Shorts 12: The One With The Dog

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UpCycles Ariana Gerstein

7 min., 2016, USA

This film was constructed through a long process involving revision and reorganization across multiple cinematic media. It began with super 8 film shot at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and 16mm shot from the El train and along lake Michigan. Images were thought through as they were re-worked by optical printing and hand chemical processing. Film cut every frame or two (would never run through a projector) were stepped up and down along the way (super 8 onto 16mm onto 35mm and back down to 16mm). The film remained as film for years. Recently it was taken to a new level by optical printing with a digital camera on a JK printer, also one frame at a time. It was rethought, retimed with a different screen ratio and sound. I would like to think the film has finally completed it’s journey- but we’ll see.

Steven Go Get Me a Switch Jared Buckhiester

19 min., 2016, USA

‘Told through the voices of three elderly South Carolinian’s who reside in the homes in which they were born, Steven Go Get Me A Switch is an oral history mapping dichotomies of gender, familial mythologies, sexuality, and belief. A heavy use of symbolism commingles with suggestions of narrative proof. The desire to be good and the impossibility of such desire becomes a sharp inaudible pitch, like a dog whistles call to violence. A taught reinforcement of the environment in which these images were taken, this work sits in opposition to contemporary critical thought, which relies heavily on the death of such symbolism.’
– Dawn Cerny

Curses Jodie Mack

5 min., 2016, USA

Made entirely by hand from cut marbled paper, this odyssey of remnants re-imagines a dream-sequence love.

See A Dog, Hear A Dog Jesse McLean

18 min., 2016, USA

Taking its title from a sound design maxim and using it as a conceit to grasp the desire for connection, See A Dog, Hear A Dog probes the limits and possibilities of communication. In this liminal cinematic space, the fear of conscious machines is matched with a desire to connect with nonhuman entities. Algorithms collaborate and improvise. Dogs obey/disobey human commands, displaying their own artistry and agency in the process. Technology, from domesticated animals to algorithmic music to chat rooms, reflects human desires but has its own inventiveness. Can we ever truly communicate with a machine, with a nonhuman animal, with each other? Our anthropomorphic tendencies, our fear of replacement by nonhuman forms, even our interpersonal limitations, can’t foreclose the possibility of connection and understanding, a great unknown sometimes called trust.

If I Were Any Further Away I’d Be Closer to Home Rajee Samarasinghe

15 min., 2016, Sri Lanka/USA

A silent poem reflecting on the place of my mother’s birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian “makers” becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience, and touch

Blua Carolina Charry Quintero

22 min., 2016, Columbia/USA

Humanity and animality are enigmatically confronted and entwined. Combining rich high-contrast 16mm images with crisp digital color scenes, “Blua” composes an uncanny entry into the relationship between human and animal existence. With a montage that complicates the relationship between fact and fiction, reaching for equal beauty and strangeness, “Blua” is an assertion of the uncanny, a cine-poetic philosophical speculation.