Robert Fulton

A documentary about a legendary American film maker/aviator Robert Fulton who was contracted by the BBC to film aerial cinematography throughout South America.

An unfinished examination of life by Robert Gardner

Fluidity of stone. Subatomic motion asserting a surface. Mind loop wandering. Visitation of sound matrix. Liquid solid. Nature transforms a planetary cycle. Relations of a timeless void.

"I traveled to Albany, NY, and called Robert Fulton and stated that I wanted to come and visit him in Newtown, CT. 'You can’t get here from there, look out the window and tell me what the clouds look like,' he said. I described them the best I could and he said, 'Meet me at Butler Aviation at the Albany airport, I will fly there in my plane and pick you up.' This film is a short homage to Bob and his family during the weekend I stayed at the Fulton Estate in Newtown." — DA

Rapidly changing images of natural objects, scenery, animals, plants, and people flicker, flash, tumble, and cascade across the screen.

Fulton made the film during his brief time at Harvard, where he had been invited to teach by Robert Gardner, his friend and collaborator (Fulton would later serve as a cinematographer on Gardner’s 1981 documentary Deep Hearts, among others). Reality’s Invisible could be described as a portrait of the Carpenter Center, yet it is a portrait of an extremely idiosyncratic and distinctive sort. Fulton moves us through the concrete space of the Center’s Le Corbusier-designed building—the only structure by the architect in North America—but, more centrally, presents us footage of students making and discussing their work alongside figures like Gardner, theorist Rudolf Arnheim, artist Stan Vanderbeek, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and graphic designer Toshi Katayama.

Robert Fulton asked me to join him to do aerial photography in the Southern Chilean Andes. We rigged microphones to record what we were saying to each other as we flew among these extraordinary formations.

Challenges; mental, physical, both? How far can you go? How fast? What’s it like to go three days without food and companionship? To run 15 miles, to climb a 14,000 foot mountain, to navigate in dense forest or open ocean, to rappel down a vertical cliff, or sleep in the snow? Teenagers find out in Outward Bound Schools throughout the country. The result is a positive sense of self and the natural environment. The film is fast paced with intentional disregard for time and space continuity. The students tell the story.

Behind the scenes look at the recording of a Dr. Pepper jingle. Commercial work.

Filmed in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Beginning with Genesis, the film follows the progress of civilization through to modern day Nairobi. Biblical themes combine with pulsating African music, wild animal sounds, and vivid imagery. Unusual juxtapositions of Bob Fulton's quick cuts and Brown's big lens shots of mega fauna and tribal dances mesmerize viewers.

Filmed in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Beginning with Genesis, the film follows the progress of civilization through to modern day Nairobi. Biblical themes combine with pulsating African music, wild animal sounds, and vivid imagery. Unusual juxtapositions of Bob Fulton's quick cuts and Brown's big lens shots of mega fauna and tribal dances mesmerize viewers.

11 minutes, 16mm, Color, Silent

Nature is our common impressional and biological ancestor. Its history is now, an open book of essences which we have largely, through the intervention of the industrial state, forgotten how to read. This film is a return to immanence, a restorative immersion, and does what film is best at: inducing a mood of informative ecstasy.

In Geshe Reading, Fulton captured an unedited conversation on spirituality with Geshe Ngawang Wangyal, the lama credited with leading the first buddhist community in the United States. Geshe Wangyal is featured in Path of Cessation, Starlight, as well as a number of Fulton works.

Movement of the body in all forms: dance, discipline, freedom, exploration, and the environment that surrounds it.

Glen Denny observed: "This film is not ocean, it is panther stalking jungle." Camera flows because it is free to move through space.

Nature, gymnastic movements, a cat...

"Like STREET FILM PART ZERO, PARIS BIRTH manifests with the employment of four projectors running simultaneously with image overlap. The film opens with one projector showing the film-maker's wife walking down a Paris Street. Short bursts of film, flash frames, jumps, and the gentle flow of motion and subtle color highlights the scene. When the other projectors are switched on, shown are isolated events leading up to the birth of a child. The mystical beauty of the film cannot be ignored and the pacing of the four images afford a kind of universal intimacy into the human condition of constant flux. Ordinary events, such as walking down streets, pouring coffee, talking on the telephone become extraordinary on the level of recognition of the regenerative process going on inside and outside the viewer."—Susan Headley

A portrait of Carlos Vilaro.

1 minute, 16mm, B&W, Silent

Creates a reorientation of vision in a union of sights and sounds which suggest a different way of appreciating and understanding the fundamental integrity of experience.

1 minute, 16mm, Color, Sound

Fluidity of stone. Subatomic motion asserting a surface. Mind loop wandering. Visitation of sound matrix. Liquid solid. Nature transforms a planetary cycle. Relations of a timeless void.

No synopsis available yet.

Crashing waves, the cry of a gull, silence.

5 minutes, 16mm, Color, Silent

Rapidly changing images of natural objects, scenery, animals, plants, and people flicker, flash, tumble, and cascade across the screen. Running Shadow is Fulton’s most dizzying and vertiginous film, in full demonstration of the gyrating flight simulating body-weight balance camera arm as eye he perfected. The landscape where he fully indulges in twists and turns becomes alien, with crashing waves on the soundtrack letting us know that nature always comes out on top.

In River Film, Fulton creates a portrait of the Roaring Fork River and its tributaries, the central artery of life near Aspen, Colorado, where he resided for many years.

In River Film, Fulton creates a portrait of the Roaring Fork River and its tributaries, the central artery of life near Aspen, Colorado, where he resided for many years.

Short film By Robert Fulton.

Short film by Robert Fulton