Ghosts of the Old South(2023)

Ghosts of the Old South serves as an intervention against the primary aesthetics of the American South and, in unraveling political patterns, offers a unique engagement with representational and intersensorial politics. The film is trisected into distinct chapters that address different but interlinked concepts pertaining to life in the South.

Chapter I is an intersensorial immersion, alternatively, a cine-trance, within the concept of cultural erosion and metamorphosis as expressed through the biochemical practice of film burial, in which Isaac buried 16mm film in his family’s burial plot at Christ Episcopal Church in Mt. Pleasant, SC.

Chapter II speaks on the Mythic South and recontextualizes notions of Antebellum's “glory days” through the manipulation of appropriated footage (namely D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation). This engagement hinges on generating tensions in the primary aesthetics of Southern myth by physically altering, rearranging, and re-presenting anew.

Chapter III serves to re-present the lived experiences of persons who both occupy and are occupied by the South. Occupations by narratives, stereotypes, and other cognitive or perceptual schemas are countered through the asynchronous chronicling of experiences of Southerners in the Carolinas and Georgia. Spatial-temporal intervention is made possible through the techniques of timelapse, stop-motion, and photofilm as techniques that call attention to the practice of filmmaking as a sensory reconstruction of experience.