J.J. Murphy
2021Print Generation
J.J. Murphy
J.J. Murphy’s feature length experimental film is a meditation on light, chemistry, and the properties of photographic emulsion and can therefore be identified as a structuralist film. Beginning with points of red light, the film takes a single minute of film and reprints in over and over, moving through several levels of abstraction, then returning to them. Winner of several experimental film festival awards.
Print Generation
Highway Landscape
J.J. Murphy
The filmmaker describes his work as 'a single take, fixed camera meditation on a dead rabbit on Highway No. 1, outside Iowa City.' As the viewer stares at the almost still-life, the elements of composition come together in sad juxtaposition; the silence of death is set off against the impersonal whizz of passing cars, their momentary appearance in the frame creating almost subliminal flashes of bright metallic color.
Highway Landscape
Sky Blue Water Light Sign
J.J. Murphy
"Sky Blue Water Light Sign is best seen in total innocence. My guess is that if one knows what he or she is looking at before seeing this little film, half of its excitement and a good deal of its meaning disappears. Seen in total innocence, though (and maybe I’m exaggerating the importance of this), SKY BLUE WATER is a wonder. With Gottheim’s Blues and Frampton’s Lemon (for Robert Hunt), it is one of the happiest, most uplifting short films I’ve ever seen.” – Scott MacDonald, Idiolects" -- Scott MacDonald, Idiolects
Sky Blue Water Light Sign
Science Fiction
J.J. Murphy
Science Fiction is a found-footage film that playfully explores the space-time continuum as it applies to narrative structure. Max J. Alvarez in the Milwaukee Journal writes: “J. J. Murphy’s Science Fiction, a dazzling five-minute experimental fantasy that at first appears to be a 1950s travelogue gone awry, features technical trickery that will impress and bewilder filmmakers and filmgoers.”
Science Fiction
The Night Belongs to the Police
J.J. Murphy
Music: The Republicans, The Appliances, and The Suburbs "THE NIGHT BELONGS TO THE POLICE concerns a burned-out agoraphobe (Jerome Carolfi), his frustrated girlfriend (poet Tess Gallaher), a wonderfully kinetic proto-punk Tinkerbelle (Michelle Davis), and a malevolent network of chiropractors. A satire of fashionable nihilism, it manages to simultaneously mock and embrace the so-called posturing of the so-called New Wave. It is, most of all, funny."–Chris Ward, CityLights
The Night Belongs to the Police
In Progress
J.J. Murphy
"IN PROGRESS is a 20-minute time-lapse movie recording the passage of days and seasons from September through May on a bit of landscape photographed on an Iowa farm. The camera doesn't move (though there are two or three slightly different locations) and it is so nearly passive that at one point frost is allowed to form on its lens, and at another the dew turns its image into a glamorous haze.
In Progress
Movie Stills
J.J. Murphy
"The more recent MOVIE STILLS (1977) is a melancholy procession of frozen moments being born, ripening, beginning to die before our eyes. Murphy selected 16 frames from a found home movie, photogrpahed them with a polaroid camera, then filmed the three minutes it took each image to materialize. Because of the higher contrast caused by this rephotography, the pictures seem to be darkening past their prime just as Murphy cuts to the enxt. Every shot starts out white and there's a key element of suspense as one's retitnal afterimages compete with the emerging forms of the developing photo. After a while, the ghost of an anecdote – a woman and two men mugging for the camera, an odd flirtation – develops too. 'A photograph is a secret about a secret,' Diane Arbus once wrote. '"–J. Hoberman, Village Voice.
Movie Stills
