Acropolis welcomes Toronto's Blake Williams for a two evenings of eye-popping 3D cinema. First, on October 18 at the Culver Theater, we present a double bill of the co-directed feature A Woman Escapes and a program of the filmmaker's stereoscopic 3D shorts, followed on October 19 at 2220 Arts + Archives by a curated selection of multi-dimensional experiments by a number of Williams' heroes and contemporaries.
About the program:
Red Capriccio (Dir. Blake Williams, 2014, 7 min)
A found footage film in three movements, drafting arrangements of motion with stasis, police with the policed, and reds with blues. Format: anaglyph 3D.
Au Hasard (Dir. Darren Dominique Heroux, 2026, 9 min)
A nine-minute experimental essay in perceptual control. Blending archival propaganda, poetic narration, and formal play, the film explores how missed information is often the root of misinformation. Evoking Godard with a touch of William Castle, Au Hasard is both a cinema of ideas and an act of cinematic misdirection. Format: decoder 3D.
Orbit (Dir. Kerry Laitala, 2006, 7 min)
Candy apple light emissions filmed at a Topsham, ME fair create a series of photic stimulating events that tickle the retinas. Whirling carousel of brushstrokes of light in garish colours on celluloid. It can be interpreted as a colourful ode to the oh so beloved yet doomed Kodachrome film material. Format: chromadepth 3D.
The Day Was a Scorcher (Dir. Ken Jacobs, 2009, 9 min)
A 3D vacation album, The Day Was a Scorcher pictures what Jacobs describes as “movie-star Flo, Nisi the thoughtful young girl, and Aza old enough to trudge with the rest of us, but still expecting to be pushed around on wheels,” frolicking in a sun-drenched Rome in the 1970s. Explains Jacobs, “It’s a perfect day when nothing happens.” Format: glasses-less 3D.
2012 (Dir. Takashi Makino, 2013, 30 min)
Everything I saw during 2012. This work will show you the dynamic moment of changing from film image to digital image. —Takashi Makino. Format: pulfrich 3D.
Let Your Light Shine (Dir. Jodie Mack, 2013, 3 min)
Eye candy as a special treat. Let Your Light Shine is the ultimate Spectrum Short film, a photokinetic stroboscopic spectacle for spectacles. A work in the tradition of the absolute animation film of the 1930s, which requires prismatic glasses to achieve the maximum result. Format: diffraction 3D.
TRT: 65 min
In Person: Blake Williams
"Red Capriccio is the first [of Williams' films] that has really opened a new avenue of thinking for me... [it] may be a touchstone for how I see and hear subsequent films." Michael Sicinski —MUBI Notebook
"2012's shifting planes evoke tectonic plates, archeological strata, in a cinematic and sonic reverie of not-quite-remembered dream images, of personal and collective memory spanning multiple temporalities." —Marianne Shaneen, BOMB
"Let Your Light Shine overwhelmed me with its profusion of hand-drawn lines refracted to surround my field of vision. More than any other of [Mack's] films, it brought that physical sensation I crave, an out-of-body experience where time slides away." —Doug Dillaman, The Pantograph Punch
"A powerful meditation on photography... What is fascinating about [The Day Was a Scorcher] is how the few elements are clinically handled to produce a growing sense of warmth: the rigorous, mechanical theoretical ruminations live at the film’s soft emotional core." —Fábio Andrade, New York University
"Orbit [is] a homage to an influential cinematic technology—Kodachrome—a transparency (slide) film with a
unique processing technique that is lamentably nearing extinction. Kodachrome is noted for its vivid highly saturated colors and Orbit exploits this property in magnificent fashion." —Lee Laskin, San Francisco Cinematheque
(Available to download after screening date)