Curt Heiner

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.

Short film by Curt Heiner

"Ghosts of Lost Futures" is a program of video works by 10 artists commissioned by the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection. Each artist was given access to the same cache of footage from the WFAA Newsfilm Collection shot in Dallas, Texas in the year 1970. The program was intended to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the archive, but due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, the program was not completed until the Spring of 2021. The artists were given complete freedom in how they re-interpreted the footage and its historical context. The resulting works are profound meditations on mourning, melancholy, disaster, and various reinterpretations of the events of 2020 and 2021 through images of Dallas' past. "The Stars of Texas Shine Tonight" is Curt Heiner's submission.