Joel Schlemowitz

Filmmaker Alyssa Bolsey stumbles on a treasure trove of vintage cameras, old film reels, fading photos, technical drawings and boxes of documents that belonged to her great-grandfather Jacques Bolsey. Among the many boxes, she spots an old movie camera with the word "Bolex" embossed on its side and a dangling tag with the date, "1927." Entranced, she embarks on a journey to reveal how Jacques aimed to disrupt the early film industry with a motion picture camera for the masses.

A young man sets out on a journey to the Ogre's lair, in search of a feather with the power to save a dying king.

A film by Joel Schlemowitz

A scratch film.

Poem by Wanda Phipps (as read by her) and accompanied by the typeoclavecin, a typewriter as a musical instrument, built by the filmmaker for the accompaniment of poets through the technique of dictation.

A garden portrait for Doris Kornish.

FOGG was inspired, in retrospect, by Marie Menken’s BAGATELLE FOR WILLARD MAAS.

A short filmic portrait of Morris Engel’s watch-part collages.

American experimental filmmaker Joel Schlemowitz here pays tribute to Joe of Swiss Camera, a friend who repaired all of his Bolex 16mm cameras. A collage of images and sounds playfully portraying the technical process of capturing and displaying film, Schlemowitz is perhaps sardonically directing his camera upon us, the audience. Simultaneously a portrait of precision and a celebration of the coarseness of film itself, FOR JOE evokes the rhythms and spectacle of capturing image in an earlier era of filmmaking. - Stela Jelincic

A Bacchanalia, kindly provided by the Aesthesians, and set to the music of Saint-Saëns from an old 78 record.

Charged ambiguity in a sado-erotic setting.

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

"Made in the intentionally amaturish in style. No plot. No story. Just a series of suggestive tableaus."

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 Nikoli Tesla's many exotic phobias.

A film by Joel Schlemowitz

A short film by Joel Schlemowitz

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.

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

A hand-cranked film of a wind-up record player, hand-colored to simulate the unheard music.

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

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 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.

SHARE at the Project Room, in the final night in the silo, with a soundtrack of Gowanus environs.

Five variations on an unfriendly-looking object.

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.

A film by Joel Schlemowitz

"My earliest experimental film. The result of a conversation with filmmaker Carl Wiedemann on the subject of ripping film to vary the size of the image."