Connor Parsley

Poetic film about labor and color.

An avant-garde superhero film in five parts. Parsley's structuralist response to the genre.

Images of a Tree is a brief but intense film about death and the future of cinema. The project was shot at the site of where a close friend of mine passed away in a car accident about a year prior. Through both its form and content, the film poetically speaks on the medium of cinema and its relationship to the internet age, the apocalypse, and the different forms of death we are subjected to. As much as this film is about the future of cinema, it is just as much grappling with the future of death.

Chaos forms a rigid candle which in turn forms a symbol.

Drawing from guides as varied as children’s cartoons, Tibetan mantra meditation, social-media based ads, and drone metal, Train of Interference visualizes the invisible overlapping of worlds, images, and distinct building blocks of language in the pursuit of generating a form of utopian moving-image-based poetry. A lengthy split screen image of two train tracks running alongside each other serves as the centerpiece of the film, generating an ever forward-moving space for the viewer’s own individual inhabitance and visually guided meditation. Forced momentum through a gradient between two concurrent planes in space-time. The first fifteen minutes stand as a primer for this experience. Images flash by in slow motion; an examination of a fractured, cloudy, ever-morphing, collective mental landscape. The film serves as a lens to view the technological present as well as a deceptively simple map towards the future.

Empty Throne features Josh's empty apartment in footage that was sourced from archives of Josh's past YouTube videos. Empty Throne was originally conceived and displayed as an infinitely looping video for projection in a gallery setting. This is the film version complete with opening credits as well as a dedication to Josh Saunders (KingCobraJFS).

"This film is a culmination of my meditations with objects, both with and without a camera present, in order to attempt 3 things: breaking down the binaries that separate me from the objects, destabilize my hierarchical position over the object, and to peer into the objects' history and their possible thoughts/emotions. The title is the combination of two essential reference points: Notes From Underground (Dostoevsky) and A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway)." -Connor Parsley

A structuralist poetic film about Christmas.

"Damnatio memoriae" is a Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory." It refers to the practice of deliberately erasing or destroying records, monuments, and other traces of a person's existence as a form of posthumous punishment. --- An icositetragram is a 24-sided star. --- "Making a movie is casting a spell." -Kenneth Anger

A short, flashing experimental film about obsession, idols, and the internet.

Structural, poetic, personal film about Richmond, Virginia.

CLEARFILM, while originally done on 16mm, is ultimately a silent digital film. The pure magic of images morphing in time, joining two eras.

Shot during the 98th Academy Awards ceremony. A group of fashion terrorists kidnap an influencer in an attempt to convince her to join their cause.

Experimental short film by Connor Parsley. Skimming deals directly with the corporeal world coming into violent contact with the digital. Its structure and shapes are drawn from that of the handheld screen of the cellphone. This is simultaneously a hopeful and a depressed film about being a very small, intensely controlled organism in a hostile world. Also, one must ask oneself today in 2024, “Is the constant stream of light, images, sounds, and videos coming from my palm actually cinema or something else entirely?”

A cinematic attempt to cast a hex.

A fading drag queen tries to make a bold artistic statement while her roommate tries to find a job.

Shot and edited on 16mm Kodak 3383 color print stock, hand processed by MONO NO AWARE.

Various robotic narrators tell stories, get into arguments, and speak on isolation within this avant-garde essay film.