
Directing
Julie Murray is an Irish born artist, film and video maker living in the US. Drawing on her background in the Fine Arts, filmmaker Julie Murray makes short experimental works in digital and film media which are poetical in nature, engaging the textural imprints and limits of the form as an essential element of pictorial content. Her film and digital works have been exhibited at numerous national and international venues including the New York Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the London Film Festival and the Flaherty Film Seminar. Her work was featured in the 2004 edition of the Whitney Biennial and her films are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films are also contained in a number of University library collections in the US and are archived at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in Los Angeles. Murray has presented her work at venues including REDCAT (Los Angeles), Anthology Film Archives (NY), Media City Film Festival (ON), Pacific Film Archives (CA), Los Angeles Filmforum, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto and at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin. Murray’s early super-8 films were selected for a National Film Preservation Foundation Award in 2014. She taught film production at University of Iowa in 2015-7 and will be a visiting artist at CalArts in Spring of 2019.

This atmospheric landscape is largely un-peopled but nevertheless expresses the busy presence of ghosts that reside in the snowy fog-bound woods, the movement of the moon and in the hesitancy of the clouds. It is an exploration of location/place both macro and micro, visited by a few incidental shadowy figures related to one another through the rhythm of their gestures.


A low light montage using Black Magic Ursa on a bean bag pod.

"The film’s haunting images are accompanied by the continuous sound of a helicopter circling overhead, which at the close gives way to the distant sound of police sirens. The beams of light, which seem to emanate from above, could be confused with helicopter searchlights, a reading whose symbolic significance evokes both security and baleful scrutiny. These sounds, however, are not only immediately associated with the events of September 11; they have also become a ubiquitous presence in the urban sonic landscape. Murray reveals the subtle disconnect of sound and image only gradually, allowing conscious recognition to develop slowly in viewing the film." -Whitney Biennial catalog, (2004). Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

IN AN EYE/EAR DUET, MOVEMENTS AND CUTS IN THE IMAGE ARE IN CONTRAPUNTAL MOMENTUM, FIRST WITH SATIE’S DANCE DE TRAVERS AND THEN WITH TWITTERING BIRDS AND BEES IN A FIELD.

MUSICAL TENSIONS IN THE RESONANT BODIES OF WIND TURBINES

Convolves the aberrations found within two image-making technologies; film and video, which here combine to produce a heap of dichotomies and forensic textures of process, like human imprints in sand.
Children's 3-D toys and insects are the subjects of Julie Murray's look at the violence inherent in the very notion of motion. Music: "Three Landscapes for Peter Wyer"

Microfilm model airplanes and their people.

Things coaxed into light in roughly the order they were encountered. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

Frequency Objects, a photogram, creates a rhythmic friction between a chaotic animation of old family photographic negatives and the smooth motion of found movie images. Through imprecise stops and starts image fragments appear. The glacial motion of figures falling half in and half out of the frame and faces suddenly happened upon amid the abstract patterns of fabric and opaque objects producing faithful shadows of themselves.

A composition of scenes and sounds in a montage reflecting poetic and musical forms. The camera, a toy, records only in black with a crude plastic lens which softens and distorts pictorial detail, creating ample room for the mind's eye to roam and query, or not, the nature of image, meaning and attachment.

