Kelly Egan: Language Lessons

The following essay is an expansion of a portrait I wrote on Egan and her films in the 2021 survey collection Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada (ed. Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, Goose Lane Press). At the time of my posting this, Egan has recently completed a new film, Of Swallows (2025) and a new body of quilted work, and this piece should be taken as an incomplete portrait of the artist's development with a specific emphasis on her filmmaking, focused on the period from 2002 to 2016.

S.B., September 2, 2026

KELLY EGAN: LANGUAGE LESSONS

by Stephen Broomer

The cameraless films of Kelly Egan have drawn from found imagery, the graphic forms of text, and the possibilities of synthetic sound played upon the motion picture projector. Since beginning in the early 2000s while pursuing graduate studies in the moving image, Egan has built a formidable body of work that encompasses 16mm and 35mm films, projector performances, and paracinematic quilts, and while her film work has engaged the synapses through the violent force of discontinuous animation in both sound and image, much of it has also engaged playfully with the discourse of language and text: the potential of language as an aesthetic medium transcending its common role in communication, the graphic potential of text cast outside the realm of mere transmission of content.

Egan was introduced to synthetic sound in 2002 in a cameraless filmmaking workshop taught by Richard Reeves: with synthetic sound, a graphic form placed within the optical soundtrack area of a film can be read by the projector as sound. Egan began by drawing shapes, letters, numbers and patterns on the soundtrack, painting, pasting and scratching them into the strip, testing the tonal differences produced by these various forms of inscription. Her earliest attempts gave her loud noises, clear rhythms, sounds that resembled percussion, and she soon began placing extended passages of written language in the soundtrack area, allowing the projector to encounter text as image. Typography is laid bare as what it is, an arrangement of density and space, a graphic interruption, stretching out to reveal an acoustic dimension.¹

These experiments belong to a long history of synthetic sound extending through Oskar Fischinger and László Moholy-Nagy and, in Canada, through Norman McLaren and Reeves. Egan’s films pursue this process not only through symbol but through language. A word carries linguistic meaning for the perceiver, and language can be embedded beneath conventional perceptual continuity. The projector responds to fluctuations of light produced by its graphic shape, so that the physical length of the word, its typeface, spacing and density may have greater acoustic consequence than anything the word signifies.¹

Egan’s filmmaking also employs photogram techniques, casting rapidly shifting visions of the shadows of organic forms and the viscera of mass communication. Several of her films use text that prominently features the op art patterning of newsprint halftone. Her interest in the creation of synthetic sound by optical means has not been limited to the black box: in complement to her work in film, Egan has also performed with the band Fleischmopp, a trio with Colin Clark and Alex Geddie, in which Egan uses projectors, synchronizers, and squawk boxes to amplify sound from film strips. Throughout this work the projector completes actions begun on the strip, setting static images into motion and translating graphic marks into noise.

Egan’s first film, finger petals (2002), is composed of photogrammed images of flowers, etching blue and green and gold against black. Their fluctuating size gives the composition added dimensionality. The soundtrack, created by directly animating the soundtrack area of the film plane, draws from the poetics of e.e. cummings, his emphasis on the aesthetic values of text itself, of the sound of speech, and the rhythms of pause. Egan transcribed “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” into the optical track, retaining its divisions and spaces as part of the composition. Cummings’s play within the sonnet form offered her a model for working inside a fixed structure while disturbing the expected language of that structure.²

Egan has recalled waiting to hear the strip for the first time, uncertain of what the projector would make of the words. “Somewhere,” set in Baskerville bold, arrived as a soft tap, followed by others until the poem had been sounded through the projector’s mechanical voice. The differences between these sounds were determined principally by the physical lengths and graphic forms of the words. Their semantic differences were of little consequence.² The source is made explicit only to the quickest eye, or an analytical projector, in the film’s final moments, when cummings’s text passes vertically along the right side of the frame. The poem survives as writing and becomes something else as sound, its ordinary relation to speech broken by the optical reader.

In cockroach (2002), the filmmaker uses newspaper, ink, and Kool-Aid on the film strip, generating soft, thready textures through which newsprint faintly registers. Eventually that newsprint, now crisp, begins a vertical climb up the film strip, and the structure of the piece thereafter alternates the crisp, strongly registered but horizontal text, with newsprint softened by intervening textures, in blue and brown. The text struggles in these obscurities, in addition to which it is reversed and magnified so that its case is shifting, conveying text not as the container of language but as a graphic force.

Letters can be recognized in these films without assembling themselves into words. Words can remain visible after their meanings have become inaccessible. Newspaper is particularly suited to this treatment. It arrives already charged with an expectation of information, but enlargement releases another body contained within it: dots, fibres, blocks, lines, variations of ink.

If the early evolution of Egan’s work maintains some mystery to the violent, sonic punctuations of her soundtracks, the relation between text, image, and sound is offered lucidly in transparent “c” (2005). Against a black base, individual letters and concentrations of text, often bearing the graphic texture of newsprint halftone or the frayed lines of Letraset, appear as exclamations. Their appearances are initially tied to bursts of electronic tone. Later, a rhythm is established of two short tones followed by a sustained one, and on that third, sustained tone, a solitary letter will fill the frame. No letter repeats: in the course of a minute, Egan goes through all twenty-six letters of the alphabet, starting with a but then thoroughly rearranged and ending with x.

The film came partly in answer to viewers of the earlier works who wanted to know what the hidden texts said. Egan had resisted supplying the words, believing that their disclosure would resolve the uncertainty produced by the soundtrack too easily. In transparent “c”, each letter was placed in both the image and soundtrack areas of the film, so that the spectator could see the sign at the moment the projector sounded it. Where the longer words of the earlier films had generally produced blunt, percussive sounds, isolated letters produced distinct musical notes.³

The same year, inspired by the work of Joyce Wieland, Egan made c: won eyed jail (2005), existing in two components as a quilt patterned out of 35mm still negatives and found motion picture film, and a 35mm film print made from the same materials as the quilt to be played on a projector. The relation between quilting and cinema here exceeds the simple likeness of two strips of material sewn together. Egan approached the quilt as the basis of another syntax, drawing a temporal order for the film from the spatial patterns of quilting. Written passages and repeated graphic forms associated with traditional quilt patterns were placed within the soundtrack. Where the work was hand stitched, words accompanied the images; where still photographs appeared, Egan used graphic signs. She constructed the soundtrack visually according to the larger pattern of the quilt without knowing precisely how the words and figures would sound when they met in projection.⁴

In the parallel formed between quilt and print, Egan offers a critique of the place of authorship in the medium, the quilt as a chart of the filmmaker’s labour, something akin to a score, informing the viewer’s understanding of how rhythms course through the film print. Thus the rhythm of the film is structured along the shape of the quilt, and that quilt is rigidly geometric, with tiles of dense colour film forming a border, and a box within that border, separated by pale—and consequently more translucent—photographic negative. Within the interior box, there are five squares of colour film, one near to each corner and a central square that joins the innermost corners of the other four. Surrounding them is more photographic negative.

In the film we see this rhythm play out: the colour sequences of the quilt’s border, pixilation of photographic stills that are often horizontally composed, become little rhythmic bridges. These are separated first by long stretches, composed, for the most part, of continuous movie negatives, and then by the rhythmic punctuations of colour provided by the interior box and squares, before returning to the initial pattern. The film plays out, by virtue of the quilt’s patterning, in a perfectly symmetrical rhythm.

The quilt arranges the film in space and permits its pattern to be apprehended as a whole; projection converts that arrangement into duration. Egan’s use of still photographic negatives complicates the passage further. As pieces of the quilt they remain discrete images, joined materially by stitching and arrangement. Passing rapidly through the projector, these photographs meet and dissolve into one another upon the screen, producing a changing visual collage that does not exist in precisely that form on the material object.⁴

The visual procedures of c: won eyed jail led to catalogs: wish list (2006), made with the photographer Penelope Umbrico using still negatives from her installation From Catalogs. Egan arranged the photographs as moving-image material and, given the source work’s concern with consumption, devised a soundtrack from barcodes, their vertical stripes resembling the patterns of variable-density optical sound. The outcome was unexpectedly representational. Among the synthetic noises Egan heard suggestions of car horns, traffic, the sounds of an urban street. She preferred the more abstract noises that had emerged from written language and did not continue the barcode experiment.⁵ A mark may be placed upon the strip deliberately and its broad acoustic behaviour anticipated, while the finished sound remains partly concealed until projection.

A Firefly (2007), made with the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa for LIFT’s Poetry Projections commission, returned Egan to language under somewhat different conditions. Thammavongsa’s interest in concrete poetry corresponded with Egan’s sense of the written word as visual material, but collaboration imposed an obligation absent from the earlier films: the poem had to remain meaningfully available to the spectator. Egan set its words into motion, making a kind of animated concrete poem. On the soundtrack, she placed the written poem for the projector to read while isolating three of its letters—f, g and i—and arranging repeated strings of them as an acoustic score. The audience could now “read along” with the projector, encountering the same letters as language, image and synthetic sound.⁶

Egan’s ransom notes (2011) was made in response to the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, an event that inspired protests and riots and that led to mass arrests and widespread condemnation of Canada’s Conservative government and the brutalizing of protestors by Toronto police. The ransom note offered Egan a form in which the appropriation of language was already implicit, transforming mass-produced language cut from newspapers into a private message. The film combines newspapers with printouts of Twitter messages circulated during the G20, returning forms of mass communication to the handmade procedures of cutting, pasting and collage.⁷

It expands on the interplay of sound and text found in Egan’s earliest films, with bleating electronic tones under a black base, interrupted by eruptions of newsprint letters in various fonts and cases. The first rhythmic shift occurs when text overtakes the screen, with text plummeting as its lines are agitated left to right, with vibrant organic forms overtaking it; this will alternate with sequences of letters appearing and floating on screen, restricted to letters A to G, with sharps indicating these letters as those of the Western musical scale. Electronic tones are again generated by laying text in the optical soundtrack area, allowing for an act of strange translation, with the projector “singing” the tones it has translated from the words; this takes on an uncanny parallel between sound and image when these clusters of “note” letters appear on-screen.

Egan used the notation of Shostakovich’s "Waltz No. 2" to organize portions of the film, assigning its notes to corresponding letters placed in the image and soundtrack areas. The result is a synchronized graphic transcription of the score which, sounded optically, bears almost no resemblance to Shostakovich. These passages alternate with noisy concentrations of newsprint and paint, their soundtracks incorporating Twitter messages written by people caught up in the G20 disturbances. Egan recognized in these different procedures a division already present elsewhere in her films: frame-by-frame animation tending toward a regulated succession of phrases, letters and notes, while frameless animation, running directly and continuously across the strip, released something more lawless. Both occupy ransom notes.⁷

The 35mm format allowed Egan to carry this division into the theatre. She constructed a stereo optical soundtrack by pasting different words and letters into its two channels, producing separate streams of synthetic sound on either side of the room.⁸

In 2016, Egan returned to the paracinematic crafting of c: won eyed jail, completing Athyrium filix-femina as the second part of her quilt film series. Where c: won eyed jail had taken inspiration from Joyce Wieland’s coexisting quilt and film work, Athyrium filix-femina draws from the early history of photography, responding to the work of Anna Atkins, who, in the 1840s, made cyanotypes of algae through direct contact with light-sensitive paper. As Egan has noted, cyanotype was relatively short-lived as a dominant photographic process but found another life in the domestic sphere, where it was used to decorate fabrics for clothing and furnishings. The passage from photographic experiment into domestic craft offered another meeting point between image-making and traditional women’s work.

Athyrium filix-femina has an intense blue cast caused by the process undertaken: Egan made her own cyanotype emulsion using Atkins’s 1842 recipe. She then used this material to make photograms of plants in homage to Atkins, the effect of which, in the rapid, discontinuous stream of Egan’s film, is something akin to bas-relief, the shapes of plants showing clear, surrounded by a vivid blue. The cyanotype returns Egan to some of the elementary conditions of her earliest photogram films: objects against a sensitive surface, exposure, contact, the conversion of physical things into shadows and shapes. Here these procedures carry another history, in which photographic experiment, textile patterning, botanical specimen and domestic ornament draw close to one another.

These effects are interrupted in their rhythms by repeating scenes from a fiction film of a young woman being tormented by a bully who holds a jar containing a spider to her face. In this restrained dialogue of abstract and figurative sequences, new aspects of Egan’s quilt patterning become evident, as these fiction scenes flip on their axis, so that the film elaborates rhythmically, becoming increasingly violent, but also through the casting of mirror images. Figures reverse. Botanical forms become silhouettes through direct contact. The symmetry first made literal in the structure of c: won eyed jail has entered the moving image itself.

The films remain grounded in an encounter between materials and the projector. Egan places things on the strip—words, photographs, plants, patterns—and allows motion picture machinery to disclose another property within them. The projector reads everything that passes through it and understands nothing. Out of that misunderstanding might emerge a new language.

Notes

1. Kelly F.W. Egan, The Projector’s Noises: A Media Archaeology of Cinema Through the Projector (PhD diss., Ryerson University and York University, 2013), 210–11. Egan describes encountering synthetic sound in Richard Reeves’s cameraless filmmaking workshop and experimenting with shapes, letters, numbers and patterns directly on the optical track. She places her own work in relation to Fischinger and Moholy-Nagy and notes Reeves’s relationship to the tradition of Norman McLaren.
2. Egan, The Projector’s Noises, 211–12. Egan describes transcribing cummings’s poem onto the track, retaining its spacing and typography, and hearing the words translated into percussive noises by the projector.
3. Egan, 212–13. transparent “c” was made partly in response to objections to the concealed narratives of the earlier soundtracks; Egan records her surprise that isolated letters produced musical notes.
4. Egan, 213–14. On quilting as an alternative narrative structure, the combination of written narratives and quilt patterns in the soundtrack, and the use of still photographic negatives to produce a visual collage in projection.
5. Egan, 214–15. Egan describes the collaboration with Penelope Umbrico, her use of barcodes in the optical track, and the unexpectedly representational sounds they produced.
6. Egan, 215. On A Firefly, its relationship to concrete poetry, and the use of the letters f, g and i in the synthetic soundtrack.
7. Egan, 215–17. Egan discusses the ransom note as a form concerned with ownership and exchange, the use of newspaper and Twitter material from the G20, the Shostakovich structure, and her distinction between the ordered qualities of frame-by-frame animation and the noisy character of frameless animation.
8. Egan, 216–17. On the construction of the film’s two-channel 35mm optical soundtrack and its use of different words and letters on the left and right tracks.

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