Lily Jue Sheng

This almost went in the trash because it’s a poor image. It’s self-conscious and struggling to not be so poor, kind of angry about it. It’s also a shadow companion to MERCURIAL MATTER made at a time I held a job upstairs ingesting filmmaker (and former AFA projectionist) Stom Sogo’s mind-bending Super-8mm films.

Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, is explored in a delicate and ethereal manner, layering space, time, and the elements of life. This ancestral art is observed from a distance, so as to never interrupt the movements of its practitioners. Rita Ferrando’s Ikebana is a hypnotic work with somewhat esoteric narration that highlights each step in the process with animations emphasizing the meticulous and meditative deeper meaning behind the art. This hybrid structure raises questions about the art of representation, inevitably present in cinema. How can we grasp the essence of what we want to show on film? Ikebana suggests that what we seek may be hidden well beyond the visible realm.

Change is a 16mm text animation that deconstructs and manipulates Chinese language in its representation of morphology, Taoist principles, and celestial cycles of time. The title refers to the I Ching, the Book of Changes, and 变 (traditional: 變), the Chinese word for 'change', in its translation that implies 'transformation'.

'Chameleon' repurposes security envelope patterns into hand-processed color photograms through several generations of contact and optical printing. Live performances feature variable speed projection, heightening the experience of scale and movement.

'Seeing Double' is a stop motion collage animation that exploits the frame-by-frame structure of film within the fleeting pace and temporality of an immersive optical experience. A series of flickering compositions explore the cycles inherent in all scales of biological matter, ranging from flora and fauna to terrestrial topographies. The geometric, yet nebulous forms reflect the dichotomy between the imposed order and erratic flux of nature.

Pedestrian scenes recorded in the background of larger ongoing projects while passing through Shanghai, Keelung, Taipei, and Taoyuan. Culture is not just measured in time and travel to the historic place(s) marked by heritage or mediated cinema. The paradox of culture, one affectively caught up in the familiar and alien, and architecture itself lays bare the very infrastructure we call culture. The film fell together walking Hongkou, where my family is from – looking up old spots, finding eminent domain streets instead. In Taiwan, we encounter deities’ birthdays, street vendors, and A Maiden’s Prayer littering streets all year round. Congregations encompassing the passionately devoted, as well as those bored and impatiently melting under the sun, come to perform this act called spiritual life to captive audiences – which cannot be distilled to geography or god-fearing seen on the surface, but ebbs and flows as money changes hands and interests over generations.

FIVE MOVEMENTS is titled after the system wǔxíng, which is very hard to describe, but in this film manifests as dreams and waking life enmeshing in the space of personal melancholia, theater, and myths surrounding the home. This new (2024) cut features recent images and videos recorded in Edison, New Jersey, and Shanghai.

Early animistic animations using travel mattes and optical printing to layer single-frame captured images into botanical and graphic collages.