S2.E9 ∙ Lewis Baltz

For millennia, art has concerned itself with the natural world. Our relationship to nature-our awe of, fear of, love of, and worship of nature has been the animating force behind uncountable numbers of artworks, poems, pieces of music and songs. Put another way, nature is one of the great subjects of art. This has been especially the case since the late 18th century, when the concept of awe at the immense, inhuman and unforgiving spectacle of nature became thematized in the concept of the sublime. SONG OF EXTINCTION is a 45-minute film and music piece, envisioned as a part of this very long lineage, with the telling and tragic difference that any work concerned with the natural world in 2017 must necessarily be seen as a work created in the midst of, and in response to, an incommensurate ecological crisis. The work was conceived in 2015 by myself and the composer Rose Bolton, as a particular and unique type of experimental film. Forgoing obvious "experimental" techniques that pertain to the manipulation of form and materiality, the film and the music, working seamlessly together, seek to rather produce an experiment in generating emotion.

The king is dying and the crops are failing. Saleem, a strange young boy with big ideas, must convince the other children to come on a dangerous adventure across the sea for a chance to save their people and their king.

Inspired by an episode of Cops, Hillbilly Wolf follows Dennis, a societal misfit / holy boy who lives in a small town in the Bible Belt region of North Louisiana. Troubled by unemployment, poverty and the death of his dog, Dennis copes with his anguish by believing in the salvation of the hereafter. His tendency toward violence, however, has made him a menace, ensuing in a meditated and desperate religious quest to escape this world.