Charles Cadkin

A world full of Image Makers erodes the objective power of the kino eye. If everyone can capture a moment on video, one angle implies the existence of infinite possible perspectives. This convergence of distinct representations distills any given moment to an impression, a painting, a memory.

Eleven songs of Illinois, resurrecting ghosts across time and space. Each location borrowed from elsewhere. Among them Norway, Normandy, Lisbon, Ottawa, Peru, and Sandwich, forming the basis of a fragmented landscape study. The film traces the dissonance between ordinary Midwestern spaces and the histories embedded within their names. Fragments of local and global history, including ecological catastrophe, racial violence, failed harvests, murder, cultural displacement, and marginal history, emerge through voiceover created through artificial intelligence and synthetic image processes that destabilize the documentary image itself. Moving between essay film, landscape study, and horror cinema, the work examines naming as historical residue, a transfer of memory detached from geography yet still haunting it.

Kevin and Christian, the talentless hacks behind hit company Flubflabski, Inc. are forced to meet their destinies. Will they reunite and continue making fun vids for kids? Or is this the end of the Flubber Boys forever...? The fate of the internet hangs in the balance.

Commissioned by Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive as part of Century of 16mm. A camera roll and investigation into the landscape of West Chicago, IL’s former Rare Earth’s Facility, Kress Creek and Reed-Keppler Park. The former Lindsay Light and Chemical Company owned production plant polluted and distributed radioactive mill tailings (thorium byproduct) throughout the community including dumping in a landfill where the Reed-Keppler Park now stands, near the West Chicago Community High School, as well as in the West Chicago Sewage Treatment Plant, which resulted in runoff into the West Branch of the DuPage River and into floodplains such as the yards of homeowners. Mill tailings are effectively radioactive sand that can easily be carried by wind into bodies of water, the air we breathe or onto food grown nearby. Clean up of the Superfund sites occurred from 2005-2012 but prior to this West Chicago reportedly had elevated rates of cancer.

The third iteration of a continuing diary film. Five years and one roll of film distilled into three and a half minutes. The filmmaker captures a distinct period in their life, living and moving from Ithaca, New York to Chicago, experiencing and exiting the pandemic, seeing friends and taking road trips. Sound captured separately on a micro cassette recorder between 2019-2022.

A love letter to the first three months of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Eleven songs of Illinois, resurrecting ghosts across time and space. Each location borrowed from elsewhere. Among them Norway, Normandy, Lisbon, Ottawa, Peru, and Sandwich, forming the basis of a fragmented landscape study. The film traces the dissonance between ordinary Midwestern spaces and the histories embedded within their names. Fragments of local and global history, including ecological catastrophe, racial violence, failed harvests, murder, cultural displacement, and marginal history, emerge through voiceover created through artificial intelligence and synthetic image processes that destabilize the documentary image itself. Moving between essay film, landscape study, and horror cinema, the work examines naming as historical residue, a transfer of memory detached from geography yet still haunting it.

Commissioned by Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive as part of Century of 16mm. A camera roll and investigation into the landscape of West Chicago, IL’s former Rare Earth’s Facility, Kress Creek and Reed-Keppler Park. The former Lindsay Light and Chemical Company owned production plant polluted and distributed radioactive mill tailings (thorium byproduct) throughout the community including dumping in a landfill where the Reed-Keppler Park now stands, near the West Chicago Community High School, as well as in the West Chicago Sewage Treatment Plant, which resulted in runoff into the West Branch of the DuPage River and into floodplains such as the yards of homeowners. Mill tailings are effectively radioactive sand that can easily be carried by wind into bodies of water, the air we breathe or onto food grown nearby. Clean up of the Superfund sites occurred from 2005-2012 but prior to this West Chicago reportedly had elevated rates of cancer.

The third iteration of a continuing diary film. Five years and one roll of film distilled into three and a half minutes. The filmmaker captures a distinct period in their life, living and moving from Ithaca, New York to Chicago, experiencing and exiting the pandemic, seeing friends and taking road trips. Sound captured separately on a micro cassette recorder between 2019-2022.

A love letter to the first three months of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s the communities of Cannonsville, Granton, Rock Rift, Rock Royal, Johnny Brook and Beerston, NY were destroyed to make way for the Cannonsville Reservoir. The reservoir would serve as the last piece of New York City’s growing water infrastructure in a battle of upstate versus downstate. 60 years after vacating or moving their homes, former residents gather at their annual town reunion to reflect and reminisce on their memories and the collective trauma that they share.

On the Northwest side of Chicago, large swaths of people have been gathering for decades to fill their containers with water from a magical water pump.

An abstract narrative, diary film and travelogue reminiscing on the quotidian. My day to day routines and deviations from it are captured as 6 months pass on the screen in a blur. Musique concrète accompanies the visuals taken from vocal samples of myself as a child and repurposed. Ruminations on nostalgia, film as material and 16mm as a particularly evocative medium with a long history of home movies and nonprofessional filmmaking. The film acts as a document, archiving time and place, as a way for me to recount where and what I did at this point in my life-a point where I still feel an existential drifting and listlessness. Something to look back at and only make sense of after the fact.