Northwest Film Forum

The films of Jeremy Moss explore the intersection of expressionistic tendencies, place and the moving body. His work ranges from surrealist documentary (Those Inescapable Slivers of Celluloid) to abstract hand-made 16mm films (The Sight and Cicatrix) to dance for camera pieces in collaboration with choreographer Pamela Vail ((un)tethered, Chroma, and That Dizzying Crest) to essay film (The Blue Record, in collaboration with Erik Anderson). As a program, these works cohesively embody an immersive optical and sonic experience reveling in cinema’s capacity for both meditative expression and the rigors of formal experimentation.

• Don’t miss Jeremy’s class on camera design for choreography on Thursday evening!

CAMERA FOR CHOREOGRAPHY with Jeremy Moss
March 5 (Thursday), 6:30pm-9:30pm
Tuition: $55 ($45 for Members)
Visiting filmmaker!

In this lecture, filmmaker Jeremy Moss will elaborate on his camera design for choreography, and how it connects to past and present traditions in filmmaker/dancer collaborations.

Register now for Camera for Choreography >

SCREENING PROGRAM

The Blue Record 
(2013, 16mm to digital video, 17 min)
Combining hand-processed 16mm imagery, a deconstructed lyric essay and an ambient score by composer Vicki Brown, The Blue Record meditates on the pastime of ruin-gazing and its application across a wide range of aesthetic experiences. Informed in part by the work of Alain Resnais, Walter Benjamin, and the Romantic poets, The Blue Record is a collaborative study of what happens when the process of decay is arrested, and ruins become commercial entities. Shot on location at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, the film is at once an immersive and Brechtian examination of the experience of destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.

(un)tethered 
(2014, digital video, 10 min)
Measured viewpoints positioned on concentric circles dissect and engage the movement of a solo performer in an abandoned mill. The perspective of both movement and place collide. Suddenly unhinged, the figure unravels and weaves freely, abandoning all formal containments. Featuring original choreography by Pamela Vail and an original score by Jonathan Pfeffer.

Those Inescapable Slivers of Celluloid 
(2011, Super8 to digital video, 7 min)
Stumbling upon sun bleached, bullet-riddled, vintage porn, sequestered in hidden desert nooks and sagebrush, circuit boards and shattered glass along off-the-path shooting ranges, rotting cow parts in ritual-like mounds, a prophet’s omniscient and culpable gaze; contemplating ideology and place, attempting to apply memory to moving image.

Chroma 
(2012, digital video, 4 min)
A wild and hypnotic ride that focuses, via manic perspective shifts, on the driving movement of a solo figure against a backdrop of frenetically flickering colors; these jolting chromatic and frame variations dance as much as the performer.

Cicatrix 
(2014, 16mm to digital video, 7 min)
A textural experience in layers, scars, and deterioration that combines hand processed, tinted, and toned 16mm imagery with an original sonic score by Jonathan Pfeffer. Both sight and sound ooze and emulate those tangible tremors catalyzed by increasing awareness of loss and decay. Initially created at the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm) in July 2012.

That Dizzying Crest 
(2013, 16mm to digital video, 11 min)
Direct manipulation acts as inciting catalyst as a dancing figure becomes ingrained and lost in the celluloid, creating an immersive new realm for the moving figure. She repeats short phrases of choreography on ambient loop; each repetition alters our perception of movement and space.

The Sight 
(2012, 16mm to digital video, 4 min)
A song of creation: immaterial space spawns volatile matter; obfuscated landscape emerges from splintering celluloid. Created at the Independent Imaging Retreat, the landscape is seen anew by 16mm hand-manipulation giving rise to a geometry of trees and meadows; the sonic score is subjected to similar direct manipulation.

About Jeremy Moss

Jeremy Moss (born 1978, Saint George, UT) is a filmmaker based in Pennsylvania working in both 16mm and digital video. His films and videos explore and interrogate bodies, identities and places shaped by rigid boundaries and porous peripheries; his camera design often emulating such strict cultural and physical structures. Moss’ films have exhibited widely at festivals and venues throughout the globe, including Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Edinburgh International, Chicago Underground, Brooklyn, Crossroads, Cinequest, Athens, Maryland and Anthology Film Archive in New York. He teaches production, history and theory at Franklin & Marshall College.

“[Moss’ films, The Blue Record and That Dizzying Crest], I would say, fall into the realm of mastery—no one ought to be confused at their inclusion in any experimental film festival, and in fact I’d say all such festivals should program Moss’s work posthaste.”

—Michael Sicinski, Keyframe

“Considering the robust traditions of collaboration between experimental filmmakers and dancers/choreographers (a legacy which includes Abigail Child, Maya Deren, Henry Hills and Yvonne Rainer, as well as numerous contemporary artists), Moss’ contributions in this field are without a doubt exemplary and innovative.”

—Steve Polta, San Francisco Cinematheque