A short treatise on the semiotics of capital, happiness, and phenomenology under the flickering neon of global capitalism.
Social & External
The people behind it
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.
Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.
The Breathers-In is a 16mm experimental narrative film in which two Victorian Sisters float through a post-industrial landscape of Loss and Alienation. Through the use of archetypal characters, silent-film aesthetics, and asynchronous sound, The Breathers-In produces a world in which established constructs of identity, race, and narrative itself are slowly splintered apart.
the quarry is a silent document of five minutes in the presence of the sublime. This small, quiet 16mm film serves as a testament both to cinema’s failure to reproduce the lived moment and to its success in replacing that moment with one that is equally wondrous.
Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.
Where have you been? I have been waiting for you. Let us begin. The Tawny Frogmouth is not an owl. Here is its actual call: hrr hrrrm hrr hrrrm hrr hrrrm.
“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas
The Valley of Fire. Oficina Chacabuco. The Calumet Industrial Corridor. From the outskirts of Vegas to the desert ghost towns of Chile - a pinhole travelogue for the world’s end, for what was left behind.
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.
An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the ritualized actions of the Red and the Blue Gods.
This experimental dance film employs a bastardized version of the 1930s three strip Technicolor process. Shot entirely on black and white film through color filters, the images were recombined into full color through optical printing techniques, one frame at a time. The gestures in this dance work explore the psychological fracturing and reunification in representations of the female body.
Between a man and his lover lies a wall, between the man and the country he loves lies another wall. Can a one-sided dialouge breaks the walls and expresses the man’s feelings and sentiments? Or does the lover or the country wants the wall to be broken in the first place? This short was inspired by Amy Len’s dance choreography “Wall” and colloborated with Loh Bok Lai. The dance was originally choreographed for a performance in Japan Dance Wave Fukuoka ‘06 - Asian Contemporary Dance Now and later made into an experimental video combining elements of an actor and monologue. The video footages were also used for the dance piece itself in KL.
"A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap. These simple elements create a hurried maze of twisting antler branches, twigs, and dissected slices of pure “space.” I can hear the crackling fires, echoing elk calls and frosty despair…" - JT Rogstad, The International Exposition
'It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan.'
Gaining ideology from their last album Disco Volodar, the short film uses the core theme of space. The short film is filmed at Unit 3 Regents Trading Estate, the usual area for Sounds From The Other City. Using the philosophy of avante garde pioneer Maya Deren ‘one must at least begin with the body feeling’, the films opening is of the four piece standing atop of the hill in the Pendle countryside. This quickly melts into a warped reality and lands you into the POV of a camera and trapped in a liminal space where you see a band in session.
100% comprised of found footage, this is a meditation on the filmmaker's relationship with herself, others, and how she is perceived by both parties. Showing the filmmaker at various stages of her life, this short seeks to visualize the embarrassing ordeal of being known when you're at your most vulnerable.
Using a 35mm strip of motion picture slug featuring the recently deceased American comedian Richard Pryor, this extended Rorschach assault on the eyes moves out of a flickering chaos created by incompatible film gauges into a punchline involving historically incompatible racial stereotypes.
Emma is a young woman who's yet to find herself. In the meantime, she has to deal with the high expectations that society has set for women.
Burford met Breer in February 1992 and filmed his actions. Breer manipulates some of his mutoscopes: he leafs through some cards of his film in the making, Sparkill Ave! A dome-shaped sculpture slowly moves across the space.
Vivian is a carefree, streetwise diamond in the rough when she meets sophisticated billionaire Edward in a chance encounter that turns into a week-long business arrangement. But Vivian's energetic spirit challenges Edward's no-nonsense approach to life, and soon they are teaching each other – and falling in love!
A documentary about the closure of General Motors' plant at Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the loss of 30,000 jobs. Details the attempts of filmmaker Michael Moore to get an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith.
When a former elite sniper is hunted down by the ruthless warlord who once held her captive, she must fight to the death to protect the daughter she has raised in hiding, on a remote Australian farm.
On a flight from Los Angeles to New York, Oliver and Emily make a connection, only to decide that they are poorly suited to be together. Over the next seven years, however, they are reunited time and time again, they go from being acquaintances to close friends to... lovers?
A fading celebrity decides to use a black market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself.
In the year 2159, two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes, a hard line government official, will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesn’t stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky Max is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that, if successful, will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.
When he suddenly finds himself without his long-standing blue-collar job, Larry Crowne enrolls at his local college to start over. There, he becomes part of an eclectic community of students and develops a crush on his teacher.
While attending a retrospect of his work, a filmmaker recalls his life and his loves: the inspirations for his films.
Jane Goodale has everything going for her. She's a producer on a popular daytime talk show, and is in a hot romance with the show's dashing executive producer Ray. But when the relationship goes terribly awry, Jane begins an extensive study of the male animal, including her womanizing roommate Eddie. Jane puts her studies and romantic misadventure to use as a pseudonymous sex columnist -- and becomes a sensation.
Alejandro is an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador, struggling to bring his unusual ideas to life in New York City. As time on his work visa runs out, a job assisting an erratic art-world outcast becomes his only hope to stay in the country and realize his dream.
In a near-future city where soaring opulence overshadows economic hardship, Gwen and her daughter, Jules, do all they can to hold on to their joy, despite the instability surfacing in their world.
On a post-apocalyptic Earth, a robot, built to protect the life of his dying creator's beloved dog, learns about life, love, friendship, and what it means to be human.
A lone drifter stumbles upon a unique pair of sunglasses that reveal aliens are systematically gaining control of the Earth by masquerading as humans and lulling the public into submission.
Told in flashback form, the film traces the rise and fall of a tough, ambitious Hollywood producer, Jonathan Shields, as seen through the eyes of various acquaintances, including a writer, James Lee Bartlow; a star, Georgia Lorrison; and a director, Fred Amiel. He is a hard-driving, ambitious man who ruthlessly uses everyone on the way to becoming one of Hollywood's top movie makers.
Michael Moore comes home to the issue he's been examining throughout his career: the disastrous impact of corporate dominance on the everyday lives of Americans (and by default, the rest of the world).
The heir to an oil fortune trades places with a water-ski instructor at a Florida hotel to see if girls will like him for himself, rather than his father's money.
Larry Burrows is unhappy and feels powerless over his life. He believes his entire life could have turned out differently had he not missed that shot in a baseball game when was a kid. One night he meets this mysterious man, who could change his fate by offering him that alternative life he always dreamed of. But as Burrows embarks on this journey of self discovery he realises that even this new life has its problems and drawbacks..
Dan Foreman is a seasoned advertisement sales executive at a high-ranking publication when a corporate takeover results in him being placed under naive supervisor Carter Duryea, who is half his age. Matters are made worse when Dan's new supervisor becomes romantically involved with his daughter an 18 year-old college student Alex.
A small, wealthy family in New York City gets progressively torn apart by secrets, lies, and the theft that orchestrates all of it.
This is the story of the internal struggle between a man's Brain—a pragmatic protector who calculates his every move, and his Heart—a free-spirited adventurer who wants to let loose.
