Al Razutis

Visual Essays: Origins of Film (1984)

These six essays on film/image history reconstruct cinema history by 're-imagining' its origins, and its poetries, and use historical films themselves (as 'text') to provide the meanings of their creations. Together, these film essays comprise a critical/s ...

Amerika (1983)

Amerika is a "feature-length experimental film which was created one reel at a time to function as a mosaic that expresses the various sensations, myths, landscapes of the industrialized Western culture (1960's -1980's) through the eyes of media-anarchism ...

For Artaud (1982)

Lumiere's Train (Arriving at the Station) (1979)

The subject of the first essay is cinema itself: an apparatus of representation wherein fact and fiction are recreated. As such, the pro-filmic facts are necessarily drawn from two of cinema's "pioneers": Louis and Auguste Lumière and Abel Gance (La Roue) ...

Ghost: Image (1979)

A Message from Our Sponsor (1979)

he claustrophobia of media "reality" - compartmentalized into game shows, movies, news reports, commercials - is presented as continuous interchangeable spectacle. This film looks at the ideology of misrepresentation, the turning of facts into icons, histo ...

Portrait (1978)

This silent 9 minute film is like a 'pointillist painting' come to life - where grainy shapes reveal themselves to be part of a visual jigsaw puzzle - an assembly over time - and where the film-maker's daughter serves to be the subject of this painting in ...

Egypte (1977)

ÉGYPTE is a meditation on ancient time and space. Inspired by the Tibetan Tantric chants of the Lamas (which also comprises the sound track), this impressionistic piece presents the ancient sense of 'mystery' without recourse to narration or didactic (his ...

Sequels in Transfigured Time (1976)

The principle of stillness in Sequels in trasfigured times is like a botanical drying procedure for film which conserves a fixed but superb memory of the shapes. ...

The Cities of Eden (1976)

Reconstructed from turn-of the century footage, an ironic vision of high industrial pomp and pageantry - in substantial shadows of ancient prerogatives engulfed by history. Original historic footage from eras long past is rendered as 'bas relief' in changi ...

The Wasteland and Other Stories (1976)

Travel as mediated spectacle, a time lapse journey from Vancouver to Reno and Las Vegas Nevada; speed as stasis, abstraction, violence, culminating in a 'televised abduction and police chase at the border' and a 'letter to home'. Within this long, high-spe ...

Aurora (1974)

Aurora is a analog videosynthetic work incorporating film loops subject to colorization, quantizing and layering and was created by Razutis at the video facilities of Evergreen State College (where he taught in 1972) and Vancouver (Visual Alchemy) utilizin ...

Runway Queens (1974)

This short film video hybrid, combining film and video processing (colorizing, feedback, mixing, quantizing) saturates the viewer's sensorium with colors and echoes and the burlesque grinds of the 1940 and 1950's dancers as recorded on historical footage. ...

The Moon at Evernight... (1973)

Built on the subliminal manipulation of forms and motion, this film's elusive, fiery images flare up and die back into the night void in recurring cycles, like the fixed but fragmentary elements of some forgotten myth or spell. Violent lyricism and lycanth ...

98.3 KHz (Bridge at Electrical Storm) (1973)

A repeating journey across the San Francisco Bay Bridge becomes a journey into disintegrating visuals, video transformation, with an accompanying sound track taken from "40 years of Radio". As a film, it anticipated the end of the film medium, and the emer ...

Méliès Catalogue (1973)

Le Voyage (1973)

"A rich visual elaboration, through optical printing, of an archetypal realm characterized by the opposition/interplay of consciousness and matter in discontinuous time. The central image is of a ghost-ship in a storm, and the entire film contains only fou ...

Visual Alchemy (1973)

A poetic document depicting psychological, alchemical, and physical aspects of earlier work in visual "transmutation" at the Visual Alchemy Studio, Vancouver 1973. The work depicted in this film includes early holography at this first art-holography studio ...

Vortex (1972)

In 'Vortex', the intense subjectivity of techno-psychedelia converges with the technological gamesmanship of the space race. The subject matter, however, is 'space' and extinction. ...

Software (1972)

In 'Software', the pixel lights of the industrialized world (electrical power) are re-formed in the speckles and patterned light of the video screen: a metaphor for energy as information transfer, but still at the service of the power structure. This short ...

Aaeon (1970)

AAEON is based on experiments with dream recollection, and features the first optical printer technology developed in Vancouver and used in many of Razutis' later films. ...

Le bulbe tragique (2016)

Ephemeral traces of nothingness—rotoscoping farmers, crumbling churches, dying memories as hand-painted layers, decay & collage on film emulsion as incidental traces of nothingness. A work that is aware of its own mechanisms. ...

Visual Essays: Origins of Film (1984)

These six essays on film/image history reconstruct cinema history by 're-imagining' its origins, and its poetries, and use historical films themselves (as 'text') to provide the meanings of their creations. Together, these film essays comprise a critical/s ...

Amerika (1983)

Amerika is a "feature-length experimental film which was created one reel at a time to function as a mosaic that expresses the various sensations, myths, landscapes of the industrialized Western culture (1960's -1980's) through the eyes of media-anarchism ...

Aaeon (1970)

AAEON is based on experiments with dream recollection, and features the first optical printer technology developed in Vancouver and used in many of Razutis' later films. ...