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Before I Knew Their Names
While my brother José was home visiting from SCAD in the early 1990s, he was painting in his black book with his designer markers, and I was editing a short silent Super 8mm documentary I had recently shot — a kind of portrait of him and our friends painting together in the streets, titled An Experimental Introduction to a Segmented Reality. On impulse, remembering something I had seen or read about Georges Méliès and early hand-painted films, I asked José if I could borrow some of his markers and immediately began to color and distress discarded footage. I re-edited what I had, spliced it together, and threaded it through the projector, screening the results onto the living room wall. What appeared was pure magic: a moving painting in the dark, mesmerizing and alive.
Suddenly, the projector caught fire, and the celluloid image began to melt in front of our eyes, creating even more spectacular abstract moving images, while our mother screamed, "¡Apaga el fuego!" — "Put the fire out!" That night, without knowing of Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, or Jonas Mekas, I discovered experimental cinema by pure accident, driven only by intuition, memory, and the love of process. Later, I would come to understand the traditions I had stumbled into — Visual Music, Abstract Expressionism, and Underground Cinema — but in that moment, it was simply a natural extension of the way I already saw the world. Works such as Sporadic Germination, Rumba Abstracta, The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: A Self-Portrait, Controlled Hallucination, and Lux in Tenebris would follow — living experiments, pieces of time sculpted with cameras, brushes, and emulsion, where each frame is a witness to breath, memory, and the flickering persistence of vision.
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Title: Rumba Asbtracta, 35mm Scratched, Hand-Painted with Acrylic, Edited Monochromatically and by Design © 1997-1998 @reyparlastudio
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Title: Sporadic Germination, (c.1994) Super 8mm footage, scratched with needles, rubbed, hand-painted, collaged with acrylic paint, saliva, alcohol, and spliced. Original no sound. Sound track spliced from various vinyl records checked out of the Miami-Dade Public Library.
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The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: A Self-Portrait, 1995 | Rey Parla. This film was screened at The Bar Space, circa 1995-1996 Miami Beach, FL which had a weekly underground cinema screenings curated by Nova Kino Director Mark Boswell under the Anti Film Festival hosted by The Colony Theater on Lincoln Road.
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Title: Lux in Tenebris, 2016. Translation: "The Light shines in the Darkness, and the Darkness did not comprehend it." Media: 35mm Hand-painted film rephotographed and digitized for LCD Digital Signage Display Planar SL4351 43" Simplicity Series, Painted Wood Frame. Edition of 3 + 1 AP. Runtime: 08:46. Screenings in Brooklyn and Tokyo.
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Parla & Betancourt, Viral Underground (2011)
This movie was produced as a collaboration between the scratch film maker Rey Parla and digital movie maker Michael Betancourt. It developed from several years of discussions about collaborating on a project, and finally began when Parla sent a drive with material to Betancourt in the summer of 2011, which Betancourt then combined with some of his own material. The finished movie is a dialogue between their approaches and techniques, combining scratch, glitch, analog processing and digital compositing to create a hybrid.
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Title: Primitive Visual Forms Concept Study, circa 2018 By Rey Parla
This experimental film emerged from a spontaneous investigation into raw image-making—pre-language, pre-narrative, and pre-intent. Shot in 2016 and later developed as a concept study in 2018, the work explores the origins of visual perception and its emotional echoes. It is not a film in the traditional sense, but rather a moving sketchbook—flickering between memory and immediacy, form and formlessness.
The piece draws on the lineage of structural film, abstract animation, and primitive mark-making. Using analog footage layered with digital traces, the work invites the viewer into a trance-like space where the image breaks down into pulse and rhythm. There is no voiceover, no character, no plot—only texture, tempo, and transition.
In making this piece, I was driven by the question: What does the eye remember before it is told what to see? The result is a cinematic study that resists interpretation yet rewards contemplation. Each frame acts like a glyph—part language, part ghost.
This film was never meant to be finished, only found. A visual field recording of sensation itself. A study in beginnings.
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Borderless – Exhibition Documentation (2016)
By Rey Parlá
This short video captures fleeting glimpses of Borderless, my 2016 solo exhibition at Happy Lucky No. 1 Gallery in Brooklyn. More than mere documentation, the footage acts as a kinetic echo—an extension of the work’s core questions: How do we perceive time? Can an image be free of borders—literal, conceptual, and technological?
The show was born from years of experimenting with photographic materials, film stocks, darkroom improvisation, and scanographic interventions. In the tradition of avant-garde artists like Brakhage, Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray, I sought to dismantle the assumption that photography is beholden to the camera, or that film must reproduce the seen world. My process embraces contradiction: light-sensitive emulsions meet digital morphing, motion picture negatives become surfaces for scratching, sanding, and automatic drawing. The result is a language I call Scratch~Graphs—hybrid visual forms poised between photograph, film, and painting.
The video is its own form of writing. A visual diary that reflects the installation’s materiality, its stillness and movement, its relationship to light, space, and perception. There are no cuts to explain, only presence. The handheld camera wanders like a witness, letting the works breathe.
Ultimately, Borderless is not just a title—it’s a philosophy. A refusal to be contained by medium or meaning. This video, like the images it frames, invites the viewer to drift past definitions, to enter a space where vision writes itself.