Joel Schlemowitz
History
Joel Schlemowitz is an experimental filmmaker based in Brooklyn who works in 16mm film, shadowplay, and stereographic media. He has recently completed his first feature film 78rpm, an experimental documentary about the gramophone. His short works have been shown at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and Tribeca Film Festival and have received awards from the Chicago Underground Film Festival, The Dallas Video Festival, and elsewhere. Shows of installation artworks include Anthology Film Archives, and Microscope Gallery. He teaches experimental filmmaking at The New School and was recently the Resident Film Programmer and Arcane Media Specialist at the Morbid Anatomy Museum.
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Filmmaker Alyssa Bolsey stumbles on a treasure trove of vintage cameras, old film reels, fading photos, technical drawings and boxes of documents that belonged to her great-grandfather Jacques Bolsey. Among the many boxes, she spots an old movie camera with the word "Bolex" embossed on its side and a dangling tag with the date, "1927." Entranced, she embarks on a journey to reveal how Jacques aimed to disrupt the early film industry with a motion picture camera for the masses.
A young man sets out on a journey to the Ogre's lair, in search of a feather with the power to save a dying king.
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A short travelogue shot in super-8 and divided in three sections. Eschewing narration, the film is more of a poetic (rather than prosaic) documentary, conveying impressions through the aesthetic concept of yūgen (evocation by what is left unsaid).
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A tableaux vivant. The sound of the victrola employed "live" for screenings, utilizing the Vitaphone sound system. Created as part of Residency Unlimited: Special Features.
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SHARE at the Project Room, in the final night in the silo, with a soundtrack of Gowanus environs.
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A film of "morning poem #43," by Wanda Phipps. The color was created through hand-printing black and white film with a flashlight and colored filters onto unexposed color film in the dark.
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Poem by Wanda Phipps. Film version of an installation piece shown at the Courthouse Gallery at Anthology Film Archives.
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A camera roll. Forty years celebrated in four-thousand frames.
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A short and lively 16mm portrait of comic book artist and performer Dame Darcy, seen through a filmic tour of her comic book, “Meat Cake,” and ending with the artist herself. On the soundtrack, a turn-of-the-last-century recording from a 78rpm Victrola record.
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Two camera rolls shot at the Collective Unconscious during a performance of "Teslamania" featuring Gecko Saccomanno and Tesla Coil Engineer Jamie Mereness. The film's visual effects, double exposures and refracted images were all done in camera, just as we see them here. On the soundtrack, Gecko provides various "Tesla tidbits," including Tesla's scheme to provide free electricity transmitted through the air, anecdotes about the Collective's Tesla Coil performances, "Tesla cooking," and a list of the inventor Nikoli Tesla's many exotic phobias.
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Spiraling colors and abstracted rotating text, with a poem by Wanda Phipps on the soundtrack both layered and singular.
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An unedited, double-exposed camera roll shot at the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, NYC, on the occasion of a birthday screening for Bradley Eros.
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A film-portrait of the Loudmouth Collective and Ugly Duckling Presse. These poet-provocateurs are the creators of the infamous "Anti-Reading" series, a carnival-like alternative to the traditional poetry reading. On the film's soundtrack we hear how the Anti-Readings were started, descriptions of various Anti-Reading activities including the Poetry smokable poems known as "Poetry Cigarettes", the memory tester called "I Forgot," and the "Diary in the Shape of a Bunny". The film includes footage shot at Anti-Readings, with time-lapse, double exposures, distorting lenses, and frenetic non-traditional camerawork evocative of the playfully chaotic spirit of the events.
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Lights at night on Avenue A, shot on black and white and extensively and laboriously hand-colored.
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FOGG was inspired, in retrospect, by Marie Menken’s BAGATELLE FOR WILLARD MAAS.
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Poem by Wanda Phipps beginning "pink around a circle of pink" heard on the soundtrack. The poem appears as flickering words and colors.
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A collaboration between filmmakers Jon Behrens in Seattle, Washington, and Joel Schlemowitz in Brooklyn, New York, shot on ALL SAINTS DAY, November 1, 2000. They each shot 100 feet of film at the same time of the day 3,000 miles apart, and they did not tell each other what they shot. The film was hand-processed, cut up into two-foot lengths and then cut back together, alternating between Joel's footage and Jon's footage. The soundtrack for this film was done the same way.
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This film is a collaboration with filmmaker Joel Schlemowitz, on ALL SAINTS DAY 2001 we each shot 100 ft of film, at the same time of the day, 3000 miles apart, and we did not tell each other what we shot. The film was hand processed and cut up into 2ft length’s and then cut back together alternating from Joel’s footage to Jon’s until all the film was gone. This film is the follow up to ALL SAINTS DAY which was done using the same techniques the year prior soundtrack for this film was done the same way.
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The day the Film-Makers' Cooperative was forced by loss of lease to move from their offices at Lexington Ave and 31st Street in New York City.
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A three minute roll of film shot by Joel Schlemowitz of Brooklyn, NY and mailed to Nicole Koschmann in Nederland, just outside Boulder, CO. The two collaborators shot images on the same undeveloped film, fusing together images from New York and Colorado.
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A film in the manner of the Symbolists. A cascade of dream images in a gothic setting. The dreamer imagines flames and fur, Gustave Doré’s depictions of Dante Alighieri and a clutter of objects on a Victorian desk, all amid a web of Rebecca Moore’s haunting music.
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Poem by Wanda Phipps (as read by her) and accompanied by the typeoclavecin, a typewriter as a musical instrument, built by the filmmaker for the accompaniment of poets through the technique of dictation.
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Corpuscles dash about. Nerves twitch. Neurons fire. Anatomical illustrations, overlaid with the body's activities scratched and handpainted directly onto the film.
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"My tribute to the filmmaker whose works helped give birth to my inpiration and my joy in experimentation with the medium of film. As a filmmaker, I am in the orbit of Marie Menken."
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A Bacchanalia, kindly provided by the Aesthesians, and set to the music of Saint-Saëns from an old 78 record.
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"After Henri Duparc's setting of the poem by Baudelaire, which is heard in faint echo on the soundtrack. Rococo adhesive transparencies over hand-colored film alternate with Jenn Reeves seen in black and white negative."
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A short film of Emily Dickinson’s poem number 1734, which begins with: “Oh, honey of an hour”. The words of the poem appear hand painted onto the film frames.
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A hand-cranked film of a wind-up record player, hand-colored to simulate the unheard music.
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A short film consisting of “Little Nothings,” a poem by Wanda Phipps, read by her with the accompaniment of in-camera superimpositions. The poem was picked through chance operation, by throwing Wanda’s poems into the air. The superimpostions were done in-camera, thus the synchronizations of word and image were also determined through chance operation. By superimposing in the camera over a sync sound shot the images in this film are presented as they were filmed, without editing.
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"Made in the intentionally amaturish in style. No plot. No story. Just a series of suggestive tableaus."
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A film by Joel Schlemowitz
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American experimental filmmaker Joel Schlemowitz here pays tribute to Joe of Swiss Camera, a friend who repaired all of his Bolex 16mm cameras. A collage of images and sounds playfully portraying the technical process of capturing and displaying film, Schlemowitz is perhaps sardonically directing his camera upon us, the audience. Simultaneously a portrait of precision and a celebration of the coarseness of film itself, FOR JOE evokes the rhythms and spectacle of capturing image in an earlier era of filmmaking. - Stela Jelincic
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A film by Joel Schlemowitz
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A short film by Joel Schlemowitz
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A miniature city symphony wrought in the sounds of the street and rain-smeared black-and-white. - Max Goldberg
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"A memorial film for my mentor."
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A film by Joel Schlemowitz
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A garden portrait for Doris Kornish.
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A short filmic portrait of Morris Engel’s watch-part collages.
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Poem by Bridget Meeds, as read by her, with accompanying text on screen intercut with a contact printed typewriter ribbon.
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3 minutes of painful and pleasurable images glimpsed in negative juxtaposed with a single long scratch played on an optical reader on the soundtrack.
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A filmic analogy for the elusiveness of the past. The operations of unconventional printing techniques representing the processes of memory. The film begins with 8mm home movies laid in a jumble over 16mm stock and exposed with a flashlight, and ends with the home movies run through a 16mm contact printer.
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Five variations on an unfriendly-looking object.
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The birds in BIRDS OF PREY are made from garbage bags and coat hangers, held together with electrical tape. Their inability to fly gives them a sympathetic quality they would not have had otherwise.
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Multiple camera passes of baroque statuary with a soundtrack of dripping water and a Louis Couperin prelude highly distorted. The centerpiece of the film is Kerry Laitala's Chattertonesque photographic self-portrait.
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A scratch film.
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A one minute prelude for a screening of short films.
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A film by Joel Schlemowitz
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Charged ambiguity in a sado-erotic setting.
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"My earliest experimental film. The result of a conversation with filmmaker Carl Wiedemann on the subject of ripping film to vary the size of the image."
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Jonas Mekas's loft. Two rolls of 16mm film shot one week after his passing. In memoriam.
