FOUR 3D SHORT FILMS BY BLAKE WILLIAMS

Born in Houston, Texas, filmmaker Blake Williams currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada. His acclaimed video work has screened at numerous international festivals, including venues such as the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and Locarno Film Festival.

"Williams is a multi-dimensional character. A writer whose work has frequently graced the pages of this magazine, he is also an academic and a film artist. And, as a filmmaker, he has no time for flatness. No filmmaker since Ken Jacobs has been so consistently committed to exploring the aesthetic potentials of 3D technology. From earlier works...to his suite of anaglyph films—Many a Swan (2012), Baby Blue (2013), Red Capriccio (2014), and Something Horizontal (2015)—the instability of screen space, and the points at which it encroaches into our own, has been one of Williams’s driving concerns." (Cinema Scope)

This edition includes the following short films:

Something Horizontal (10 minutes)

Flashes of Victorian domestic surfaces and geometric shadows transform the physical world into a somber, impressionistic abstraction, while elsewhere a spectre emerging from the depths of German Expressionism reminds us that what goes up always comes down.

Red Capriccio (7 minutes)

An anaglyph 3D found footage film about machines and landscape that interlaces motion with stasis, crescendos with glissandos, and reds with blues. Its three movements depict a parked Chevy Caprice police vehicle, Montréal’s Turcot Interchange, and an empty rave room.

Baby Blue (10 minutes)

An anaglyph 3D found-footage film. None of the source material was shot stereoscopically; rather, the 3D effects are reliant on the phenomenon of motion parallax. Via its time delay strategy, visual depth illusions manifest themselves (or not, in some cases) through horizontal motions in the camera and/or its subjects. Clips of trains, space shuttles, beaches, and cyclopes butt against one another to present a doleful impression of mutated technologies, gestures, and species.

Many a Swan (6 minutes)

An anaglyph 3D found-footage film about folding — folding paper, folding land, folding video planes, folding timelines — bending a compilation of Grand Canyon video B-roll and Hollywood’s Golden Age of 3D into a single, mutated stream. Partially inspired by the work of the “grandmaster of origami,” Akira Yoshizawa (1911 – 2005).