Robert Schaller

A pinhole film shot and processed during the 2008 Wilderness Film Expedition in Colorado; the footage was edited later at home. A journey to the trip's highest point, Big Agnes Mountain, to see what we could see.

Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion, 4 Ukrainian girls were forced to leave home and proceed their paths abroad, now living two lives at a time. The attempts to settle down in a foreign country are constantly interrupted by internal doubts, fear for the family back home, chats with friends who joined the army, and feelings of constant uncertainty about the future.

A single human figure waves back and forth in a pattern that reproduces the composer’s movements making the shaker sound on which the piece is based. The movement was initially videoed with a phone, the sound recorded on a good deck. The video was then analyzed carefully frame by frame, and converted to a movement score that was then performed by a dancer and a homemade camera. In this process it becomes something other, refracted through multiple layers of interpretation, its calm insistence full of a sense of meaning that finally passes without ever having revealed more than the enigmatic gesture itself. Shot with a homemade pinhole camera onto homemade emulsion.

A reflection on an ancient act. A letter from the ephemeral pinhole world is sent, written, and received. Shot with a homemade pinhole camera onto commercial emulsion.

In 2014, Curt Heiner, Robert Schaller, and Armand Yervant Tufenkian made a film in Colorado's Mt. Zirkel Wilderness. It briefly chronicles both a climb and the struggle to document it using a handmade photographic emulsion that was prepared and coated onto celluloid outside on a rock at night using water from a rushing creek, rolled up before dawn during a lightning storm, shot under the constant threat of more lightning, and processed carefully on-location the next night. What results is presented as it came out of the camera, the result of a collaboration between the filmmakers and the wilderness environment where they lived for a week.

Downhill skiing has been a big part of my life both growing up and as a parent; whatever problems it raises (and there are some!), the way in which it facilitates being in the mountains in the winter as a joyous immersion in beauty, friendship, athleticism, and family is profound. This film captures something of my experience of skiing as witnessed through a homemade camera built for making it.

In September of 2013, there was a massive flood in the mountains where the filmmaker lives, above Jamestown, Colorado. It was somewhere between a one hundred and five hundred year event. Houses, roads, and infrastructure were destroyed, and at least one person lost his life. For several years afterwards, everything about life was disrupted. The Jamestown flood was something of a best case scenario, given that it happened in a developed country with insurance and public works funding. And yet it was a disaster, pointing emphatically to the need to address the worsening global climate crisis that makes catastrophic events like this increasingly common. The film sets out to convey the sense of confusion and disorder written onto the landscape by the raging waters that still affect life years after the event that caused them. Shot with a homemade pinhole camera onto homemade emulsion.

An imagining of a bee’s eye view of a spring day in Golden Gate Park. A primitive, home-made camera reveals a world of vibrant, frenetic color, racing between flowers and losing itself in the revelry of survival and sunshine.

An excursion into the world of hand-made film emulsion and an exposition of some formal possibilities of using three images side by side. A dancer's brief gesture is treated, repeated, and juxtaposed, becoming the fabric of visual construction that is less about representation than rhythm and time. Originally a work for three projectors, it is here composited onto a single strand of film.

A vision of the mountains in which I live, both gentle and harsh, domestic and wild, populated and not. Shot on a homemade pinhole camera. Edited initially in 2007, then finished and printed in 2010.

The structures of our thought filter what we see, and in fact there is no seeing apart from those structures. This film is part of an ongoing project to show where I am in a (here, natural) landscape in a way that reflects those structures of thought. It is "hypnogogic," not so much perceptually (although to some extent that too) as conceptually. Our eyes see constantly, but what do we actually notice? That vision is excessive, wasteful, even; in paring down, it becomes both more spare and more concentrated. It is also a meditation in process of how my marvelous son Marcus has changed my life and my way of being in the world, recoloring a place where I was already.

An optical quest to capture the experience of running through the Colorado mountains on and around the Continental Divide.

One hears in the call of the sea the feeling of a promise made to us before birth, that we can know the world not merely as an atlas of things seen, but rather as a continuum of felt experience in which it is impossible to distinguish between our selves and the world around us: self and other are melded into one. To the Beach explores this feeling from three vantage points, filmed (respectively) near, in, and under the sea using a variety of techniques, and registers the resulting images onto hand-made film emulsion. I. Approaching the Shore: in which the ocean first offers its irresistible salty scent. II. Swimming: in which we become again what we are. III. Seeing Stars: as above, so below.

Aleatorically derived (using Skittles and the Golden Ratio) from Homer’s Odyssey and Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, If Not One and One offers a kinetic and visual exploration of identity in a postmodern world. Its original production involved the dancer, Michelle Ellsworth, interacting with her own often abstracted image (filmed onto home-made gum-printed emulsion). The piece can be presented in a variety of ways, from (as here) a completely recorded event, to film with live music, to film with live music and dance. Shot with conventional cameras onto both commercial and homemade emulsions.