Remaining Light: Trailer (2021)

Remaining Light is a quintessentially millennial film that uses the allegory of the road trip to highlight the dissonance between the future we were promised and the reality we live. When faced with that binary we see that toxic narcissism and hopeful optimism are two sides of the same coin.

Sometimes Our Friends Come Over (and sometimes we’re all alone): Trailer

"A Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" for Trump's America of sorts, Sometimes Our Friends Come Over... is the story of a couple considering the future of their relationship in a post-futurist world. Beset by vague maladies and self-sabotage, we come to find that in some cases, staying together may be the saddest ending of all.

Bite Mark Evidence, 2021

A film about a highly controversial forensic technique that gained national prominence during Ted Bundy's trial for the murder of Lisa Levy.

Cursed Objects, 2021

A landscape film about the Hillside Stranglers - a serial killer duo who stalked Los Angeles in the mid-late 1970’s.

I Love You, 2014

More so than photographing the subject into nothingness, the camera here reassembles its subject with every repetition allowing the image to constantly redefine itself while simultaneously heading down path towards the undefinable. Without filtration or synthesizers, I Love You uses re-photography to create several generations of the same small clip reducing a cultural artifact into an abstraction of sound and image.

Reactor 4 by Chestnut, 2020

off their latest album 'Dark Tourism' Directed by Daniel Watkins Edited by Christina Santa Cruz

Suffering for the Duration, 2012

Suffering for the Duration, is cinematic critique at its most primitive. It explores the physical properties and limitations of the apparatus by burning the surface of 16mm film with a soldering iron. In doing so we witness the chemical changes that occur within the celluloid as it attempts to hold itself together. It is cinema fighting for its own life, and in that fight we witness the literal disintegration of the close up, the wide shot, etc., leaving in their place a violent abstraction of light and shadow.

Fever (Lake Monroe, Sanford, FL), 2016

Lake Monroe at 6:45 am is rendered into abstraction through re-photography (multiple generations of the same footage, copied over and over and over again). My own personal history with this place blends together with the history of the land itself to create a moving image which slowly "un-defines" itself. Unbecoming here is a way of saying goodbye to the place that raised me.

Widescreen, 2011

Widescreen is a technological separation of the elements that we popularly define as cinema: time, light, and spectacle. Exhibited ideally as two rear-projected screens installed in direct conversation with one another, the audio/video are looped to create a sort of moving image corridor. Using these exhibition techniques allows for the film to interact with its environment as well as the viewer. Patrons would be allowed to pass between the two screens/walls adding to the piece a multitude of personal narratives and desires; elements that are ultimately translated into the cinema of a given society. Those stories exist here literally and in the ever fluctuating space between light and time.

Fun World, 2011

In Fun World I work within the aesthetic discourse of narrative cinema and use that established grammar to play against viewer expectations, in turn dismantling any preconception one could have regarding the images meant to logically proceed other images. An example can be found in the film's second shot as we move through a child's birthday party. The move at first appears to be a dolly towards the Mother, yet as we pass her it becomes a move towards her son, but we ultimately pass him, and move towards an empty booth. A shot that, at various moments in its duration seemed to have a specific focus, is revealed to have no true subject. This is an example of the plurality of the undefined image; “une image juste” rather than “juste une image.” When you refuse to define your images you open them to a multitude of possible meanings, thus freeing them from the “image stream” and releasing them to a much larger series of histories. Not simply a history of cinema, but also a history of images. Through this technique one can approach what Robert Bresson defined as “cinematography.”