James Otis

A young woman stands by a car while scenes from metropolitan life flash by.

Into my hands fell a 20-minute exhortation to find the right job after high school. Struck by its fierce redundancy, I undertook a distillation, editing the optical track, aiming for conversational cadence, choosing image only when silent. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

All is inevitably one. With the golden mean as seed, the fruit is 10 sided. Not "?'s", but "?s'" in homage to Ken, who almost offhandedly wished for wheels within wheels. Breathtaking, mesmerizing, deeply satisfying.

Let's pretend that the friction between mono- and dicotyledonous forms (between, say, "lilies tulips the hyacinth" and "fruit blossoms the briar rose the passion flower" or, as here, English ivy) generates green. Partially computer generated. "What triangles do when no one is watching." - Andrzej Ehrenfeucht

Alternating between two cameras three feet apart, shooting black on each to match the image on the other, created in-camera A and B rolls for pseudo-hyper-stereoscopic view of two trees. Natural lighting cooperated.

The filmmaker courts the muse of computer art. At the gods' demand Calypso grants Odysseus freedom, but gives a cloak designed to drown. The melodic constriction of Schubert's "Das Wandern" paces an emerging imposition of grid upon randomness. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

William Sheldon's crackpot body typing, based on the superficially convincing fiction of universal endo-, ecto- and mesomorphic components of the human form, gave each person three numbers from 1 to 7, one for each of these three components, interpretable as coordinates of a point in a cubic parameter space. The result of decades of obsessive recording, his Atlas of Men contained standardized pictures of 1200 individuals, obvious animation fodder. Attending to fundamental cinematic concepts of cut, shot and motion, I employed a computer to reduce Sheldon's three dimensions to the one of time. Further programs turned the coordinates of bodily form into notes, giving endomorphy, ectomorphy and mesomorphy each their own voice. Thus each point in Sheldon's parameter space implies a type of human and, by my contrivance, a frame of film and a musical chord.

"Having moved from mountains to Denver I attempted to come to terms with the neighborhood." -James Otis

How may be unknown, but attaining the goal is certain. Dichotomous branching fractals incorporate carefully shepherded randomness. "Good Faith" Share the riches! Here's the catalog! "Bad Faith" Microbes of our soil zip beyond Pluto? "Justification by Faith" A leaf sings of seed forms. "Otis's computer animations glow as none other with intelligence of form, astonishing life-likeness of movement and the deep impress of personality." - Stan Brakhage

A delicate window study. "Outside, spring had come to Minnesota, while in here?"

One tree per frame, each from a different place on the surface of a doughnut-shaped parametric space, cooperate to rotate continuously, slowingly from the one- to the two-dimensional. After a pause accelerating counter rotations attain an approximation of a form of infinite dimension.

Computer generated. "With all the grace and flair of an elegant proof." - Carol Mickett. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

A terse alloyment of the elements shifts consciousness from subject to object. Purgation unto stillness condenses movement from through to of.

A casting up off of hands ironically employs a composition of renunciation. "Foregone Conclusion" for the dame the world as butterfly is perceived "Edit Synch" for the little boy down the land as crystal abstracted "Concluding Cone" and as rainbow trout for the master pondered. Hand made sound, hand made and lens-captured images. "Golly, I'm glad I'm not your girlfriend." - Friend of a friend upon viewing TRIPTYCH

Super8 James Otis film from 1980.

Upbeat, fast-paced, crowd-pleasing investigation of original sin and marketing, based on a South African apple juice commercial. The sound track is an obsessively synchronized mad marimba version of the old mission hymn, "From Greenland's Icy Mountains."

This film I found and found I could not change without degrading, too stunning was the as yet unknown hobbyist's joy in mixing potent, posed and oddly distant pictures from his private life with the symbols of small town identity politics Civic leaders of Boulder, Colorado organized the Pay Dirt Pow Wow in 1934 to bring miners and farmers together and lift their spirits with a community festival. Soon renamed Pow Wow Days, it was last celebrated in 1978.

In this poignant comedy about the pickle of incarnation, the soul, thwarted in its yearning for union with God, recognizing completeness closer to home, is reconciled corporeal existence. "I found myself needing to engage with emulsion without using a lens or a splice." Part 1- Growing awareness of the futility of the yearning. A perceived origin in the crystalline motivates fruitless if understandable invocation of kindred forms. Music by Dave Hewett and J. Otis with Dave Gamble Part 2- The soul's recognition of its enmeshment in matter and time, falsely termed a Fall. Music (Dumbo's humiliation by the clown before he knows that he can fly) by F. Churchill and O. Wallace Part 3- The soul, succumbing to the siren song of matter, returns home. Music (la ci darem mano from Don Giovanni) by W. Mozart, modulated J. Otis

World Premiere at Spectacle Theatre on June 13, 2025.

A film by James Otis.

Coming to grips with landscape via pseudo-hyper-stereoscopy. Your eyes are two-and-a-half inches apart, giving viscerally felt depth to 25 feet. If your eyes were 400 feet apart, you'd see solid forms three miles distant and think your grasp extended a mile. I established pairs of viewpoints up to hundreds of feet apart and jogged between, at each shooting a few frames. Since usual depth perception is only to 25 feet, we see anything in stereo as within that distance; mountains are seen as close and, hence, small. Filming took days and days: time, too, is miniaturized; shadows creep and clouds boil. Experience land as diorama and time as summary. UPPER BLUE LAKE, although not the most successfully pseudo-stereoscopic of several such wide-eyed studies, so enthralled me with its various qualities of light and atmosphere, I persevered, for five years jogging whenever I could, 12,000 feet high in the Colorado Rockies.

Eggs, mountains, thistles and ultimately a glorious burning bush, pulsing to a contrapuntal samba, harboring a bit of the surrounding void, the human heart. Computer generated.

Pseudo-hyper-stereoscopic view of one tree over three years. Shimmering life in flexible time, an antenna alert to whose vibrations?

"A Tree for the Angel-men." One tree one afternoon.

"Eighteen years of dinners are condensed in this affectionate family portrait which grew out of a family tradition of taking slides of holiday dinner posing." - James Otis