‘No Long Shadows’

2020

The works in 'No Long Shadows' were developed in response to a peculiar chapter in recent aesthetic history -- the little-known story of a failed 1959 film festival, which was to be co-presented by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage and military-chemical giant DuPont.

DuPont’s president at the time, Crawford Greenewalt, inspired by the National Film Board of Canada’s recent work, proposed the film festival as a corporate promotion – a showcase of cameraless, animated films, to be produced and screened exclusively on the chemical company’s new polyester film stock “Cronar."

They hired a young and apprehensive Stan Brakhage to run the promotion. But before the festival came to pass, Brakhage and DuPont had a falling out, Brakhage quit, and the event was canceled. In 1965, DuPont officially halted research into cinematic film products, rerouting their relevant facilities and resources into the manufacture of X-Ray film and specialized stock for the US military's missile test sites. In 2003, Stan Brakhage died, after years of battling a rare form of bladder cancer.

‘No Long Shadows’ emerges as both an expository effort and an aesthetic response to this disturbing chain of events, and to the conspiracies it spawned regarding DuPont's involvement in Brakhage's death. Investigating the material networks of sensory technology and scientific research that undergird the gleaming surfaces of art and film, these works frame aesthetic experimentation within contested histories of science, industry, capital, and war.

This project was carried out with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Monstera Foundation.