Cloud Chamber


Rental Format(s): 16mm film

This hand-painted step-printed film begins in a field of white light slightly bespeckled with ephemeral glazes of flecks of silver which gradually give way to pale suggestions of pastel colors. These take shape occasionally and flicker the forthcoming bits of solid colored and multiply formed abstract images, a few brief sequences-of-such intersperced with the cloud-suggestive silvered passages as at beginning, which eventually end the film.

"When a hailstone forms, it makes a vertical voyage through a cloud; heavy updraft winds keep it aloft while downdrafts force it to fall. As the hailstone falls, its outer layer melts, shifts and then re-freezes in a complex formation when it rises. You can determine the number of trips a hailstone has made through a cloud by counting the number of rings that have formed around its center. Eventually, the aggregate becomes too heavy and falls as a singular ball of ice.

"In CLOUD CHAMBER, I felt that I saw what I might have seen, had I been at the nucleus of such a hailstone, collecting the colors of the cloud while making a circular voyage and finally falling at the saturation point - the heavy colors at the end of the film. The illustrations on the front are evidence of this collection of diverse colors on a hailstone, due to the obvious existence of such colors (in some form or another) in the clouds that generate them!" - Courtney Hoskins

Rental Fees

  Fee  
16mm film $25.00  

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