Tom Chomont

Tom Chomont's interest in cinema began at the age of four, drawing movies on paper and tinkering with an old, broken projector at home. During his adolescence, he made his initial explorations with a camera gifted by his parents, though without film inside. A graduate in painting, Chomont discovered his true calling in cinema after reading the Film Culture magazine. In 1961, he started filming his first reels shot on camera, creating 8mm diaries. Over the two years he studied film at Boston University, he began working on his initial 16mm films. Populated with sleepwalkers, doubles, and magical objects, these early works, both lyrical and fantastical, were already edited on a Moviola, featuring family, friends, and lovers.

During the same period in Cambridge, twice a week, Chomont began showcasing key avant-garde films from both his era and earlier periods. Viewers witnessed works by Jean Epstein, Maya Deren, Jean Genet, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, George Kuchar, and Andrew Meyer. Just before the screening of "Galaxie," a film of portraits by Gregory J. Markopoulos in which Chomont appears, the police permanently closed the screening venue.

Overwhelmed by the discovery of "Twice a Man," Chomont spent several months studying Markopoulos's film, noting the content and duration of each shot. Inspired by it, he began working in the years he lived in New York—between 1966 and 1969—developing his own editing technique from very small film fragments, sometimes just a single gesture. Later, he would re-film these images and copy them repeatedly, creating repetitions or inversions using a mirror printer.