Ruby Skin

A found footage film that taps into the poetic tradition of the language cut-up, while taking filmic advantage of the 26-frame displacement between sound and image inherent to the optical soundtrack system of 16mm film. The magenta-shifted fragments of an educational film on "Reaching Your Reader" reveal their chemistry where the splicing tape ripped a "ruby skin" of the emulsion away from the base of the film, leaving a green tear at the edit points. Ruby Skin is a material hommage to the disappearing medium and some of its idiosyncrasies.

(Eve Heller)


A jarring rhythmic hiccup is introduced into the original films, impeding our cognitive ability to see through to the image, throwing us back to the filmstrip itself.

(Mike Kiscinski)


In Ruby Skin (so named for the complexion of the film emulsion found fading into red) (...) orphic clatter creates a fractured concrete poetry that sticks to us like cling wrap. Is this a language-poetry slasher film? Or the keys to the kingdom? (...) alarming and sensuous, quizzical yet ultimately intelligible in every sense of the word.

(Mark McElhatten)