Joel Haertling is a filmmaker and musician from Boulder, Colorado. Haertling began filmmaking while in junior high school, and making experimental music at the age of 20 after many years of training in classical music. Haertling's music group, Architects Office, has been prominent in the International Experimental Music Underground since 1983. Through this activity Haertling became known to filmmaker Stan Brakhage in 1984. From 1984-1988 Haertling made soundtracks for five films by Brakhage and played Faust in Brakhage's two and a half hour four-part series of Faust films. In 1996 Haertling collaborated with Brakhage as a filmmaker on THROUGH WOUNDED EYES.
Haertling has made 25 films in Super 8 and 16mm since 1975. He has toured Europe three times as a filmmaker since 1992 with screenings in France, Spain, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Denmark. He has been making films for raves since 1992. His most recent screenings have been at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Cinemath�que Ontario in Toronto, a rave in Taos, New Mexico and ATA Gallery in San Francisco. He also teaches master classes in abstract filmmaking.
Haertling's films are non-narrative personal documentaries using abstract photographic and non-photographic filmmaking techniques. Silent tooled, scratched and painted films such as Untitled 1990, Untitled 1994 and THROUGH WOUNDED EYES are a featured part of Haertling's film program. Haertling's other motion pictures (Motion Diary, Motion Diary Atto Secondo the Reel, etc.) feature music soundtracks produced by Haertling or his music group, Architects Office. In these films he uses a technique of pixilation (single-frame cinematography) that produces extreme time compression, reducing scenes to rapid visual elements and creating near-subliminal mental impressions. Metaphor is thereby consciously and unconsciously realized on multiple and interrelating sonic and visual levels. Other physiological reactions of the eye such as after-imaging and negative envisionment are also factored in.
A film by Joel Haertling and Stan Brakhage.
"This film is a collaboration between Joel Haertling and Stan Brakhage. It is a hand-painted film incorporating treated film images of trees in Fall colors and scratched film. It has four levels of superimposed image. Inspired by an eye aberration caused by a detached retina, this film approximates what is seen through wounded eyes. The film begins with an eye injury, followed by a multi-color dot pattern that approximates damaged-as-seen-through-a-screen eyesight. A scratch pattern is introduced that is identical with a recurring eye aberration associated with a detached retina. A flowering Agrimony plant appears, the name meaning a wound to the eye. A catharsis is reached at the point that the scratched pattern changes to its negative and transforms to color negative. This introduces other painted and sanded film sequences that resolve the catharsis of incoming images into a visual-world-unto-itself." - Stan Brakhage
1996, 16mm, color/si, 7m (24fps), $25