Robert Schaller
2021If Not One and One
Robert Schaller
Aleatorically derived (using Skittles and the Golden Ratio) from Homer’s Odyssey and Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, If Not One and One offers a kinetic and visual exploration of identity in a postmodern world. Its original production involved the dancer, Michelle Ellsworth, interacting with her own often abstracted image (filmed onto home-made gum-printed emulsion). The piece can be presented in a variety of ways, from (as here) a completely recorded event, to film with live music, to film with live music and dance. Shot with conventional cameras onto both commercial and homemade emulsions.
If Not One and One
Signals
Robert Schaller
A single human figure waves back and forth in a pattern that reproduces the composer’s movements making the shaker sound on which the piece is based. The movement was initially videoed with a phone, the sound recorded on a good deck. The video was then analyzed carefully frame by frame, and converted to a movement score that was then performed by a dancer and a homemade camera. In this process it becomes something other, refracted through multiple layers of interpretation, its calm insistence full of a sense of meaning that finally passes without ever having revealed more than the enigmatic gesture itself. Shot with a homemade pinhole camera onto homemade emulsion.
Signals
To the Beach
Robert Schaller
One hears in the call of the sea the feeling of a promise made to us before birth, that we can know the world not merely as an atlas of things seen, but rather as a continuum of felt experience in which it is impossible to distinguish between our selves and the world around us: self and other are melded into one. To the Beach explores this feeling from three vantage points, filmed (respectively) near, in, and under the sea using a variety of techniques, and registers the resulting images onto hand-made film emulsion. I. Approaching the Shore: in which the ocean first offers its irresistible salty scent. II. Swimming: in which we become again what we are. III. Seeing Stars: as above, so below.
To the Beach
Three Years On
Robert Schaller
In September of 2013, there was a massive flood in the mountains where the filmmaker lives, above Jamestown, Colorado. It was somewhere between a one hundred and five hundred year event. Houses, roads, and infrastructure were destroyed, and at least one person lost his life. For several years afterwards, everything about life was disrupted. The Jamestown flood was something of a best case scenario, given that it happened in a developed country with insurance and public works funding. And yet it was a disaster, pointing emphatically to the need to address the worsening global climate crisis that makes catastrophic events like this increasingly common. The film sets out to convey the sense of confusion and disorder written onto the landscape by the raging waters that still affect life years after the event that caused them. Shot with a homemade pinhole camera onto homemade emulsion.
Three Years On
