BALTIMORE
2022 | 16mm to digital projection | 22m | sound

BALTIMORE catalogs the landscapes and architecture of the filmmaker’s hometown of Baltimore City. Personal and observational, this 16mm film, shot from 2016 to 2018, explores exterior spaces, material and psychic fragments of historic buildings, many of which have been demolished or renovated since the completion of the film. 

Sound, Edit, Camera: Margaret Rorison  Composer: Bonnie Jones Re-Recording Mix: Tom Boram
All footage was shot with a 16mm Bolex Camera from June 2016 - July 2018.  
Creation of this work was made possible in part by a Ruby artist project grant from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.

Aside from film festival premieres and screenings, my film, BALTIMORE was exhibited in a two person show at Current Space Gallery from September 11 - October 2, 2021, curated by the gallery’s co-founders.  The film was exhibited with additional "visual footnotes": various maps of Baltimore City to provide a political and geographical context of the city, select still frames of filmed locations with accompanying unique histories of these locations, and two large “film objects” created from the edited 16mm workprint of the film. Documentation of this exhibit is included in this project. 

Select Screenings
Musuem of the Moving Image, Queens, NY
The Maryland Film Festival 
El Festival Internacional de Cine UNAM, Mexico City, MX
Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, UK 

Sympathetic Bodies
2018 | 16mm to video | 5m | sound

This film was made for the track, "Sympathetic Bodies" by Byron Westbrook from his 2017 Body Consonance LP on Hands in the Dark Records. All footage was hand-processed and shot on 16mm B&W reversal film, incorporating rephotography with the JK Optical Printer. This work was made with the support from Crater Lab in Barcelona. 


"The body is an ever-compassing approach to empathy through the DIY philosophy, the hand-processing of material which allows the touch to be truly felt. The film’s rhythm corresponds to Byron Westbrook’s song of the same title -which the film was made for- but perfectly works as its own creation. Rorison’s tactile universe, in process and in the image itself, is always tangible, even in its out-of-context digital screening. Nature mirrors time, time is mirrored in our body, as the prescience of the imminent is expected with subtle calm."

- José Sarmiento Hinojosa, "CROSSROADS 202O.PROGRAM 4: ALL THOSE THINGS YOU USED TO FEEL", desistfilm , September 4, 2020

Memory of August 
2017 | 16mm | 6m | sound

A series of moments captured in room 139. Intimate spaces of time spent with my grandmother, Margaret during a month long recovery in a rehabilitation center in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Special Jury Award for Best Experimental Short, New Orleans Film Festival, 2017 
Edinburgh International Film Festival, International Premiere, 2017 

departure
2020 | 16mm | handmade cyanotypes | sound | performance
 
departure incorporates the alternative 19th C. cyanotype process with my passion for 16mm film and darkroom experimentation. For this short projection performance, I created handmade 16mm cyanotype film loops by coating clear leader with cyanotype iron based emulsion, then created a contact print using the original black and white negative and the coated film strips to create a final positive cyanotype image.

This excerpt is a digitized version of a dual 16mm projection performance I created with the handmade cyanotype 16mm film loops.  As the two projectors ran, I incorporated a live soundtrack and amplified the motors of the projectors using contact microphones. 
 
The cyanotype images are of my mother and sister. The audio is taken from a recorded conversation between my grandmother and myself during her final stages of Alzheimer's. This piece is an acknowledgment to the women in my family. 

One Document for Hope
2016 | 16mm to digital | B/W | 8m | sound 

One Document for Hope is a short film shot during the 2015 Baltimore Uprising. It incorporates the sterile and procedural narrative of the Baltimore City Police Scanner recorded on Monday April 27 against precious moments of gathering, celebration and protest in Baltimore from April 28 – May 3, 2015. The film was shot with a 16mm Bolex and edited in camera during the week of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising. The footage was provided through The Ann Arbor Film Festival ORWO Award for Best Cinematography. 

Documentation: Margaret Rorison 
Thanks to Karl Ekdahl for providing the BCP scanner recordings. 
Baltimore, Maryland 2015

Select Screenings
Affinities, or The Weight of Cinema curated by Kevin Jerome Everson & Greg de Cuir Jr., The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival
Ann Arbor Film Festival 

dark logic
2016 |16mm to video | 5m | sound

dark logic is a short experimental 16mm film that was filmed in Los Angeles, California, twentyninepalms, and The Noah Purifoy Outdoor Museum in Joshua Tree.  dark logic is an ode to the restricted space and surveillance in the skies. The soundtrack is derived from a live performance by Mario de Vega​.​ This work was supported by The Echo Park Film Center Summer Artist in Residence Program. 

PULL/DRIFT
2013 | 16mm to video | 10m | sound

PULL/DRIFT is a collaborative project that evolved into many parts. In 2013,  Clarissa Stowell Gregory and Joshua Wade Smith collaborated on dance & sculpture for a performance involving: water, woods and raft. Clarissa & Joshua created the site-specific performance PULL / DRIFT on September 8th at Patapsco Valley State Park, Daniels Area.

For six months, Baltimore photographers/filmmakers Liz Donadio, Carr Kizzier, and myself documented the evolution and execution of this site-specific performance, which finalized in a gallery exhibition, Pull / Drift: In the Slipstream at Gallery CA from December 6 2013 - January 10, 2014.

The documentation that I captured from the dance performance became a 16mm film with a live sound accompaniment by sound artist, Josh Millrod. This piece premiered at Mono No Aware Festival of Expanded Cinema in December of 2013. 

Throughout my documentation process of Pull/Drift, I focused on the flow of the human form and its relationship to its surrounding environments. I was interested in discovering a dialogue between limbs and hips, the curves of the land, the mechanics of flesh, the rhythmic channeling through water, grass and earth. I was captivated by how the development of motion sculptured a new sense of time and established a magical sense of ritualistic bliss.

vindmøller
2014 | 16mm | 3m | sound

This short film is a study of the monolithic wind turbines along the shores of Amager, Copenhagen. Triple exposed on one roll of color film, then finding four generations of grain. The soundtrack is a recorded live-improvisation by artist Mario de Vega using unstable media and acoustic resonators

Winner of ORWO Award for Best Cinematography, 53rd Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2015

DER SPAZIERGANG
2013 | 16mm | 3m | sound

The film is shot on one 100' roll of 16mm color film, all of which was composed and shot in-camera. The film is made of up single frames taken during extensive walks throughout the layered historical landscape of Berlin, Germany in April 2013. 

The title, DER SPAZIERGANG (The Walk)  comes from a story by German-Swiss writer, Robert Walser.

Select Screenings 
27th The Images Festival, Toronto, ON
52nd Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, MI
NEW YEAR, NEW WORKS, The Filmmakers Co-Op, NYC