The 16mm films on this DVD reflect Hamlyn's early formation in painting and drawing, where intense observation was central to the effort to realise images of a visible world that is anything but straightforwardly apprehensible. All the work stems from the way the film medium lends itself to a particular way of structuring temporal images. In the case of film, as opposed to video, the characteristics and constraints of the technology push one towards a way of working with the frame as the basic spatio-temporal unit of construction.

Cinédoc Paris Films Coop’s “Experimental Film Collection” DVD collection aims to promote major works from the vanguard and experimental cinema heritage. Claudine Eizykman, disappeared in June 2018, was the co-founder of Paris Films Coop in 1974 and Cinédoc in 1979, of which she was president until 2018.

Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure is a site-specific live projection performance that was a highlight of this year’s festival (36th Toronto International Film Festival). In the projection booth, Brooklyn-based artists Sandra Gibson and Luís Recoder distilled a found 35mm commercial film print into rich, gorgeous beams of light that danced on the screen, the auditorium walls, and the faces of the rapt, dreamy spectators who filled the theater at the Ontario Gallery of Art. (The movie that was the basis for the work was never identified to the audience, and the artists have never watched it in its entirety.) The introductory movement of the piece is a marvel: tiny lines of white light that were movie credits in a past life shimmer onscreen like sunlight filtering through deep water. Occasionally a half-glimpsed face from the original film surfaces deep within the piece like a mirage in the desert; other moments resemble flashlights dancing through fog. The audio to the piece, created and mixed live in the theater by the Dallas-born contemporary composer Olivia Block, is at once organic and otherworldly. In addition to sounds produced digitally and musically, Block works with sounds she has collected from the world around her. Occasionally, these feel familiar: is that the sound of rushing water? Peeper frogs chirping on a summer night? The plaintive bleat of an alarm? The whir of an airplane about to take off? The pop of distant fireworks? Together, the visual and aural components of Aberration of Light are a symphony of lights and darks, quiets and louds, that are greater in concert then the sum of their parts.” (Livia Bloom, Filmmaker Magazine)