The history of 19th century warfare, firearms and early amateur filmmaking converge in Caroline Rumley’s EPONYMOUS, a meditative archival essay with untold riches of 16mm footage shot in cinema’s earliest days. Its cinematographer was Hiram Percy Maxim, creator of the silencer and Rumley’s ancestor by marriage. The family legacy of violence goes back one step further, into the late 1800s: Maxim’s father is credited with the invention of the automatic machine gun. In a time when the moving picture camera was a novelty contraption for the inventor class to explore, the Maxims did just that — leaving behind a trove of beautiful footage tying their creative impulses to the machines of death they produced. As Rumley ponders their lives and legacies, the images reverberate through time, from the past to the present and back again.

- Daniel Christian