Mamagüela

September 1994 •Spanish

Experimental film about rhythm as corporal expression of a culture. Presents various choreographies and does not include the participation of men.

#movieofmylife

July 2017 •English

Premiered at the 2017 Locarno International Film Festival.

What I Learned at the Harun Farocki Residency

June 2017 •English

In this video I share my experience as the first Resident of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin during the winter of 2016-2017. Produced for the Goethe Institute.

Swole

January 2017 •Finnish

In Swole I continue to document my commitment to an intensive and transformative gym and diet regimen, as well as the communities that form around such activities, sustaining themselves through texting and sharing videos and photos on social media. I learn the vocabulary of my new community.