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John Warren--filmmaker, professor, curator
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Since returning to my native Nashville, I have primarily been concerned with exploring what I call, “polytonal vision.” I continue to work with my 16mm Bolex, often employing in-camera multiple exposures, but I am also working more with digital video.
All images were shot on 16mm film and all effects were composed in-camera. A portrait of lower Broadway, a section of Nashville that has for decades attracted country music fans to its honky tonk bars. The project was supported in part by the Tennessee Art Commission.
A cinematic collaboration based on a poem by Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay written in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. The film "uses an eclectic mix of stereoscopic imagery from historical archives to construct a fascinating visual essay to accompany the poem itself. The unique style allows for moments of complement and juxtaposition that make the collaboration shine." - Kindling Arts Festival
"Film artist John Warren transforms footage from the first three seasons of Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1982) into a cinematic hall-of-mirrors. Subjected to a meticulous digital reprocessing, both action and narrative dissolve and are subsumed into a psychedelic, cascading digital texture, presided over by a hypnotic soundscape." - Slamdance Film Festival program notes
Journey Through the Snow (In the Pine Forest) / Waltz of the Snowflakes
A film poem layering "found" sound and image that investigates the intersection of cinematic history and memory while creating a hypnotic feeling of movement and flow.
A projector-performance using 16mm film loops and liquid lights. The visuals were made in collaboration with DigDeep LightShow.
A look at construction cranes around Nashville as figures trapped by the ambivalent forces of capitalism. The piece continues my interest in the landscape, not as a mere pictorial representation, but instead as a point of perceptual inquiry to examine the outer world in an attempt to understand the inner world.
A cine-installation that employs three prominently visible projectors, each with a loop of 16mm film, to construct a meditation on Nashville’s history as a hub for commerce. The piece is also a reflection on the deep nature of film, of substance, of luminosity and shadow.
Reach into nature, explode into space.
March to the sea.
Summer’s end.
Installation view of Upside/Downside from Coop Gallery in Nashville.
"A whirlwind found-footage homage to the age of psychedelia and protest on the streets and at the parties of late 1960s Hollywood." – program notes from the BFI London Film Festival
Part 1 of the “Fuzz Acid Flowers” trilogy. A portrait of the era in American history when–in the words of Joan Didion–a demented and seductive vortical tension was at work.
Part 2 of the “Fuzz Acid Flowers” trilogy. Sunset Strip to Haight-Ashbury, through the looking glass.
Part 3 of the “Fuzz Acid Flowers” trilogy.
In grad school at CalArts, my film work became concerned with examining landscape, and experimenting with the optical printer.
A journey with a Bolex down Sunset Boulevard, from the Pacific Ocean into the heart of the city.
A motorcyclist is subjected to an optical reworking — stroboscopic layers collide, blend, and fade away. For Charlotte Pryce.
Visions of a flower valley, saturated with the intoxicating colours of dreams gone by. Lovingly filmed on a single roll of Kodak's 7285 100D color reversal in Antelope Valley, CA. For James Benning
A girl explores a luminous beach as a mysterious voice pushes reality deeper into sublime abstraction. The film reveals the simultaneity of stillness and change in the sea, ultimately transforming into a hypnotic search for our lost Edenic origins.
A femme fatale, a deal gone wrong, the city at night.
"The film was made by painting directly onto 16mm film, in the tradition of artist-filmmakers who often mix handmade approaches and out-of-date equipment to create unusual film experiences. As with other films by Warren, Notturno forgoes a language-based narrative in favor of a staccato sequence of images, emphasizing feeling over storyline." - Chief Curator Mark Scala, Frist Center for the Visual Arts
An observational portrait of the skate park in Venice Beach..
Fossil Falls, CA. Shooting Landscapes with James Benning.
A CalArts narrative experiment, remaking a scene from the strange and beautiful 1955 cult classic directed by Charles Laughton.
I studied filmmaking with Rob Todd at Emerson College, and never stoped making movies.
"This poignant and unassuming color film interprets the dreams and memories of an elderly woman as she looks back on her life, The film searches for a deeper image of death. A sense of loss weighs heavily in this work as what appears to be a home movie of a grandmother alone at the grave of her husband plays unaltered. Hope is symbolized in images of cherry trees in bloom and stained glass church windows, perhaps implying the promise of an afterlife." -- Black Maria Film Festival catalogue
An observational portrait of a day in the life of a family living in a small southern town, this film explores how family dynamics are affected by changes in culture and commerce. My BFA thesis film for Emerson College.
Filmed on super 8 and 16mm b&w film. A silent movie about the end of silent movies, and a miniature epic about a piano player for the motion pictures who loses his job and his girl when “talkies” are invented in the late 1920s. Funded in part with a grant from the LEF Foundation.
A super 8 portrait of Kerala, India; 2007
