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- Can you go home again? What if you're a gay man and home is a state where voters keep electing a homophobe to the US Senate? In 1996, native son Tim Kirkman returns to North Carolina to explore the parallels and differences between himself and Jesse Helms: they're from the same town and college, with media interests, from families blessed by adoptions, Baptists by upbringing. Tim puts his camera in front of his family, a boyhood pal, college friends, his pastor, Helms fans, community activists, novelists Lee Smith and Allan Gurganus, a mayor who's gay, and people in the street, including a brief interview with Matthew Shepard. What is it to judge, and what is it to love?
- A simple home movie of a cat is reprocessed through a "Zip-a-tone" dot pattern making a complex of layers. In combination with freeze frames, positive and negative, and color motion, this work attempts to visually construct a system of overlays like those in Baroque musical composition.
- A view of a gas station is seen from inside, behind a multi-paneled tire ad display. In a 2 1/2 minute sequence, ordinary events are seen intermittently through the opening display. This sequence is then divided and rearranged seven times in reverse order, each time in smaller units until finally the film appears to move smoothly backwards. In information theory a "moment" is defined as the shortest duration at which no distinctions can be made between units of information. This film dynamically reveals film's basic unit, the frame.
- Made entirely from the Lumiere's 1896 film Demolition of a Wall, Brand's 1973 version takes six frames from the falling wall and shows them in all 720 possible orders. With a piano track that follows a similar pattern, the film celebrates cinema's origins by systematically iterating the many paths it has yet to explore.
- An old tree sits on a mound in an Ohio farm field. The filming of the tree and the metrical editing of the film is organized around the tree's natural elements: water, earth, root ends, roots, trunk, limbs, branches, leaves and sun.
- The Texas Farm Workers Union at the conclusion of their cross-country march to repeal parts of the Taft-Hartley labor law.
- This is a trilogy consisting of Rate of Change , Angular Momentum and Circles of Confusion . Together they develop a study of pure color based on the notion that film is essentially change and not motion. The films build one on the other as first pure change, then relational change, and finally, irrational change. They can be seen together or as separate works. Rate of Change (16mm, 18 minutes, 1972) is a film that has no original, no frames, only slow continuously shifting colors, cycling around the perimeter of the spectrum. The changes are so slow as to be unseen, yet they alter perception of the color. In Angular Momentum (16mm, 20 minutes, 1973) nearly continuous color changes rotate around a spectrum, but this time at varying speeds of rotation and degrees of intensity. The colors on the left start white and rotate very slowly. As the film progresses the color values become darker and the speed of rotation increases until, by the end, the color is nearly black and rotates around the spectrum about once per second. On the right, the opposite occurs, starting black and progressing nearly to white. The film has an improvised electronic soundtrack by Richard Teitelbaum. In Circles of Confusion (16mm, 15 minutes, 1974) circles of colored light (red, green and blue) pulsate and flicker as they move around the frame. Where they intersect, they display a variety of secondary colors. The term "circles of confusion" comes from the physics of lenses. There it has to do with the focus of light. Here it refers to the focus of mental and emotional energies as an irrational system for composing a film.
- A series of playful films frame aspects of the medium in unlikely and ironic ways with each films posing a riddle or joke about then contemporary concepts in avant-garde film. For instance, An Angry Dog is a hand-held animation made from a Cracker-Jack toy, and Before the Fact shows filmmaker Saul Levine with students trying to mimic a previously recorded phrase and then trying to imitate each other imitating the recording. In It Dawn Down an ordinary take-up reel spins to make colorful and delicate patterns even though the film is black and white, while The Central Finger creates a perspectival puzzle from the hand of a mannequin. Includes: An Angry Dog (16mm, silent, 5 1/2 minutes, 1974); It Dawn Down (16mm, silent, 5 1/2 minutes, 1974); The Central Finger (16mm, silent, 5 1/2 minutes, 1974); Before the Fact (16mm, 6 minutes, 1974), made with Saul Levine and Students at S.U.N.Y. at Binghamton; The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin (16mm, silent, 4 minutes, 1975); New York State Primaries (16mm, 5 1/2 minutes, 1975); Still At Work (16mm, 4 minutes, 1975).
- Skinside Out -- by Bill Brand and Katy Martin -- features paint on skin, carried out in an expressionist mode on both of the filmmakers' bodies. The emphasis is on the pleasure of looking -- at the edge of repulsion -- and the implications of making public an essentially private gesture. The film posits painting as a gendered, bodily act, whose location shifts continually within a context that's always changing. Images filmed in the studio are juxtaposed with footage of a construction barge along the Hudson. By examining both in relation to surface, the work paradoxically looks for what lies within, while questioning who and where we take ourselves to be.
- When shooting SUSIE'S GHOST, I was mourning the loss of my older sister and my photography and the performance of collaborator Ruthie Marantz express a diffuse sense of loss. Is she looking for something or someone? Is she really there? Is she really gone? The film was shot in Tribeca, my downtown Manhattan neighborhood, before the housing bubble burst. Construction mania had not yet obliterated the last traces of the manufacturing district I'd moved to 35 years earlier. That too has passed.
- The video was shot July, 1999 inside and outside 20 North Moore Street where John Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy lived. Ruth Hardinger, a sculptor, is a 1st floor resident in this building and was unwittingly trapped by the media frenzy and the public attention that unfolded on the sidewalk in front of the building after the Kennedy plane crashed off Martha's Vineyard. Made in collaboration with Bill Brand, a nearby neighbor and experimental filmmaker, "I'm a Pilot Like You" looks through the back side of the media mirror to reflect on the clouded boundary between public and private in the weeks immediately following the fatal Kennedy accident.
- This is an impression of the 1982 folk festival at the Tracy and Eloise Schwarz farm in Central Pennsylvania. The festival, dedicated to the legendary Elizabeth Cotton, includes Bluegrass, Old Timey, Cajun, Country, and Gospel music. In contrast to the casual atmosphere of the festival, the film is an elaborately collaged image with shapes derived from traditional Pennsylvania Dutch designs. While sometimes the music seems to animate the image, at others the image itself becomes a kind of visual music eliciting ephemeral sensuousness. The film is a unique meeting of the folk tradition and the avant garde, implying a fundamental connection between the two.
- West Virginia industrial landscapes are collaged in abstract mattes that transform the photographed scenes into a kinetic field of shapes and spaces inlaying social, sexual, personal and political content. Woven into the film's fabric is the story of Fred Carter, a retired coal miner and black lung activist who was framed by the Federal Government in order to undercut the black lung movement and to stop his bid for president of the United Mine Workers Association. His story is told through fragments of documentary interviews and through Kimiko Hahn's poem which forms a counter-theme in the film. The film has an original sound composition by Earl Howard.
- Pictures are seen through a maze of swarming dots that alternately form a screen obscuring the image or form the very substance of the image itself. The soundtrack quotes excerpts from a 1930 Franz Boas text about a Kwakiutle Indian who tells his story of learning the ways of a shaman. The story serves as a metaphor for the artist's struggle. The film is about the desire to master the magic of the image while following a path of skepticism and doubt.
- Mountain landscapes, Manhattan cityscapes and images from magazine covers and television news are fragmented in computer generated mattes. Intercut with a found documentary about family life in Malaysia, the film becomes an essay on reading. Watching the film is like an accelerated game of Concentration with glimpses of the image appearing inside swirling grids. The juxtaposition of the gridded sequences to the conventionally assembled Malaysian footage formulates an inquiry into the nature and meaning of the "document" in cinema.
- This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life in Lower Manhattan in the '70s and at the same time dramatizes questions about the nature of cinematic representation. "Split Decision" is a boxing term used when the judges declare one fighter to be the winner by non-unanimous vote. Here, the fight is between the films main characters seen intermittently in a bar, negotiating a 'pick-up', and at home, breaking up in a domestic quarrel. The fight is also in the telling, between modes of conventional and radical representation.