John Kneller
2021This Film Has No Commercial Value
John Kneller
Film made by John Kneller with a sound design by John Shipman. It focuses on the environment using time-lapse cinematography as a means to capture phenomena that is impossible to see with the naked eye. Automated pan, tilt and zoom mechanics were custom-built by the filmmaker to augment the time-lapse techniques. The resulting imagery is a hyper-reality of landscapes transformed by means of the camera's mechanical mediation. The sound design was created from naturally recorded sound phenomena and musical performances. The Romantic musical elements are reminiscent of lyrical depictions of nature and environment. The deliberate mediation of the sound and image suggests that our relationship to the environment cannot be viewed outside of the realm of the political. The film is a lament for the plundering of the earth. Paradoxically, the camera also exists to plunder the earth, mining images. The film was completed in 2006.
This Film Has No Commercial Value
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John Kneller
"Honouring the tradition of optically-printed films, 'We Are Experiencing ...' is a visual treat that manipulates, combines and recombines to dazzling effect. In this digital age, this optically printed film runs countercurrent to the trends. The film uses repeating imagery such as five autumn's worth of leaves, or the same images repeated, and the effect is mesmerizing." - Liz Czach, Toronto International Film Festival, 1997
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Synaesthetic Anaesthesia
John Kneller
The optical printer is used to manipulate archival imagery from the colonial era, forming a layered tapestry with contemporary images of landscapes, architecture and phenomena. By means of montage and optical recombination the film takes these historical fragments and builds them up to a frantic pitch. The film seeks to depict the frenetic digital information age but entirely through traditional photomechanical methods, a reversal of the norm. The sound design enhances the film's transformations, and provides a sensitive counterpoint to the "colonial eye." The role of the colonist as exploiter of natural and human resources is evident, the filmic mediation brings these images into a contemporary context.
Synaesthetic Anaesthesia
Axis
John Kneller
Axis takes as its subject matter the mundane, faceless urban landscape with its gleaming towers and factories. The workaday humdrum... drones to the hive. So I take to the streets, with my homemade Bolex robot, affectionately known as "BOLBOT." It is a time-lapse motion control machine capable of smoothly spinning through X-Y-Z axes continuously or in a stop/go pattern. The resulting footage is a transformed view of the city; urban scenes are in a continual state of exaggerated movement. A main idea of this film is to take mediated views of everyday city scenery and to elevate the city to a frenzied cosmic rendering with orb-like symmetries abounding. The city, and nature are transformed into a seething and pulsing mandala. The hope is that the spectator experiences meditative, trancelike states.
Axis
You Take the High Road
John Kneller
This film reflects the filmmaker's ambivalent feelings towards the new age of digital technology. As many as twenty picture elements per frame are composited by conventional and digital means. The resulting visual cacophony suggests a state of information overload.
You Take the High Road
Sight Under Construction
John Kneller
This project is envisioned as an experimental film that will seek to challenge the modern-day purveyors of culture: Hollywood and Madison Ave. The philosophical urging of this piece will be that man's over-reaching tendencies are based on human ego, and are out of balance with the natural world. The workings of a man's ego can bring about greatness in art and architecture, science and medicine, but can also bring about catastrophe. Willed obliviousness to impending disaster is a human flaw readily exploited by corporate culture and media. This film will challenge the 1990's credo: "Don't think about it, just do it!"
Sight Under Construction
Kinestasis
John Kneller
"KINESTASIS" consists entirely of advertising still images. These are collaged and heavily image-processed to achieve a phantasmagoric effect. The multiplicities of advertising images are occasionally juxtaposed with quickly morphing "slit-scan" images of skulls in mass graves. Multiplicities as viewed from opposing sides of the capitalist coin.
Kinestasis
