A terrible virus finally brings down the internet, and humans look out from the wreckage in the aftermath. Five weigh in with personal recollections: pensive, disbelieving, grieving, philosophical. We used to have movie stars and famous musicians. Now we had each other.
News from another pandemic, the one that "changed everything" before it fell out of the news cycle and collective memory, except for the newly infected or those who, like myself, managed a new life after death. Based on a text by David Wojnarowicz.
Begun in a three-week seminar at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) in October 2016, seventeen of us began an excavation together, immersing ourselves in a selection of Red Cross shorts made over nearly a century in countries round the world. This nearly wordless feature-length ensemble...
Portrait moments collected across the world carry powerful situations and stand out from the grip of the image with an expression, a tear, a flame, a scar or a position of the body. The glances and gestures directed beyond the frame of the photograph both stun and shake; the documentary and...
Commissioned for The Colin Campbell Sessions by Lisa Steele at Vtape, one of a half dozen shorts made in tribute to one of our video dads. Colin had died suddenly and unexpectedly of colon cancer in 2001, but not before lending grace to more than fourty low-tech wonders of cross-dressing satire. An...
BRAND begins like a child's yawn, a fairy tale with an incredible beginning. Brand blends two themes into a fugue of questions and answers. The first theme is a child's play, illuminated here in the flickering shadows of a kindergarten. The second theme shows the red-hot iron that will mark any...
Based on Dogen’s Mountains and Rivers Sutra, written in 13th century Japan. Here are a few words of introduction spoken by the artist. Direct-to-camera address in an alternating light current, an establishing shot of language. How should we begin?
Brasília, the "city of hope", "the ultimate utopia of the 20th century" , is being conserved as a cultural heritage today. It is a place as old as the filmmaker. Segments of amateur footage and of feature films shot on location in the early sixties are inserted in his 1998 travelogue. The utopian...
After a purported bike accident, the nameless amnesiac undertakes audio-visual therapy by producing a series of one-minute shots through the streets of Toronto. The result is an episodic love letter set against the city's intimacies and haunts, populated by old and new acquaintances, while the...
Mirrors features a series of mirrors clipped from the movies of Ingmar Bergman. A mise-en-abyme, a reflection on reflections, in other words, an endless looking, or relooking. The mirror (phase) offers a time without end, a glassy eye that throws back the world as an endless picture. It invites its...
Eva Marie Rodbro’s embedded ethnographic maestro short, originally shot in Brownwood, Texas in 2009, is given a fan remake. Night vision animal life and teen hangouts conjure a temporary and fragile collective, while conversation fragments, alternately performed and raw, shouted and whispered,...
Tasked to produce a short intro to my feature-length essay Cut, I turned to the origins of the close-up, in a scene featuring camera person Billy Bitzer and director D.W. Griffiths. How to live in this new body, with its cuts, its fissures and fractures?
Based on texts gleaned from Catherine Bush’s novel Blaze Island, this multi-layered collage offers a fleeting love story on a distant shore. The novel reimagines Shakespeare’s last testament, The Tempest, now set on a fictionalized version of Fogo Island, a windswept island off Canada’s east...
The movie’s prelude visits Lenin’s home town of Ulyanovsk during Victory Day, the annual commemoration of WW2’s end, in an increasingly militarized spectacle of children and guns and then moves to anti-capitalist gestures in Strasbourg (France) where DIY collectives create new forms of...
