Images from magazines and color supplements accompany a spoken text taken from Herbert H. Clark’s “Word Associations and Linguistic Theory” (in New Horizons in Linguistics, ed. John Lyons,1970). By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. Image and word work together and against each other to destroy and create meaning.
The Erosions series develops the concepts of oxidation, wear and entropy from an audiovisual and cinematographic perspective. This is Barranca (Canyon).
After the ominous attack that the paramilitary and police corporations carried out on September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, the student Aldo Gutiérrez Solano remains in a coma until today. A brief homage to the resistance of the body fighting against power.
The Bats details the mating habits of flying mammals in an abandoned Mayan temple in the 14th Century.
This title is only available on Soft Science.
"Exhibitons, whether of objects or people, are displays of the artifacts of our disciplines. They are for this reason also exhibits for those who make them, no matter what their ostensible subject. The first order of business is therefore to examine critically the conventions guiding ethnographic display..."
- Destination Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998
Between the Frames is a series that offers a glimpse into contemporary history that is already past, a portrait of personalities and opinions shaping what and how art reaches a public forum.
Epilogue: Between the Frames, Chapter 8
"A film about the time of the blast furnaces — 1917-1933 — about the development of an industry, about a perfect machinery which had to run itself to the point of its own destruction. This essay... on heavy industry and the gas of the blast furnace, convinces through the author's cool abstraction and manic obsession, and through the utilization of a single example of the self-destructive character of capitalistic production: 'The image of the blast furnace gas is real and metaphoric; an energy blows away uselessly into the air. Guided through a system of pipes, the pressure increases.
The unstable earth becomes the epicenter of this videotape document which explores—in a fractured way—the relationships between the people, places, and furniture that sit atop the San Andreas Fault.
"I don't put myself into my movies because that would be too much--my pictures reflect my own feelings. So hopefully it's entertaining. Otherwise I can't bear looking at them, ha ha!"
–– Mike Kuchar
In this dream-portrait of Mike Kuchar, he floats through his memories as the sea, space and sky drift past. Wrapped in odd costumes, he frolics with the imaginary creatures surrounding him, and recalls the creatures of his own imagination.
"In the late 1980s I saw ads in New York for a telephone 'Confession Line'. To call in and 'confess' was free; listening in incurred a by-the-minute charge. The soundtrack was built from a collection of these actual, anonymous calls. Adultery, theft, and regret; ghosts spun through phone wires and televisions. An installation version was created for the 1992 Worldwide Video Festival (Amsterdam).
Soundtrack: Jem Cohen with Ian MacKaye.
This title is also available on Jem Cohen: Early Works.
This is the burial hymn for thousands of souls in the anthropocentric times. The ghosts of the American way of life. Part of the Hauntology series.
Moving towards an unknown destination, a group of anonymous passengers float through an unidentified landscape. Built from Cohen’s archive documenting his travels, the film can be seen as a curious parable. The film's subheading refers to the Old Testament, Daniel chapter 11, verse 40: “And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.”
Blind Huber is a film interpretation of a poem by the American writer Nick Flynn loosely based on the life of Francois Huber, the blind 18th Century beekeeper, who sat before a series of hives for fifty years unlocking an unknown world.
Written by Nick Flynn. Cinematographer: Alex Stockwell.
This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.
This slow-motion film is a glass snow globe with dancers who topple and bounce off the sides of the frame. Re-purposed by Breder at his Dortmund retrospective as Weisse Tasse in which a video was projected on the side of a white cup.
This is the flowers under attack. An entire ecosystem under attack. This is the omen of the bugambilia. This is the pulsation of the nervous trance of petals in the anthropocentric times. Part of the Hauntology series.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT/SUMMARY: This film centers around one performance, when Holland-based musicians, The Ex, visited New York to play a concert. This performance is intercut with city scenes, first from Amsterdam and then New York, of construction sites, street life, and protests against the Iraq war and the Bush administration. The construction site scenes relate to the band's dedication to music as a realm for collaborative building and creative destruction.
"A meditation on history, memory, and change in Central and Eastern Europe, Buried in Light is a non-narrative journey, a cinematic collage. Cohen’s “search for images” began at a time of extraordinary flux, as the Berlin Wall was dismantled—opening borders yet ushering in a nascent wave of consumer capitalism. What he saw struck him as a profound paradox: the moment Eastern Europe was revealed was simultaneously the moment it was hidden by the blinding light of commercialism.
A Kafkian vision of the New World. The arrival of Karl Rossman to the contemporary Babylon under the spell of the paranoid avant-garde. Kinetic coexistence of the archaic forms in dissolution.
The post-Platonic cave in whose interior the nuclear catastrophe to come is disseminated.