Deep Focus Short

Speaking through her alter ego and a male voice, Cauleen Smith’s biography contrasts semi-true fiction with media representation.

What is pure cinema? Henri Chomette’s answer to this question is a seminal investigation into the nature of film.

The mystery of insect flight explored. Interpretations of a mythological and fantastical nature are illuminated in motion and time.

Smith brings together the forced migration of birds, the treatment of people of colour and Syracuse’s connection to the birth of stereoscopic photography.

Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking-Glass illuminated. Illustrations retreat into the fibre of the page, light dissolves into the film emulsion.

Fragile leaves and fine threads of fungus string together, like an obscure genre of 17th century painting: Forest Floor Paintings.

Greetings to mankind! The five-note sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is performed outdoors by New Orleans musicians.

A silent film celebrating dialogue. Choreographer Taisha Paggett dances on a grassy empty lot in Chicago, communicating in semaphore.

This play of observation scans Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking-Glass with magnifying glasses, used by both entomologists and filmmakers alike.

Stan Brakhage is attracted to creating films like an insect to light. Mothlight resurrects dead moths in the projector’s beam.

An intoxicating flower drenched in luminous colours and sparkling light. Such luxurious and temporary beauty shows the transience of life.

A recording of a piano performance by Alice Coltrane guides Cauleen Smith through three sites of creativity and generosity across the USA.

Delicate threads of energy spiral into mysterious cells of golden dust: these are the luminous particles of the alchemist’s dream.

An encounter with a mysterious, luminous substance and the mythical star jelly. Coronal Kirlian photography joined with hand-processed images.

A flash-mob performance of Sun Ra’s anthem Space Is the Place, performed by The Rich South High School Marching Band.

Glowing germs and flowers colour this alchemical 16mm miniature. Pryce spins gossamer golden threads in the silent darkness of the cinema.

Live performance with vintage magic lantern and handmade slides tells the story of an outlaw: a science-fiction fable for the Anthropocene.

Reading as a radical act. Cauleen Smith stages three readings of excerpts from Gerda Lerner’s book Black Women in White America.

Live performance with vintage magic lanterns and handmade slides tells the tale of famed naturalist Hudson's spellbinding recollection of birds.

Collage of paintings from the Renaissance, combined with hand-painted images. A portrait of stillness and silence, disturbed by the urgency of sadness.