Short Films and Moving Images

The moving image works of EveNSteve—artist Stephen Schaub and author Eve O. Schaub—occupy a space where documentary dissolves into poetry, and the act of looking becomes a ritual. These films are not simply stories told in pictures; they are meditations in motion, lyrical investigations into time, place, and the search for meaning. Drawing from their hybrid art practice of hand-inscribed photographs and in-camera collages, EveNSteve bring their same tactile and philosophical sensibility to the screen, transforming landscape, history, and myth into immersive visual experiences.

The 1680 House (2025)
Inspired by Robert Kaplan’s The Nothing That Is, this haunting visual poem explores the paradoxical richness of absence. Shot in a historic 17th-century home using only natural light, a 1939 Minox “spy camera,” and Italian motion picture film, The Nothing There Is transforms hand-coated brown paper bags into sacred surfaces of mark and meaning. Symbols scrawl across images like untranslated glyphs—echoes of language, memory, and loss. The work asks: how do we assign value to the unseen, the unfinished, the unresolved?

A Week in the Icehouse (2024)
A luminous portrait of two artists in retreat, A Week in the Icehouse invites the viewer to slow down and enter the rhythms of artistic practice. Set in a converted 19th-century icehouse in Truro’s historic Corn Hill district, the film becomes a meditation on light, sound, and color in winter. Here, making art is both ritual and play; the quiet presence of process is itself the work.

No One’s Home (2024)
Echoing the themes of silence and space from A Week in the Icehouse, No One’s Home expands the inquiry: what does it mean to create in isolation? Set in the same Corn Hill locale, the film reflects on artistic absence and presence, collaboration and solitude, and the echoing voices that inhabit a place long after its occupants have left.

Frost (2022)
Set against the backdrop of two of Robert Frost’s Vermont homesteads, this fictional meditation follows a would-be poet in search of inspiration. As real landscapes blur into imagined ones, Frost becomes a quiet journey through artistic longing, literary legacy, and the terrain of introspection.

Chapter Three: In Which the Past Becomes the Future, But Only in the Best Possible Way (2021)
Using mirrored imagery and violet-tinted fields at the famed Jenne Farm in Reading, Vermont, Chapter Three constructs a Rorschach dream of a future that folds back on the past. What does it mean to idealize Vermont? And can we imagine the future without romanticizing—or repeating—the past?

Each One a Soul (2021)
Set at the Bennington Battlefield on the New York–Vermont border, this deeply personal work blends Revolutionary War history with contemporary questions of memory, trauma, and healing. With imagery from the battlefield and text drawn from archival sources, Each One a Soul reimagines a site of violence as a sacred place of rebirth. The work is especially resonant for artist Stephen Schaub, a Gulf War veteran seeking to understand his own experience through the lens of art and time.

There Are Forests in the Animals (2021)
This lyrical film is a meditation on the interwoven forces of femininity, wildness, and the ancient rhythms of the natural world. Part poem, part prayer, Forests reminds us that the boundary between human and animal, myth and biology, is not fixed but porous—and sacred.

Walking Makes You Think Differently (2021)
What does it mean to know a place? In this experimental short, the viewer follows a fictional visitor’s wanderings through Quito, Ecuador—documented in a 26-foot panoramic in-camera collage. Like memory itself, the narrative is fragmented and nonlinear, shaped by walking, weather, and wondering.

Rokeby (2020)
Rokeby Museum in Vermont is more than a preserved site—it is a palimpsest of abolitionist resistance, Quaker life, and literary legacy. This film traces its layers through overlapping imagery and handwritten archival fragments. The result is a tapestry of lives lived: farmers, freedom seekers, writers, and rebels whose voices rise again from the land.

The Home of My Choice (2020)
Taking its name from a quote by Alexander Twilight, the first known Black American college graduate, The Home of My Choice interrogates how history is framed—and who does the framing. Shot in Brownington, Vermont, the film weaves image and inscription to explore the complex legacy of Twilight, whose story has been shaped and reshaped to suit shifting agendas. In asking what home and history mean, this film becomes both tribute and critique.

A Wonderful Plague (2020)
Created at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, A Wonderful Plague draws connections between historical pandemics and the social, political, and spiritual narratives that surround them. Using imagery from Provincetown, Massachusetts—a town marked by epidemics past and present—the film inscribes layered truths across the landscape: smallpox, AIDS, COVID. Who decides the story of a pandemic? And what if the meaning lies not in survival, but in remembering?

Together, these films form a cinematic constellation—an unfolding archive of place, time, and feeling. Through slow looking, handwritten inscription, and the layered poetics of voice and vision, EveNSteve’s films compel us to see not just with our eyes, but with our memories, our questions, and our dreams.