ARISE! Walk Dog Eat Donut

Film and video maker Ken Kobland returns to the urban landscapes he filmed 20 years previously, such as the New York subway and the S-Bahn in Berlin. We leave, we travel, but it’s always the same images that we are drawn to. A moving road movie about eternal departure and arrival.

“A melancholy, semi-abstract video poem made up largely of blurred images shot from moving subway and elevated cars in New York City and Berlin. Woven into the film are fragments of a diary (despairing epigrams like ‘all meaning evaporates’) and a Russian ballad. Repetitive without becoming monotonous, the video evokes an urban sadness that is so insistent it becomes a whole philosophy of loss and resignation.”

—Stephen Holden, “A Thematic Feast of Avant-Garde Videos,” The New York Times (16 July 1999)

Note: The version in distribution was remastered and re-edited by the artist in 2021.  The original version is also available for research purposes.