Film and Video

Several strands emerge in recent American experimental film and video. Films and live projection works, in which the artist manipulates the projector during the performance, explore color and light, material surface and cinematic space, and the mechanics of the projector. New digital videos use the fluidity of digital technology to create works addressing narrative, documentary, and popular culture. Several pieces articulate a personal anxiety around distant danger, psychic disintegration, or mortality. From the projected light of the magic lantern to the virtual reality of the Internet, this group of works asserts the fragility and humanity of our contemporary world. The series includes fourteen programs. All programs are screened in the Kaufman Astoria Studios Film & Video Gallery.

Brian Frye
Brian Frye is a filmmaker, curator, and founder of the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, an alternative screening space in New York City's Lower East Side. In Oona's Veil, Frye submits the screen test of Charlie Chaplin's eighteen-year-old soon-to-be spouse, Oona O'Neill, to a complex series of manual reworkings, weaving a "veil" of surfaces and time lapses over the original film. Blotched by the markings on the celluloid caused by its deliberate exposure to chemical and natural elements, Oona's image is rendered both concrete and abstract.

In the winter of 2000, the Brooklyn screening venue Ocularis organized a party celebrating Andy Warhol's 1963 film Kiss Frye filmed other filmmakers and participants as they restaged their own versions of Kiss. In the resulting film, Wormwood's Dog and Monkey Show, Frye observes the scene with a Warholesque detachment similar to the original film.

Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper is known for his work as an actor, director, and artist. In Homeless, his most recent digital video, a homeless woman is portrayed sleeping on the boardwalk of a beach in Southern California. The video follows her through the day, capturing the tedium and depression of life on the street. At certain moments, the narrative is interrupted by flashbacks of the woman dancing in a topless bar, as though she were recalling moments in her past. The underlying humiliation of her topless bar work is paralleled by the humiliation of homelessness; both are created by economic deprivation, and both consume pride and self-esteem. Hopper's portrayal of a life falling apart demonstrates his long-term interest in the abjection and nihilism of the American social environment.

Diane Kitchen
Diane Kitchen's film practice embraces two genres: ethnographic documentary, exploring such subjects as indigenous life in the Amazon basin; and a more personal cinema, in which her lens focuses on the magnificent details of nature--autumn leaves, the pelt of a deer, or the glistening surface of snow. In Wot the Ancient Sod, autumn leaves appear in close-up, nodding gently on their stems, then blur into diffused halos of colored light. Through focal adjustments of the camera lens, Kitchen melts the veined, reddish brown surfaces of leaves and twigs into abstract forms, whose diffused light fills the entire screen for several moments before the camera shifts once more and brings another form into focus. Kitchen's use of light both underlines and redefines the properties of natural forms.

Fred Worden
Since 1976, Fred Worden has made a body of films that articulate one of the fundamental principles of cinema: the perception of light in motion. In The Or Cloud, the dynamic force of light is articulated through a sequence of abstract forms that swirl, arc, flicker, and tumble across the screen in black, white, and gray tones, creating a vibrating energetic space. Worden creates this space from a single image of marks made in ink on acetate; he then deconstructs the image through intermittent projection, shifts in registration, and different generations of duplication. The unknowable mystery of space is suggested by the work's title, which refers to an astronomical body named the Ort Cloud, a cluster of orbiting rocks that is slowly descending, like a dust cloud, through the atmosphere.

Glen Fogel
The films of Glen Fogel are intensely personal, constructing an immersive space infused with emotion. Shot in Super-8, 16mm, and video, their intimacy is reinforced by an enclosing sound. In Reflex, close-up images of a face fill the screen through filtered colored light, accompanied by a sound track of a pulsating heartbeat and slow breathing, creating an erotic, claustrophobic space. In Ascension, Fogel transforms moments from the TV game show The Price is Right. He manipulates footage of women's faces as they throw back their heads in joy and excitement, and causes their faces to contort into ambiguous expressions that meld smiles, ecstasy, horror, and pain. The sound of the women's screams of pleasure is transformed into a carnal moan, simultaneously unsettling and melodic. Fogel's film freezes the moment in which the everyday is catapulted into the unimagined dream.

Alfred Guzzetti
Alfred Guzzetti has made short films, feature-length autobiographies, documentaries, and, in the last few years, digital video works. The Tower of Industrial Life is a portrait of the late capitalist landscape, staged in a series of urban and natural scenes into which texts communicating disturbing information on political events are inserted. Guzzetti's exquisitely constructed work draws the viewer into a gentle flow of lazy sensual images, then abruptly disrupts it. The words and sentences that periodically scroll across the screen remind us of what we know, or think we know, and that which we have repeatedly heard, yet have consistently forgotten, "news of distant places and of distant and scarcely imaginable violence."

Irit Batsry
Born and raised in Israel, Irit Batsry moved to New York in 1983. These Are Not My Images (Neither There Nor Here) is her first feature film, and belongs to an ongoing thematic project, Neither There Nor Here. Rhetorically refusing both the content of her film and any stable definition of her own location, Batsry creates a dislocation of place, medium, genre, and meaning. The place, Southern India, is both a physical location and a metaphor for remoteness; and the genre shifts between documentary, experimental narrative, and personal essay. In the video, a Western filmmaker journeys through Southern India, accompanied by a half-blind guide, and encounters a local filmmaker. All three characters narrate their different views on the meaning of place. Batsry's fusion of film and video techniques reflects her intense questioning of what constitutes truth, fiction, reality, and memory.

Joe Gibbons
For twenty-five years, Joe Gibbons has documented his life in a series of sardonic, autobiographical Super-8 film and video diaries. Confessions of a Sociopath is an existential digest of his neuroses. Combining family home movies of himself as a child with factual and fictitious tableaux in which he plays his own alter ego, Gibbons enacts various dramatic episodes in his life. Transgressive acts and traumatic events--becoming addicted to heroin, shoplifting, drinking, and evading his parole officers, all experienced alongside his success as a filmmaker--are laid before the viewer with disarming honesty. In this existential dance with his own shadow, the psyche takes on the form of a catastrophic, yet comical labyrinth, within whose corridors Gibbons is condemned to perpetually roam.

Keith Sanborn
Keith Sanborn's work explores the relationship between narrative and abstraction. For the Birds, part three of a cycle titled Theory of Religion, Theory of Ecstasy, was inspired by an eleventh-century allegorical Sufi mystical text, The Conference of the Birds. As Sanborn explains, the Sufi text explores "transparency and opacity, multiplicity and unity, narrative and insight, the mundane and the ecstatic." For the Birds translates these literary relationships into a sensory, cinematic form, using sound and light. Over a period of eight minutes, a screen suffused with light undergoes subtle shifts in hue as first one bird, then several, and finally an entire dawn chorus can be heard. The diffusion of light and the gradual crescendo of birdsong suggest a celestial, even ecstatic state of being as they induce a meditative state in the viewer.

Ken Jacobs
Since the late 1950s, Jacobs has produced a substantial body of work including films and Nervous System performances. In Flo Rounds a Corner, single frames showing Jacobs's wife Florence walking around a street corner in Italy are computer-manipulated, creating a disorienting optical reading of arrested movement--forward motion paradoxically suspended in place--and hovering steps. In Crystal Palace (Chandeliers For The People), Jacobs dispenses with film: employing a single-slide projector and an exterior shutter, he hand-manipulates objects in the path of the light, "generating visions of a vast crystalline dynamo, a color-spectrum 'metropolis' in deep space." Inspired by the Moscow subway interior, Jacobs says of its passengers: "They spread without hurry to radiating tracks, passing under enormous chandeliers liberated from palace ballrooms of the once-ruling class. They were now The People's Chandeliers, their crystals vibrating in sympathy with local and express trains."

Leighton Pierce
Leighton Pierce trawls images from his immediate environment to create impressionistic studies of domestic life. The Back Steps is constructed from a moment at a children's Halloween party at Pierce's home. Two young girls run down the steps of the porch in the twilight. Their swift movements become a compositional unit that is repeated and abstracted into an intimate tableau. Pierce's painterly images are made using a slow frame rate, which blurs each figure and movement into swathes of colored light. The rustle of the girls' dresses and their childish laughter echoes enigmatically as they run down the steps, disappearing into the darkness. The images evoke a dreamlike state, in which the figures appear as phantoms melting into the night.

Luis Recoder
In Luis Recoder's films and live projection works, projected light is used to create a perceptual interface between materiality and immateriality. In a series of cameraless film studies titled Available Light, he subjects the film strip to indirect light exposures, light flares, and fogging. In Space, the black emulsion sparkles with tiny flecks of light that crackle across the screen like a meteor shower. In Available Light: Shift, a two-projector work, color negative and positive prints are projected on overlapping screens in alternating blocks of color. In all of Recoder's work, the film apparatus is used to assert light as a tangible form of matter.

Mark LaPore
Mark LaPore's filmmaking is both antidocumentary and nonfictional. In The Glass System, LaPore captures a series of tableaux from the streets of Calcutta: a knife-sharpener honing blades on a stone rotated by the pedaling of a bicycle; a child performing a tightrope walk high above a small crowd. As each sequence appears, a narrator reads from a Bengali-English phrase book, the text underlining our presence as outsiders, attempting to enter another culture through its most basic tool of communication: language. LaPore intersperses his tableaux with scenes from a rapidly disappearing New York. In the fleeting street life of both cities LaPore recognizes a slower, more humanist existence, whose infinitesimal aspects he records as they hover at the brink of disappearance.

Peggy Ahwesh
Peggy Ahwesh's work explores the ways in which social constructions of female sexuality and power are played out through cultural expressions of fantasy and desire. For Ahwesh, the most potent contemporary symbol of female empowerment is Lara Croft, the busty female star of the popular video game Tomb Raider and the subject of Ahwesh's new video, She Puppet. Lara Croft is the quintessential fantasy woman: sexually alluring, physically powerful, courageous, thrill-seeking, and smart. Female power is articulated through action and risk: in the video game Lara visits the South Seas, the rooftops of London, the glaciers of Antarctica, and the canyons of the desert. Re-editing images of Croft as found footage, Ahwesh creates a portrait of fantasy and empowerment.

Peter Campus
Since the early 1970s, Peter Campus has been a major figure in the field of video and digital media. In Death Threat: Receiving Radiation, Disappearance, Death Threat, triggered by a recent bout of cancer from which he has fully recovered, Campus addresses the subject of his own mortality. In Receiving Radiation, the superimposition of one layer of imagery over another becomes symbolic of the diffusion of radiation through the body. The dread of death is visualized in Disappearance, as Campus gradually fades his own image out of places near his rural home. Death Threat speaks to anxieties around the disappearance of the physical self. In this moving video work, Campus confronts the fear of death, seen through the lens of survival.

Peter Hutton
Peter Hutton has been an important figure in experimental film since the 1970s. Since 1985, he has made numerous films whose subject is the Hudson River. In Hutton's silent films, a single shot is often sustained over a period of time, within which minimal movement occurs. Time and Tide begins with a short reel of the Hudson River shot by Billy Blitzer in 1903 for Biograph, titled "Down the Hudson." Hutton continues Blitzer's study of the river, exploring both its beauty and the way in which industrial development has altered its shores. Hutton's sculptural training is evident in the high contrast between depth and surface. The timelessness of his films evokes the removal from daily experience felt on the ocean; subtle changes of light and movement, experienced as though in slow motion, suggest small epiphanies of nature.

Phil Solomon
Phil Solomon's films construct a dialogue between the represented image and its altered physical support. His works, according to filmmaker Stan Brakhage, "disintegrate the pictorial 'fabric'…of old movies in various states of emulsion rot." In Twilight Psalm II: "Walking Distance", figures emerge almost imperceptibly from found footage in glittering midnight blue and brownish hues. The physical nature of the imagery is made evident by Solomon's subjection of the film's surface to extensive photochemical treatment as he literally paints with the film's emulsion. The film appears almost as a rusted surface, the artist explains, "left to us from, say, the Bronze age, a time when images were smelted and boiled rather than merely taken, when they poured down like silver, not to be fixed or washed…but free to reform and coagulate into unstable, temporary molds…. Twilight Psalm II: Walking Distance is...a cinema of ether and ore."

Robert Beavers
Robert Beavers has been making films since the late 1960s. His meticulously composed films are conceptually complex, carefully crafted, and concise. In The Ground, the three-dimensionality of Beavers's "prismatic" filmic space is articulated through a dialogue between the actions of a bare-chested stonecutter and the curved, sun-baked surface of a ruined tower. Filming on the Greek island of Hydra, the camera captures details of the stonemason's body as he cups his hand to his chest, echoing the curve of the nearby tower and implying a connection between the concave spaces of the large and small forms. Beavers draws a parallel between the actions of the stonemason's chisel on stone and his own editorial cuts, revealing the filmmaker's deep understanding of the material, volumetric possibilities of cinema.

Robert Fenz
Robert Fenz's Soledad: Meditations on Revolution III is the third in a series of films, begun in 1997, exploring the meaning of revolution and modernity in different Latin American countries. Soledad takes as its subject three cities: Mexico City, San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and New York. Within an improvisational structure in a core framework, random glimpses of daily life in the three cities emerge and disappear in shifting relationships to each other, framed as rectangular and circular shapes within a black background. At certain points, two rolls of film are shown in parallel strips, juxtaposing different times and places, as when television footage of a masked revolutionary appears alongside shots of the streets of Mexico City

Scott Stark
For twenty years, Scott Stark has redefined the viewers' perception of cinematic space. In Angel Beach, anonymous 1970s 3-D photographs of bikini-clad women on Northern California beaches are rendered both three-dimensional and cinematic. Stark reinforces the stereoscopic method by which the photographs were originally created, filming details from the photographs frame by frame, using an incessant flicker to separate each still figure from its background. The strobing suggests the illusion of a movement around the figures, which is simultaneously canceled by their static reality as photographs. Through this paradox, the figures, compressed into the film frame, suggest a hyper-reality of space. Stark articulates the liminal space between the still and moving image, in which movement is used to underline the concrete nature of photographic stillness within a cinematic space.

Seth Price
The work of Seth Price is concerned with the relationship between modernity, popular culture, art history, and technology. "Painting" Sites demonstrates Price's interest in the internet's role as a vast interactive archive that makes accessible otherwise disconnected groups of cultural material. "Painting" Sites creates an ironic, fractured narrative using two classic forms of high culture and popular entertainment: painting and the fairy tale. Reproductions of paintings from various periods in art history, drawn randomly from the Internet, appear as Price narrates a story he wrote, in the style of a Grimms fairy tale. The story evolves into an elaborate, improbable narrative; a labyrinth in which stories within stories double back on themselves, in an endless deferral of resolution. Price manipulates the 'ideal' of narrative, in its perpetual promise of something meaningful to come.

silt
silt, a San Francisco-based collective, set up in 1990 by Jeff Warrin, Keith Evans, and Christian Farrell, creates film performances and site-specific installations using ideas drawn from science, natural phenomena, and mysticism. Each performance involves multiple film projections, shadow interferences, objects, and sounds. The film prints are rusted, buried in the ground, consumed by mold and bacteria, left to interact with the earth's natural alchemical process like fossilized relics. silt operates the film projectors like a disc jockey, physically "performing" with the equipment, introducing filters, shadows, organic material, and their own bodies into the projections. In this merging of projections, objects, shadows, and sounds, the boundaries between the real and the projected, the live and the recorded, become confounded.

Steina
Steina is a central figure in the history of video art. Her videos use mechanical and digital devices to transform images and sound into a narrative of synthesized abstract forms. In Trevor, Steina deconstructs footage of Trevor Vishart singing an experimental vocal composition into a microphone, with his eyes closed. Steina's technical mastery transforms the recording of Trevor into an interiorized, psychological portrait, in which the formal manipulations of sound and image evoke a roller coaster of intense emotional feeling. Trevor's closed eyes, hunched shoulders, shaking head, and primal sounds become expressions of an unspoken angst. Through the highly structured formal sequence, composed like a musical score, Steina reveals the electronic signal's ability to manipulate image and sound into a single, synthesized abstract form.

Stom Sogo
The films of Stom Sogo are constructed with a fresh, intuitive eye. Problem's You consists of nine rolls of unedited super-8mm film, capturing streets, interiors and beaches in and around New York City. Each shot was made in a single take, and the rolls' absence of editing emphasizes the importance Sogo placed on chance and spontaneity, influenced by Jonas Mekas and John Cage. Details of buildings, trees, and the sea slowly creeping up the sand on the shore are all infused with a sensuality and sensitivity to shifts in light and shadow. In Guided by Voices, Sogo constructs a film version of Dennis Cooper's novel Guide. The highly abstracted, colored film evokes a psychedelic experience. As Sogo recalls, "It was 5.45 a.m. - all my memories flashed before me, I fell off the stairs and the film finished itself."

Susan Black
Susan Black's video works are landscapes of American suburbia. In Heaven on Earth, a single tracking shot of bungalows and neatly tended gardens in Palm Springs, California, is inverted. This simple device renders the image newly concrete. The ordinariness of a road of suburban houses is replaced by a dramatic abstraction of form, in which the shape, volume, and weight of each house, fence, and tree now hanging from the ceiling is given a new density and three-dimensionality. Black's inversion suggests a surreal reading of the popular American belief in suburbia as an oasis. Heaven on Earth depicts the hyperreality of American suburbia, recalling Jean Baudrillard's comment on Disneyland, which he states is "presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real."

Bosmat Alon and Tirtza Even
Kayam Al Hurbano (Existing on Its Ruins) is a collaborative work initially inspired by short anecdotal dream texts written by Bosmat Alon. This digital video, shot by Tirtza Even and Alon in a Palestinian refugee camp near Bethlehem, and in the surroundings of Hebron (Halil), addresses the highly charged subject of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The directors interviewed dwellers in the camp, and people from Hebron whose homes had been demolished by the Israeli government. Fragments of the interviews are interwoven with languorous images of daily life in the ruins, creating an unsettling disjunction with the hard reality they depict. Exploiting formal digital devices such as opening cracks in the picture and planes of light sliding off the frame, the filmmakers create a visual syntax that expresses the fractured and transient life of the Palestinian refugees. In "the charged silence of a continuous pause, an extended margin of inaction," listless men sit, endlessly waiting, in a limbo of displacement and uncertainty.

Tony Cokes
Tony Cokes has produced video and multimedia installation works since the mid-1980s, using video to critique received assumptions of race, class, gender, and popular culture. He often works collaboratively, as a member of X-PRZ, a biracial art collective founded in 1991. 2@, the fourth in a series of five videos made with the band SWIPE, of which Cokes is also a member, investigates the ideological discourse surrounding the music industry. Original music by SWIPE mimicking the major shifts in pop music from the 1960s to the present accompanies a series of sentences in black letters, excerpted from song and album titles that spring from a white background. As the capitalizing of words shifts each phrase into an ambivalent status somewhere between statement and logo, 2@ becomes a taxonomic cultural critique that epitomizes the very form it seeks to deconstruct.

Zoe Beloff
Zoe Beloff's work embraces nineteenth-century protocinematic forms and digital media. Her works explore the nineteenth-century belief in technology as a conduit for parapsychological phenomena, articulating the repressed desire and fantasy triggered by its potential to unlock the unconscious. Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side is a stereoscopic film based on medium Elizabeth D'Esperance's 1897 autobiography. In A Mechanical Medium, Beloff, in collaboration with sound artist Gen Ken Montgomery, creates a live "stereoscopic séance," in which stereoscopic 16mm home movies from the 1930s are projected over vintage 3-D slides of Asbury Park, New Jersey. Derelict casinos, boardwalks, hotels, and amusement parks become a "land of the dead" into which Beloff and Montgomery breathe life, as they project phantasmic images of people, "afterimages of the living," inside the abandoned spaces.