Whiplash Notebook
new work by
Blanca Rego Eislow Johnson Josh Weissbach
Jesse Malmed Jimmy Schaus Robert Schaller Colby Richardson
Saturday, June 6 | 7:00 PM
Buckle up for a high-velocity ride toward the limits of perception itself. Montage executed at the speed of life. The camera pushed to extremity. Various modes of structuralist filmmaking generate hybrid documents of sensation, time, and place. Psychedelic and formally ruthless, the films in this block blur the line between abstraction and documentary, preserving not simply what was seen, but what was felt. And oh, yeah, this is definitely a strobe warning.
This program is rated PG | Total runtime 56 minutes
Alignment, dir. Blanca Rego
2025 | Spain | 3 | video | Canadian premiere
Four dots blink on the screen and start to join following some of the multiple possibilities that can create connections between them. The generated shapes are sigils that invoke aligned forces, one after the other, in a flickering and hypnotic trance.
Injured?, dir. Eislow Johnson
2025 | USA | 13.5 | video + 16mm on video | Canadian premiere
Need help? Crashouts, manifestation influencers and injury lawyers collide in this breakneck ride through the Midwest. 50 years after attorney ads were first legalized in the U.S., their ubiquitous self-portraits (allegedly) invoke a churn-and-burn economy of volume, velocity, fears and veneers.
explant / implant, dir. Josh Weissbach
2025 | USA | 3.5 | 16mm on video | Canadian premiere
A lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after sixteen years.
Ski, dir. Robert Schaller
2025 | USA | 12.5 | 16mm | Canadian premiere
Amid a pandemic and a failing marriage, a woman retreats into obsessive fantasy. A film star becomes her companion as the boundaries between reality and reverie blur. Lost in a frozen Antarctic landscape inspired by Frank Hurley's 1914 Endurance expedition photographs, escapism becomes a mirror revealing how far she's drifted from herself.
Still, Moving, dir. Jesse Malmed
2024-26 | USA | 10 | video | Canadian premiere
A film that is always changing, premiering, never leaving, rearranging and covering itself, retiring, retreating, staying still, leaving moving, mining and miming itself.
Single Frame Experiments, dir. Jimmy Schaus
2025 | USA | 6.5 | video | World premiere
A collage of regularly made animations using still photographs on my phone. Images of drag shows, nightclub lasers, graffiti, rainy city streets and more spin and strobe in a lysergic torrent. The sound is from a live performance by my noise duo Malverde providing sound effects and atmospherics for a DIY Halloween “scare zone” performed by drag queens, treated with collage processes mirroring those of the image track.
Take a Look Around, dir. Colby Richardson
2026 | Canada | 10 | video | World premiere
"How does it work, you just spin it around?"
A video-artist takes a power drill to the fair.