www.joelschlemowitz.com

Films

Short film rentals and institutional sales of "78rpm" available from The Film-Makers' Cooperative

Jonas's loft (2019) 16mm, 6 min.

Jonas Mekas's loft. Two rolls of 16mm film shot one week after his passing. In memoriam.

Jonas at the Gershwin (2019). 16mm, 3 min.

A 16mm camera roll. A panel on the films of Andy Warhol at the Gershwin Hotel. Jonas Mekas with his 8mm video camera. Silverly foil and neon clouds.

78rpm (2015), HD and 16mm, 98 min.

A film about the gramophone.

Screenings: Anthology Film Archives, NY NY 2015; Northwest Film Center Portland OR 2016; Moviate, Harrisburg PA 2016; Sight Unseen, Baltimore, MD 2017; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie NY 2017

Louis Armstrong Obon (2015), HD and super-8, 14 min.

A short documentary portrait of Japanese jazz musicians Yoshio and Keiko Toyama, seen through their annual visit to the grave of Louis Armstrong at Flushing Cemetery in Queens, NY.

Screenings: Japan Cuts, NY NY, 2015; Crossroads Film Festival, Madison, MS 2016

The Traditional Day for Eating Grilled Eel (2014), 16mm to digital, 6 min.

Events of a summer day in Tokyo's Yoyogi Park.

Awards: Juror Award, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival 2015

Screenings: Chicago Underground Film Festival 2015; Milwaukee Underground Film Festival 2015; Antimatter [media art] Victoria Canada 2015; The Iowa City Documentary Film Festival 2015; Alchemy Film Festival Hawick UK 2016

Natto (2014), super-8 to digital, color, sound, 8-1/2 min.

A brief discourse on the cultural conversation between the Japanese and the foreigner initiated by the question: "Can you eat natto?"

Chimera (2012), 16mm,

color, sound, 6 min. Illusions made manifest through light and shadow.

In Springtime (2012) 16mm, color, silent, 3 min.

The change of seasons, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

Scenes from a visit to Japan (2011) super-8, 14 min. A short travelogue, shot in super-8, divided in three sections. Eschewing narration, a poetic documentary, conveying impressions and invoking a short moment of elegy to the recent suffering in Japan through the aesthetic concept of yugen (evocation by what is left unsaid).

Screenings: Tribeca Film Festival, NY 2012

For Adolfas (2011), 16mm, b&w, 4 min.

In memory of Adolfas Mekas. 16mm footage shot at a book release party for "The Sayings of St. Tula" in 1999, and Adolfas's retirement party as head of The People's Film Department at Bard College in 2004.

"Dream twenty-four dreams per second." - St. Tula

Screenings: Chicago Underground Film Festival 2012

Victrola Cinema (2010) 16mm, b&w, 3 min. A tableaux vivant. The sound of the victrola employed "live" for screenings, utilizing the Vitaphone sound system. Created as part of Residency Unlimited: Special Features.

Nocturne [Avenue A, no lens] (2008) 16mm, 3 min

A camera roll stroll down Avenue A, New York City, shot without a lens. The specificity of time and place a partly ironic directive through which we can lens this little work, that might otherwise be lensed by us as non-representational cinema. A nocturne. Dashed off as a mere unedited camera-roll, a filmic "flinging of a pot of paint in the public's face," as has been said of some other nocturnes. And lastly, serving as a little saturnine invocation of the filmic flaneur.

Screenings: New York Film Festival 2008

Camera Roll (for Taylor) (2008) 16mm, b&w, 3 min.

A camera roll city cine-poem, filmed in Brooklyn in the vicinity of the Gowanus Canal. Screenings: Tribeca Film Festival, Olympia Film Festival

Teslamania (2007) 16mm, 6 min.

Two camera rolls shot at the Collective Unconscious during a performance of "Teslamania" featuring Gecko Saccomanno and Tesla Coil Engineer Jamie Mereness. The film's visual effects, double exposures, and refracted images, were all done in camera, just as we see them here. On the soundtrack Gecko provides various "Tesla tidbits," including Tesla's scheme to provide free electricity transmitted through the air, anecdotes about the Collective's Tesla Coil performances, "Tesla cooking," and a list of the inventor Nikola Tesla's many exotic phobias.

Music by Dorit Chrysler.

Screenings: Tribeca Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival

The Glowing Woman (2007) 16mm, 5 min.

Poem by Wanda Phipps. Spiraling colors and abstracted rotating text, poem by Wanda Phipps on the soundtrack both layered and singular. The color was created through hand-printing black and white film with a flashlight and colored filters onto unexposed color film in the dark.

morning poem #38 (2007) 16mm, 2 min. Poem by Wanda Phipps. Film version of an installation piece shown at the Courthouse Gallery at Anthology Film Archives.

morning poem #43 (2007) 16mm, 1-1/2 min.

A film of "morning poem #43," by Wanda Phipps.

The color was created through hand-printing black and white film with a flashlight and colored filters onto unexposed color film in the dark.

Dame Darcy - a film portrait (2007) 16mm, b&w, 5 min.

A short and lively 16mm portrait of comic book artist and performer Dame Darcy, seen through freewheeling tour of her comic book, "Meat Cake," and ending with the artist herself. On the soundtrack, a turn-of-the-last-century recording from a 78rpm Victrola record.

40/4000 (2007) 16mm, 3 min.

A camera roll. Forty years celebrated in four-thousand frames.

Loudmouth Collective / Ugly Duckling Presse (2003), 16mm, b&w, 20 min.

A film-portrait of the Loudmouth Collective and Ugly Duckling Presse. These poet-provocateurs are the creators of the infamous "Anti-Reading" series, a carnival-like alternative to the traditional poetry reading. On the film's soundtrack we hear how the Anti-Readings were started, descriptions of various Anti-Reading activities including the Poetry Fishing Pond, the Typewriter Inferno, Poetry-Poker, Poem Portraits, the smokable poems known as Poetry Cigarettes, the memory tester called "I Forgot," and the Diary in the shape of a Bunny. The film includes footage shot at Anti-Readings, with time-lapse, double exposures, distorting lenses, and frenetic non-traditional camerawork evocative of the playfully chaotic spirit of the events.

Awarded BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 2004

Screenings: New York Underground Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour

All Saints Day [2] (2002) 16mm 7 min.

co-maker, Jon Behrens.

A second collaboration between filmmakers Jon Behrens in Seattle, Washington, and Joel Schlemowitz in Brooklyn, New York, shot on ALL SAINTS DAY, November 1, 2001. They each shot 100 feet of film at the same time of the day 3,000 miles apart, and they did not tell each other what they shot. The film was hand-processed, cut up into two-foot lengths and then cut back together, alternating between Joel's footage and Jon's footage. The soundtrack for this film was done the same way.

Screenings include: Seattle Underground Film Festival

Boulder-Brooklyn, a correspondence film (2001), 16mm, 3 min.

Co-filmmaker: Nicole Koschmann

A three minute roll of film shot by Joel Schlemowitz of Brooklyn, NY and mailed to Nicole Koschmann in Nederland, just outside Boulder, CO. The two collaborators shot images on the same undeveloped film, fusing together images from New York and Colorado.

All Saints Day (2001), 16mm, color/b&w, 7 min.

Co-filmmaker: Jon Beherns

A collaboration between filmmakers Jon Behrens in Seattle, Washington, and Joel Schlemowitz in Brooklyn, New York, shot on ALL SAINTS DAY, November 1, 2000. They each shot 100 feet of film at the same time of the day 3,000 miles apart, and they did not tell each other what they shot. The film was hand-processed, cut up into two-foot lengths and then cut back together, alternating between Joel's footage and Jon's footage.

Moving Images - the Film-Makers Cooperative relocates (2001), 16mm, color/b&w, 14 min. voices: Jonas Mekas, MM Serra Jonas Mekas, one of the Film-Makers' Cooperative's founders, and MM Serra, the current executive director, describe the Coop's beginnings, the organization's recent struggles, and the difficulties of finding space for the arts, over richly layered images of the Coop's recent move. The Film-Makers' Cooperative, founded in 1962 as a filmmaker-run distribution center, is now the largest archive and distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world, with over 5,000 films and videos. Since 1967 the Coop had its offices at Lexington and 31st Street, but as documented in this film, it has now relocated to the Clocktower Gallery at 108 Leonard Street, New York City.

Awarded SILVER PLAQUE, Chicago International Film Festival

Screenings: Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, Denver Film Festival, Humboldt Film Festival, Thaw02 Film and Video Festival, International Art Film Festival (Slovak Republic), Seattle Underground Film Festival, Crossroads Film Festival, Arizona International Film Festival, Cucalorus Film Festival, Light Plays Tricks

Reverie (2001), 16mm, color/b&w, 7 min.

Music by Rebecca Moore.

A film in the manner of the Symbolists. A cascade of dream images in a gothic setting. The dreamer imagines flames and fur, Doré's depictions of Dante, a clutter of objects on a Victorian desk, all amid a web of Rebecca Moore's haunting music.

Broadcast on the Sundance Channel, as part of UNDERGROUND SHORTS

Screenings: Recontres internationales Paris/Berlin

Bagatelle Biologique (2000), 16mm, b&w, 4 min.

Corpuscles dash about. Nerves twitch. Neurons fire. Anatomical illustrations, overlaid with the body's activities scratched and handpainted directly onto the film.

In the Orbit of Marie Menken (1998), 16mm, silent (24 fps), 3 min.

My tribute to the filmmaker whose works helped give birth to my inpiration and my joy in experimentation with the medium of film. As a filmmaker, I am in the orbit of Marie Menken.

1734 (1997), 35mm, silent, 2 min.

A short film of number 1734 from Emily Dickinson's works, which begins with the line: “Oh, honey of an hour.” The words of the poem appear written onto the frames.

Invitation to a Voyage (1997), 16mm, color/b&w, 4 min.

After Henri Duparc's setting of the poem by Baudelaire, which is heard in faint echo on the soundtrack. Rococo adhesive transparencies over hand-colored film alternate with Jenn Reeves seen in black and white negative.

Bagatelle in Neon (1997), 16mm, 3 min.

Music by Marisol Limon Martinez

Lights at night on Avenue A, shot on black and white and extensively and laboriously hand-colored.

For Joe (1996), 16mm, color/b&w, 4 min.

A memorial film for Joe of Swiss Camera, repairer of all our Bolexes. I tried to make a film sardonic and precise, as I felt would be befitting to a person possesing both these qualities.

Filmpoem for Wanda Phipps (1995), 16mm, b&w, 3-1/2 min.

I came across Wanda's poem in a journal called The World, and it just struck me, so to speak. Before even meeting her I shot a roll of street scenes, and the rest is history.

Poem for the Past (1993), 16mm, color/b&w, 4-1/2 min.

A filmic analogy for the elusiveness of the past. The operations of unconventional printing techniques representing the processes of memory.

The film begins with 8mm home movies laid in a jumble over 16mm stock and exposed with a flashlight, and ends with the home movies run through a 16mm contact printer. Ticking clock, projector noise and Ligeti samples make up the soundtrack.

Channeled Energies (1993), 16mm, b&w, 3 min.

Three minutes of painful and pleasurable images glimpsed in negative juxtaposed with a single long scratch played on an optical reader on the soundtrack.

London Film Festival, 1993. Whitney Museum of American Art, 2000.