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 

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 

From 2012-20122, I directed Sight Unseen, a Baltimore based experimental film series. The series was launched in June of 2012 with support from a Launch Artists in Baltimore Award upon my graduation from The Maryland Institute College of Art Graduate Program in Photographic & Electronic Media.  The series began as a roaming project, collaborating with various venues in Baltimore City. 

The series brought notable filmmakers, curators, and artists to Baltimore to present their work including: Peter Burr, Nazli Dincel, Sky Hopkina, Mark Toscano (film preservationist for the Academy Film Archive), Ephraim Asili, Greg De Cuir Jr., Madsen Minax, Laura Parnes & David Dinnell to name a few. 

Sight Unseen formed partnerships with various Baltimore-based organizations including, Area 405, Current Space, Enoch Pratt Library, Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Institute College of Art, Metro Gallery, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Creative Alliance, The SNF Parkway Theatre, & The Red Room Collective. In additional to film screenings, Sight Unseen organized a series of affordable workshops on analog practices including handmade emulsion, film as performance, and experimental hand processing techniques. These workshops were held at notable organizations such as Current Space and Full Circle Fine Art in Baltimore City. 

The 2021/22 Season of Sight Unseen was made possible by a generous contribution from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and with operational support from the SNF Parkway Theater. 

My work with Sight Unseen has been internationally recognized throughout the years and received generous funding and support from The 2012 and 2014 MICA LAB Artist Award, Artists Public Domain, The 2015 Contemporary Grit Fund, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and The SNF Parkway Theatre. 
 
 

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 

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 

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.

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

This body of work reflects my practice in expanded cinema (cinema as a performance) while lies heavily on collaboration with improvisors and experimental sound artists.  All three works were made on 16mm film, intended to be projected with an analog projector and experienced with a live sound component. 

departure (2020) is a short piece that I made with my own discovered process of creating 16mm cyanotype loops. I created a live soundtrack while projected multiple loops of 16mm film. The soundtrack included a synthesizer, electromagnetic pickups, and recordings of my grandmother speaking, reciting lucid memories at a later stage in her live. This short work premiered at The Red Room in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Of Our Mothers (2018) is a collaborative one-hour durational performance peice that musician, Audrey Chen and I premiered in Berlin, Germany during an artist residency in 2017.  The work incorporates dual 16mm projection of  hand-processed 16mm film loops that depicted images of my grandmother, mother, and sister, while incorporating sounds from contact microphones and electronics from the projection booth. As I project, Chen utilizes her voice, cello and electronics in a completely improvised response. 
 
PULL/DRIFT (2014) is a short 16mm dance film that was edited in camera. The film documents a site-specific dance performance that took place on September 8th 2013 at Patapsco Valley State Park, Daniels Area. The 16mm film is accompanied by a live score created by musician, Josh Millrod and was selected to premiere at Mono No Aware an annual festival of expanded cinema that takes place annually in Brooklyn, NY.

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 

understory
 2019 | 16mm film to digital | 10m | sound 

This short film is a personal navigation through four seasons of loss.  A series of memory frames shot on expired and donated 16mm film. An ode to navigation, an adaptation to silences and deafening cries.  

All footage was shot during the years of 2012-2016 in Los Angeles, Gettysburg, and Baltimore. 

SCANSION
2012 | 16mm installation | color | sound 

SCANSION is a short 16mm film composed of extensive walks through various Baltimore landscapes. The film has been hand edited like a poem, where cuts function like line breaks, working to establish inherent rhythm and meter. 

The film was created for a gallery and is intended to run on a continuous loop with an accompanying surround sound speaker installation. The soundtrack has been compiled of field recordings taken on my walks through Baltimore City. Additional sound by musicians, C. Spencer Yeh and Lea Bertucci, voice by Kelly Laughlin.

“…in complete consciousness I understood what for me walking travel and cinema had in common. Sometimes I preferred walking, that is to say, talking with my legs over speaking, which is to say, walking with my mouth- but basically, it’s the same thing”
-Serge Daney

TRT of film: 8min
Soundtrack: 12min
Both run on a continuous loop.