Thomas Comerford began making experimental films using Super-8 equipment in the early 1990s after studying sculpture, performance and classical languages in college. In 1996, he expanded his practice to include 16mm film and various video formats. With influences ranging from filmmakers Leighton Pierce, Deborah Stratman, James Benning and Robert Nelson to writer W.G. Sebald to photographers Ansel Adams and Eugene Atget, Comerford pursues a poetic, sometimes surreal, use of sound and image juxtaposition in his films, observing and interrogating his subjects--most often landscapes--with a careful attention to detail. His recent films are site-specific to Chicago and explore the evidence, revision and erasure of histories in the landscape.
From 1997-2002, he created a ground-breaking series of films called the "Cinema Obscura" series. These films, made with a pinhole motion picture camera and found/homemade noise machines, feature the unmistakable atmosphere of pinhole imagery and examine the role photography and media play in the perception and understanding of history and place. In May and June 2002, he took these films on a tour of the eastern, midwestern and southern U.S. with filmmaker Bill Brown under the banner, Lo-Fi Landscapes.
In 2005, a new 16mm film, Land Marked/Marquette (Series), had its world premiere at the 2005 New York Underground Film Festival, and continued to premiere across the midwestern and western U.S. in Spring and Summer 2005, in a program entitled Lo-Fi Landscapes: Pictures From the New World.
These award-winning films have screened at a number of U.S. and international festivals and venues. For more details on each title, click on the still image. For rental information and/or video/dvd previews, please inquire.
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| Land Marked/Marquette, 2005 | Chicago-Detroit Split, 2005 (collaboration with Bill Brown) | Figures in the Landscape, 2002 | ILLA CAMERA OBSCVRA (The Dark Room), 2001 |
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| Départ (Departure), 2000 | Fey Eyes Pin Holes Drums Hum, 1999 | Sisyphus's Cinema, 1997 | In the File, 1997 |
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