Max Devereaux

Co-directed by Max Devereaux and Igor Amokian, MD+IA=? is a sonic and visual collage that fuses circuit-bent electronics, broken tape loops, glitching drum machines, and free-improvised guitar. Amokian’s footage of modified CRT televisions generating unruly abstractions is layered with Devereaux’s processed iPhone videos, altered through datamoshing and glitch-editing apps. The result is a vivid collision of sound and image—a colorful flux of patterns and distortions where technology’s failures become raw material for improvisation.

Facing is a short experimental film that turns the grocery aisle into a frenetic canvas. Shot with rapid cuts and a constantly moving camera, the film zooms through product labels until they dissolve into chaotic blurs, streaks of color, and fractured lines. Familiar packaging blurs together in a fast, chaotic montage, where the images overlap and mix until they turn into shifting colors and patterns.

Lazy Boy unfolds in long, unhurried takes that mirror the stillness of its subject: a full-time furniture salesman in the South Bay of Los Angeles, working through the quiet despair of an economic recession. With customers scarce and sales impossible, the film lingers on stalled transactions and empty showrooms, transforming the monotony of labor into a portrait of endurance.

Hypnic Jerk unfolds as a dreamlike tale of a man who buys a banana from a street vendor and is drawn into a strange, shifting journey. Starring Thomas Roman Howell and Matt Bertzyk, the film moves between the everyday and the surreal, with quiet performances that bring depth and nuance. Through oblique gestures and subtle shifts in tone, Devereaux shapes a disorienting narrative that hovers between waking and sleep, humor and unease.

Waking Up is a quietly introspective short film shot entirely on location in Japan during Devereaux's first tour in the country in September and October of 2024. Filmed across Tokyo (Nakano, Ekoda, Shinjuku, Chiyoda, and along the Chuo Line), Matsumoto in Nagano, and Ukyo in Kyoto, the film captures fleeting, seemingly mundane moments that held deep personal significance for the filmmaker. Each shot captures a distinct moment when Devereaux felt his nervous system decompress just enough to be inclined to film — moments of stillness and clarity amid the motion of travel and creative exploration. Waking Up is both a poetic travelogue and a personal awakening. Echoing his own words — "When I arrived in Japan, it felt like I had finally woken up from a bad dream" — the film offers a meditative window into moments of quiet revelation, captured not for spectacle but for memory.

Shot in downtown Minneapolis, Rush Light assembles a rapid montage of fleeting street compositions. Through quick cuts and sudden shifts, Devereaux creates a collage of ready-made visual moments—buildings, signs, shadows, and chance alignments glimpsed in passing. The film operates as both a study of three-dimensional space and a meditation on the eye’s ability to seize upon images in a split second. Color, light, and shadow flicker across the frame, transforming the city into a shifting field of accidental design.

Max Devereaux and Suko Pyramid documentary about the making of their first three albums together as a duo and the story of their inspiring, international collaboration. Produced entirely remotely, featuring never-before-seen photos, videos and audio as well as interviews with close collaborators from all over the world.

Mineral Bar is a meditative short film shot on location along the North Fork of the American River in Colfax, California. The film focuses on the natural interplay between rocks and rushing mountain runoff, capturing the hypnotic dance of crystal-clear water as it flows, ripples, and reflects light in ever-changing patterns. Through lingering shots and immersive sound design, the film highlights how the cold Sierra Nevada waters sculpt and animate the riverbed, creating a quiet yet dynamic visual experience.

Unfurl is a minimalist short film composed of six contemplative shots featuring different colored plastic bags placed before a dual-camera setup, presented in split-screen from two contrasting angles. Each sequence begins with Devereaux's hand compressing a bag, then releasing it — allowing the material to slowly expand. The initial release is rapid, but the motion soon settles into a meditative, near-slow-motion unfurling, drawing attention to the subtle behavior of shape, light, and texture. Inspired by a live performance Devereaux witnessed of avant-garde composer Takehisa Kosugi — specifically his act of wrapping a microphone in paper during a performance at the Getty Center's Rajikaru! conference — the film channels a similar spirit of experimental material interaction, silence, and focused perception. Unfurl invites viewers to observe slowness and transformation as a form of quiet performance.

Digital Smoke is an experimental meditation on light, memory, and distortion. Shot at twilight in Minneapolis’s Loring Park, the film captures the moment just after sunset, when street lamps flicker on and reflect across the lake. As Devereaux moves the camera backward and forward, fading light introduces digital noise. Rather than correct it, he amplifies the imperfection, layering light trails until the noise becomes ethereal white clouds—“digital smoke”—that dissolve the boundary between image and abstraction. Frames evoke the hazy textures of J.M.W. Turner and the pixelated aesthetic of early video games, blending painterly romanticism with digital fragmentation.

Filmed over five years across varied sites, Devereaux gives quiet attention to the shifting sensations of place. From rain and snow to beaches, mountains, and city streets, the film traces environments in contrast: rural and urban, water and land, summer and winter. These images, held in long takes, resist narrative flow, instead assembling a meditation on how landscapes provoke moods, memories, and ideas.

Made in response to Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, Devereaux turns his camera on the gardens of Loring Park in Minneapolis, attempting with reckless abandon to capture every flower in sight. The film emerges as an impressionistic study of color and form—fragments slipping out of frame, dissolving into blur, or flaring into pure surface. These fleeting images converge into unpredictable patterns of sensation and meaning.

Shot in long, contemplative takes, Madrona Marsh lingers on the last remaining vernal freshwater wetland in Los Angeles’s South Bay. Amid Torrance’s dense urban sprawl, the film observes the marsh as an unlikely oasis—home to birds, fish, insects, reptiles, and moments of quiet human presence. Influenced by the rhythms of slow cinema’s great masters, Devereaux shapes stillness and habitat into a meditative portrait of fragile ecology and the persistence of life within an urban environment.

Filmed during Max Devereaux’s senior year of high school with classmates as cast and crew, this black-and-white short tells the story of a man who wakes from a nightmare only to find the undead stalking the night. Originally released in 2013 with an unlicensed score, it was quickly taken down, only to be resurrected nearly a decade later as a silent film with a newly improvised free-jazz guitar soundtrack by Devereaux himself. Equal parts horror homage and DIY time capsule, the film transforms its youthful origins and troubled history into a fittingly undead return.

Drawn again from footage shot in the Torrance Public Library parking lot, Introduction to Crack Sealing 3 remixes material from the first two films into a new visual texture. Where the earlier works traced and fractured the asphalt lines, this version overlays them through double exposures that randomly overlap and fade in and out. The result is a shifting, layered surface in which gestures collide, blur, and dissolve, creating a cracked field of inscription.

Filmed in the same Torrance Public Library parking lot, Introduction to Crack Sealing 2 reworks the material of the first film into a sharper, more fractured arrangement. Where the original moved fluidly along the wavering asphalt lines, this version interrupts and jolts—images are thrown at the viewer in abrupt succession rather than unfolding in smooth sequence. At irregular moments the progression halts, pausing briefly to give the eye a fleeting chance to study a composition before the next cut arrives. Silent and stripped down, the film turns the repaired surface into a volatile field of inscription, where repair becomes staccato mark-making and perception itself is fractured into sudden bursts of line and form.

Shot in a series of long-takes over several days, the film follows a flower shop attendant (played by Devereaux, then actually employed at a small flower shop by the beach) in fragmented detail. The order of scenes resists chronology: moments recur, shift, or vanish, creating not the passage of a single day but the jumble of many, refracted into a meditation on routine and its quiet abstractions.

Filmed in the parking lot of the Torrance Public Library shortly after its surface was repaired, Introduction to Crack Sealing traces the calligraphic gestures left by flexible rubberized asphalt. Devereaux’s camera follows the wavering lines, skipping from one to another, turning the utilitarian marks of maintenance into strokes of abstract drawing. Silent and pared down, the film reframes the parking lot as a field of accidental composition, where repair becomes inscription and the act of seeing becomes a study of gesture itself.