Now
Very Short Films (under 10 minutes!)
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4m 42s
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Wayne Koestenbaum • 2023 • 5 minutes
Now, a hand-made and hand-altered 16mm film, presents the viewer with a densely layered and wildly colorful pageantry of lines, splotches, scratches, and other painterly marks, applied to blank leader and to found footage. For this extravagant exercise in what is known as “direct cinema” or “cameraless filmmaking,” Koestenbaum bleaches or scratches the found footage, and draws and collages upon its surface, to create vertiginous streaks of hallucinatory flotsam, streaming by like a dream held up to a microscope for intricate scrutiny. Fragments of buried narrative appear, such as flashes of what appears to be a home movie of a wedding. On the soundtrack, Koestenbaum hums and sings an improvised song, celebrating the “now”—the present moment of consciousness, rendered permanent and vivid in this brief, ecstatic film.
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Reflection
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Ribbons for Peace
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