Sprockets, Scratches, Splotches: Nine Short Films

Well before the cinematic image was fractured into digital pixels, it was developed on strips of film stock ridden with holes. Either as part of avant-garde collectives or as solitary magicians, experimental filmmakers have taken this as an opening to think about the materiality of the celluloid—toying with those perforations alongside purposeful distortions and inevitable decay, integrating other visual and manual techniques of scratching, painting, coloring, and drawing. This program of shorts brings together a genealogy of works that range from the mid 60s to the present day, magnifying on screen what was meant to be hidden in the machine.

Timescraps: Film Threads and Sprocket Holes (2023)
Dir. Krista Leigh Steinke
8min, Digital

Although it plays with various digital techniques, interdisciplinary artist Krista Leigh Steinke’s experimental short is a homage to the material history of cinema. It especially illuminates the labor and skill of women in the early twentieth-century motion picture industry as editors and colorists.

An Ecstatic Experience (2015)
Dir. Ja’Tovia Gary
6min, Digital

Artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary’s dazzling mosaic—titled after Losing Ground (1982) by Kathleen Collins—is a mesmerizing exercise in channeling film materiality through what she has described as a “radical Black femme gaze.” Archival footage of actress Ruby Dee, revolutionary Assata Shakur, and contemporary documentary of BLM protests are combined across refashioned 16mm celluloid, marked with splashes of color, glitches, and etched drawings.

The Dante Quartet (1987)
Dir. Stan Brakhage
8min, 16mm

Stan Brakhage took six years to make The Dante Quartet, which is entirely composed of hand-painted images inspired by The Divine Comedy. A sumptuously hypnotic chaos of colors, it materialized the experimental filmmaker’s search for a way to transmit hypnagogic or closed-eye vision.

Slides (1971)
Dir. Annabel Nicolson
11min, 16mm

Painterly and tactile, Slides was made by running cut-up fragments of film strips through a contact printer. British filmmaker Annabel Nicolson’s process of cutting and sewing transformed the material by hand, resulting in a mobile dance of abstracted images.

Train Again (2021)
Dir. Peter Tscherkassky
20min, DCP

At once harmonious and explosive, Train Again condenses the shared history of trains and cinema into a frenetic, ecstatic phantom ride through time and audiovisual material. Peter Tscherkassky made the stunning experiential work as a tribute to fellow Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Kurt Kren.

Black Is (1965)
Dir. Aldo Tambellini
4min, Digital

A 16mm film made without any use of a camera, this work by the pioneering innovator Aldo Tambellini defied the boundaries of the medium. Scorched and scratched, Black Is acts as a portal into the darkness of an art form created through light.

Black Rectangle (2013)
Dir. Rhayne Vermette
2min, Digital

Kazimir Malevich’s 1913 painting Black Square began as a curtain, which Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette translates into a cinematic process of veiling and unveiling. Black Rectangle is the choreography of an optical track in which a jumble of 16mm found footage shifts and falls apart.

Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles (1966)
Dir. Owen Land
6min, Digital

By using a Kodak color test as found footage, the painter, writer, photographer, and experimental filmmaker Owen Land rendered the hidden imperfections of celluloid the visible focus of his film. Material comes before content in what Land cheekily called “the dirtiest film ever made.”

Ray Gun Virus (1966)
Dir. Paul Sharits
14min, 16mm

A visual artist associated with the structural film movement, Paul Sharits made Ray Gun Virus as one of his earliest “flicker films.” The staccato work targets the retina and aims to shake-up consciousness through a rapid succession of monochrome sheets of colored paper.