The Cedar Closet is an ongoing collaborative video series between myself and artist Jula Yanna. It is hosted on Youtube.

LINK TO WEBSERIES

Went for a little swim. 

This was the first short I made for the Cedar Closet. It’s indicative of the run and gun, improvisational nature of the project. I was listening to the soundtrack to the film Challengers (before actually seeing the film) and I pictured the footage I shot from a local community rubber duck race overlayed with the music. It’s a cut and dry example of experimenting with image, sound and comparison, with the added benefit of evoking an almost ominous tone which I’m looking to cultivate in this collection of films. A lot of “experimental” online video projects have an ability to conjure through abstraction and small details a really interesting fictional folklore. Creating our own version of this is in part what the Cedar Closet means -- threading a needle ever so slightly through multiple films across artist, plot and style. 

Duckies 2 is almost the antithesis of the first film. It is quiet where the first is musical and it is mute where the first is colourful. Duckies takes place during the day, Duckies 2 is a nighttime swim. It is my own reaction to the first film: a rejection of the melodramatic narrative I built up in the original. It allowed me to warp something more abstract -- to use the frames as insperation. I saw the ducks as they were after the race. I saw the river water as an ultrasound image. I heard the muffled voice of a stranger. It is a film about birth, time, and escape.  

Chrome Plated Kippa is a very simple film. It is a reflection of my granny. Made during a period when I found myself wanting to reconnect with her and spend time on the hill where she lives. I had graduated school and had enough time to help her with various things at her home. It was the first period of time where I truly felt her age, where I saw her health in the context of time and when I was old enough to build a relationship with her through the eyes of an adult. Everything around me was in the context of my past before leaving for college and it all felt like it was slowly deteriorating. A car crashed into my old elementary school, the single cherry tree in her backyard finally caved in, and her stories and conversations contained more questions and ambiguity. I made this film to document this period of time, it is raw. It is made of brick and wood. 

Below The Village started out as a very different film. In the same vein as Duckies 2 it began almost as a reaction to Chrome Plated Kippa. The original conceit of the film was a piece about my aunt. It was to be another recollection of time and place where I recorded her voice during conversation and filmed near her home in the woods where I spent my summers as a child. I slowly grew away from this as I couldn’t find a proper use for the voice over and my feelings migrated away from telling a story close to the reality of the farm where she lives. The film then began to shift towards experimenting through lighting and sound design which allowed me room to shape a more interesting and vivid portrait of the dark and the creatures within. 

DIRECTORS NOTES
A Natural History came into form through a process of thinking about my home town. I’d gathered a lot of footage of the area and certain locations around the town that held meaning to me but I didn’t have a film to build these shots around. Many of these clips made it into previous Cedar Closet videos. The film opens with a quote from the poet and essayist Diane Ackerman, a resident of Ithaca whose well known book A Natural History of the Senses served as a sort of bible for me in these times of filming throughout Ithaca NY. I wanted to capture the essence of parts of the book using my own language. This is a film about the beauty of night. It is a love letter to my years of scaling the hills and watching the magic of the town from afar.