Eve Heller

A film woven around the idea that between early cinema and avant-garde film exists a connection.

An exploration of the space where femininity and criminality collide. The film collages archival footage clips culled from silent films, original footage and computer-generated imagery with a series of narratives drawn from true crime confessions, early criminological texts, and the filmmaker's own reflections. The result is a cool and piercing meditation on the way the categories of "woman" and "criminal" have been constructed.

Passersby at Astor Place in New York City speak silent volumes as they move by the mirrored surface of a diner window. I wanted to capture the unscripted choreography of the street, its dance of gazes and riddle of identities.

A found footage film that taps into the poetic tradition of the language cut-up, while taking filmic advantage of the 26-frame displacement between sound and image inherent to the optical soundtrack system of 16mm film. The magenta-shifted fragments of an educational film on "Reaching Your Reader" reveal their chemistry where the splicing tape ripped a "ruby skin" of the emulsion away from the base of the film, leaving a green tear at the edit points. Ruby Skin is a material homage to the disappearing medium and some of its idiosyncrasies.

"Vienna’s Jewish Währinger cemetery opened to the public in 1784, during an era of tolerance and prosperity that eventually coincided with the dawn of photography. With the rise of Nazism, this historical jewel of a Biedermeier cemetery was variously desecrated and became an overgrown wilderness, though passersby noted it sounded as if a paradise of birds was locked behind its high stone walls. The graveyard today bears further scars of political and inertial neglect. Without the care of generations displaced or killed during the Nazi era, graves have been decimated by the falling branches and uncontrolled growth of ancient trees while the words and symbols on tombstones disappear into dust. Singing in Oblivion interweaves footage shot on location with images painstakingly lifted from antique glass negatives and printed one frame at a time in a darkroom onto 35mm film strips." - Eve Heller

Twenty-plus former students, colleagues, and admirers of Peter Hutton answered an invitation to shoot A Roll For Peter. The parameters were simple: shoot a single 100 feet roll of black and white 16mm film. They were then strung together with black film separating the rolls, as Peter often separated the single shots in his films.It is a series of pieces that speak to Peter’s strong contemplative aesthetic ethos. Each filmmaker has 2 and half minutes of screen time to commune with Peter’s memory, and the collected rolls will become more than the sum of their parts.

A stunning avant-garde sci-fi assembled from ‘70s features and educational movies about time and space.

A film gleaned via the optical printer from a home market movie made in the late 1930's about a chimpanzee's high adventures in an amusement park at Coney Island. Central weight is given to the chimp's inscrutable gaze, indicating psycho-emotional territories informed by peculiar details that haunt the original. The resulting film is a slighlty hypnotic and open-ended parable about coming of age in a shifty world of slipping terms. LAST LOST is a silent film in spirit, trying to speak without words, like some dreams. (...) The primate of Heller's confabulation brings both peace and a sword. The reviving spirits that he releases are not easily compatible with the order of things, and such newfound awareness doesn't necessarily provide the keys to the kingdom but rather a profound uneasiness with the staple amusements and short circuitry of this provisional world.

A fragile Super 8 self-portait rediscovered on 35mm, made by a struggeling nineteen year old discontented with the pseudo-Brakhagean spectacle presented by her fellow students at the end of the 1970´s. I shot with a remote control and intercut magnetic striped passages of black to record my quandary. The paradoxical predicament of being both subject and object in myself resulted in a film that represents a perhaps obligatory phase of cinematic narcissism in the early work of an aspiring avant-garde filmmaker.

The world as seen in a teardrop of milk. I set out to make a film about how unwitting constellations of meaning rise to a surface of understanding at a pace outside of worldly time. This premise became a self fulfilling prophecy. An unexpected interior began to unfold, made palpable by a trauma that remains abstract.

"A slow motion blow-up to 35 mm foregrounds the kinetic serendipity of a handhold portrait shot in 1980 and entirely edited in-camera. At the time I explored the groundbreaking portability and technical features of Super 8 to capture the wild intensity of my dog Juice as we played in a down and out neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York. In 2009 I treated the film as an objet trouvé — without bettering its formal quirks and lags — documenting the so-called 'amateur' nature of the medium and an unselfconscious phase of filmmaking practice." - Eve Heller

The first film I ever made consists of the first roll of film I ever shot, entitled One. I made it for the first film class Keith Sanborn taught, in 1978 at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Buffalo, when he was a graduate student working with Hollis Frampton. I was 17. The assignment was to make a film using one roll of Super 8 film, without moving the camera. The result is a kind of poetic/cinematic one-liner. It is in tune with the structuralist spirit of the day - to my surprise.

A crossing of paths behind the seen, a labor of love in the wake of one who was just here.