Jon Behrens (born May 12, 1964, in Eugene, OR; died in Seattle, WA, Sept. 5, 2022) was a prolific, dedicated, self-taught filmmaker and composer whose career spanned more than four decades. Jon founded the Interbay Cinema Society, the Engauge Experimental Film Festival and the Lightpress Grants program.
Civic Pavilion
Boston City Hall, 5 Congress St,
Boston MA 02201
Program Info
Analog Dreaming
Analog Dreaming
Jon Behrens
Boston, MA — The RPM Festival, Boston’s premier experimental media festival, returns to Civic Pavilion, Boston City Hall this spring, offering a dynamic series of film screenings and workshops designed to expand the boundaries of the moving image. In its 12th year, RPM continues to celebrate innovative, avant-garde art while fostering a dialogue on environmental sustainability in the world of media production.
Thanks to the generous support of the City of Boston’s Arts and Culture, RPM Festival 2025 presents Analog Dreaming, Jon Behrens Memorial Program.
This program celebrates the vast legacy of a Seattle-based and one of the Northwest’s most prolific filmmakers and composers Jon Behrens (1964-2022), showcasing his unique experiments with image, sound and celluloid. From silent studies in light, color and water and cinematic abstractions to landscapes, cityscapes, NASA images and Hollywood movies, the program demonstrates a remarkable diversity of Behrens’ films, which are both simple and complex, lyrical and psychedelic as well as mediative and visually challenging.
Since the late 1970s, Behrens made well over 100 films using different formats, styles and approaches, ranging from short documentaries, narratives and diaries to found footage, hand painted and optically printed films. Behrens’ work is a living proof of his genuine love and passion for experimental film, his lifelong mission of supporting analog filmmakers and his numerous contributions to the filmmaking community through the Interbay Cinema Society, the Lightpress Grants program, Engauge Experimental Film Festival and other initiatives. The program features a selection of Behrens’ films and his three unreleased films.
Intro & Post-screening discussion:
Kornelia Boczkowska, PhD (AMU, Poznan), is a scholar, curator and educator with a special interest in American avant-garde cinema. She has received several research grants and is the author of two books and over forty other publications on independent, experimental and documentary (avant-doc) film.
PART I: LANDSCAPES AND CITYSCAPES
In the Autumn Before the Winter Comes Man’s Last Mad Surge of Youth
16mm to digital, color, sound, 3 min, 2019
Light Color and Water
16mm to digital, color, silent, 1 min, 1987
Undercurrents
16mm to digital, color, sound, 9 min, 1994
Viaduct
16mm to digital, color, sound, 7 min, 2020
One Minute Movie No. 1
16mm to digital, color, sound, 1 min, 2013
The Colors of Boulder in the Summer
16mm to digital, color, sound, 6 min, 2015
PART II: EXPERIMENTS IN FOUND FOOTAGE
Difficult Cinema
16mm to digital, color, sound, 6 min, 1993
Fluffy Fluffy Calm Calm
16mm to digital, b&w, silent, 7 min, 1998
Atomic Theory and Chemistry
16mm to digital, color, sound, 5 min, 2012
Found Footage Film
16mm to digital, color, sound, 2 min, 2017
PART III: EXPERIMENTS IN HAND PAINTED FOOTAGE
Bipacking Experiments No 1
16mm to digital, color, silent, 2 min, 1999
Anomalies of the Unconscious
16mm to digital, color, sound, 11 min, 2003
Retina Circus
16mm to digital, color, sound, 3 min, 2014
My Stars
16mm to digital, color, sound, 2 min, 2021
PART IV: ANALOG DREAMING
Modular on the Spot
16mm to digital, color, sound, 3 min, 2017
I Love Synthesizers
16mm to digital, color, sound, 6 min, 2016
Total: 74 mins
In the Autumn Before the Winter Comes Man’s Last Mad Surge of Youth
16mm to digital, color, sound, 3 min, 2019
Optically printed fragments of film Jon Behrens shot during the autumn months in response to seeing some of Caryn Cline’s films. Caryn re-introduced Jon to shooting films outside.
Viaduct
16mm to digital, color, sound, 7 min, 2020
A loving look back on a Seattle icon that is no longer there.
Difficult Cinema
16mm to digital, color, sound, 6 min, 1993
A film made by taking scraps of film from other projects and some found footage. The footage was chopped up into very short sections and then cut all back together again at random with hand painting sections and sections with the emulsion bleached off of the film. The Soviet France provided the soundtrack.
Found Footage Film
16mm to digital, color, sound, 2 min, 2017
A film made up from discarded trailers from Hollywood movies from the early 1990’s.
Bipacking Experiments No 1
16mm to digital, color, silent, 2 min, 1999
Jon Behrens’ unreleased hand painted film.
Anomalies of the Unconscious
16mm to digital, color, sound, 11 min, 2003
An entirely hand painted, manipulated and step printed film and the second instalment of the Anomalies Cycle when Jon Behrens began experimenting more with other colors and different textures. The soundtrack was performed by NEGATIVLAND.
Retina Circus
16mm to digital, color, sound, 3 min, 2014
Jon Behrens’ unreleased hand painted, manipulated and optically printed found footage film.
RPM FESTIVAL Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization that depends on grants and donations.
Please consider making a tax deductible gift.
Partners & Sponsors
Revolutions Per Minute Festival is co-hosted by Art and Art History Department and Cinema Studies at UMass-Boston,
MFA Boston, Goethe-institut Boston, Brattle Theatre in Cambridge & Harvard FAS CAMLab.
RPM Series at Boston City hall presented with the support of a grant from Mayor's Office of Arts & Culture.
The RPM Awards are co-presented with the Cinelab, Boston.
