Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

Music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, 16mm color film by Paul Clipson.

Filmed in the Botanical Gardens of Golden Gate Park and the San Francisco Bay. 16mm scope / anamorphic film, Color / B&W . Music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.

"[T] is a film at the limit of cinema, an experiment in the moving image where stillness and movement converge on each other to produce an experience of time as space. Philippe Leonard shot the footage for this remarkable work at Times Square, in New York City, during the hours of artificial illumination. Partly for this reason, it is an oneiric diary, tempted by myth and, at the same time, suffused by a melancholy sense that myth has lost its magical power. Faces appear and disappear in spasmodic waves of light, which emanate from billboards and mobile telephone screens and confuse the boundary between the organic and the artificial. The dilation of time and the miniaturization that that enables in [T] also ensures that the momentary betrayal of excitement, suspicion, attraction, hesitation, boredom and relief that traverses these faces approaches pure physicality." - Rosalind Morris

The video, for a track by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, was directed by Paul Clipson, who interprets the stuttering ambient composition with busy, bursting edits of a young woman walking on a sun-drenched beach.

Music by Jefre-Cantu Ledesma. Film by Paul Clipson with Trevor Montgomery.

Commissioned by the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Paul Clipson's five-part COMPOUND EYES cycle delves into the otherworldliness of the natural world. In training his Super-8 camera on insects and other "minor" invertebrates, Clipson draws the eye into an unseen realm, one so delicate as to simultaneously tempt and refuse the touch. Following the surrealist desire to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, Clipson relates this micro-landscape to the built environment. Electronic musical motifs supplied by frequent Clipson collaborator Jefre Cantu-Ledesma add another layer of inquiry, one tuned to the unspoken space between wonder and terror. This first entry in the series keys the viewer's vision to a single drop of dew on a blade of glass. Wisps of eyelashes, dandelions and insect limbs seem to brush against the lens in a trembling intimation of seeing.

An exploration of movement, woven into layers of time, and photographed in natural and nocturnal urban spaces, ambiguous within a confluence of lights, colors and darkness. Sound by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and directed by Paul Clipson.

SPHINX ON THE SEINE is a film poem: the beginning of a metaphysical journey, musing on a series of brief, but enigmatic images taken from around the world. These images follow one after the other, but geographically span thousands of miles and large passages of time between each cut. Notions of time, space, and memory collide within a visual fabric of abstractions, landscapes, textures, superimpositions and graphic forms, to suggest the first moments of dream-sleep.

Super 8mm, 21 min., color and b&w, music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

Film by Paul Clipson. Music by Jefre-Cantu Ledesma.

Super 8mm, 21 min., b&w, music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.

Latest installment from the on-going collaboration between filmmaker Paul Clipson & musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Paul's Super8 films, shot entirely in New York City, channel the blissed out states of color drenched psychadellia explored by Brakage as well as lovely black and white still life's that reminisce on Ozu's 'pillow shots' & Chantel Akermans monumental portrait of Pre-Giuliani New York 'Letters Home'. Jefre's music is culled from the same sessions that launched his 2007 release on Students Of Decay 'Shinning Skull Breath', (the two share a track in common). Billowy clouds of distorted guitar expand out into long passages of muffled static and fuzzed out melody.

Super 8mm by Paul Clipson. Sound by Jefre Cantu Ledesma.

Film by Paul Clipson. Music by Jefre Cantu Ledesma.

Super 8 films by Paul Clipson. Sound by Jefre-Cantu Ledesma.