"To see the city through the eyes of Dominic Angerame is to see an organic beast of concrete that sifts and breathes in rich shades of black and white."
--Silke Tudor, SF Weekly
The City, Refuse, Passion, and Death: On the Work of Filmmaker Dominic Angerame
by Stefan Grissemann
Since the 1960s, the American filmmaker, theorist, and avant-garde activist Dominic Angerame has been working in a form that is both documentary and poetic, an aesthetic alliance between realism and fantasy. He employs a variety of techniques, but his films are invariably and primarily concerned with basic problems of rhythm: the nervousness of the montage in almost all Angerame films stands in startling contrast to the gentleness of its effect on the viewer. The double and triple exposures this artist prizes so much brake, as it were, the quick pulse of his cuts and help them to achieve a peculiarly delicate quality.
Dominic Angerame’s works search for unfamiliar views of seemingly familiar things: cities, landscapes, faces, and bodies. The filmmaker’s desire to make everyday images “strange” at the editing table, to learn to see them fresh and to estrange them from our senses, makes his films seem—in all the different social realities they contain—always distanced as well, as if they led to another world beyond the concrete, beyond time and defined space. In Angerame’s films, which pay homage to films from early cinema and the classic avant garde to American underground films of the 1960s and 70s and non-narrative films of the present day, an amazingly comprehensive history of the “visionary” moving image is always present. It may be that precisely his refusal to adopt a signature style has diminished the immediate influence of Angerame’s films; however, Angerame’s decision to work “universally,” not to be swayed by considerations of the art market, and to experiment with very different styles increases the pedagogical worth of his films. It’s not surprising to learn that Angerame, born in 1949, teaches at several American schools in addition to being the executive director of the American avant garde distribution center Canyon Cinema. His films testify to an encyclopedic knowledge of film—and also his desire to satisfy, with his own audio-visual offerings, the very different desires of his audience.
The concept “experimental film,” by the way, doesn’t fit Dominic Angerame. It sounds, he says, like it’s just an attempt, as if he didn't know exactly what he was doing. His practical work in film is informed by essentially one principle: the renunciation of “narrative form.” That alone seems enough to isolate a visual talent like his for a long time. Dominic Angerame is a marginalized filmmaker. The large digital movie databases don’t even know his name.
I. City
His own films are “like city symphonies,” Angerame explains lapidarily, “big-city landscapes in high-contrast black and white.” This alludes to only one (but nevertheless important) part of Angerame’s oeuvre: his five-part City Symphony, made between 1987 and 1997, the title of which is derived from the famous 1927 Walter Ruttman film Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, and which formally stands in the tradition of Dziga Vertov’s urban-industrial montage. Angerame’s city films show (urban) destruction and (cinematic) construction as two sides of the same coin: as de-construction even. To see the city through Angerame’s eyes, writes Silke Tudor, is “to see an organic beast of cement that seems to breathe in rich shades of black and white.”
The first of the City Symphony films is an Angerame masterpiece. Continuum deals in complete immediacy, with the play of light and shadow on cement surfaces, streets, houses, and bridges, but it deals also with the work performed on these sites: steel frames full of busy welders gleam in the blazing sun, house facades are cleaned and sand blasted, streets are tarred and strewn with shimmering gravel. There’s wiping, spraying, cooking, shaking, and painting: Angerame shows us a world at work, in transformation—and, at the same time, he brings out the hierarchies implicit in that world: proletariat and industry, above and below. The workers remain anonymous, and the masks they wear emphasize their lack of identity. Nowhere else is Angerame’s virtuoso editing technique, celebrated by Stan Brakhage for its “seeming lightness, which is so difficult to achieve,” more apparent than in Continuum.
If one knew nothing of their history, it would be virtually impossible to date Angerame’s films. There’s a decidedly timeless quality to the City Symphony’s subject matter and black and white material (and also to Angerame’s partially manual film techniques). There’s an urban, utopian mood in Continuum that would fit just as well in the late 1930s as it does in the late 1980s.
Angerame’s city works untiringly probe the textures that present themselves to his camera: they show patterns and inscriptions on walls and metal surfaces, focus on fissures in cement, lose themselves in shadowy passers-by and smoke rising out of machines. By stylizing the urban everyday, Angerame translates it back into its emblematic quality in a series of astonishing signs. His film language follows—as in the fundamental cinematographic dramatization of white (sun) and black (tar) in Continuum, for example—a strict sensual order.
Premonition (1995) and In the Course of Human Events (1997) are cinematic twin stars that illustrate Angerame’s construction/destruction philosophy most clearly. The first film captures for one last time on film the emptied Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, which was damaged beyond repair in the 1989 earthquake, right before it was torn down. Angerame sees Premonition as a “daydream,” as a melancholic preview (and at the same time a continuous cinematic review) of an unstoppable annihilation. This film is, according to the director, “like the memory of something that has yet to take place.” In the Course of Human Events is also constructed as an elegy: a tragedy of annihilation, a documentation of the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway.
Similar to the filmmaker Peter Hutton, Angerame stylizes his urban landscapes into half-abstract, extremely painterly compositions. The ghostly calm that hovers over Premonition and the intense interest in construction details are reminiscent of the austere architecture films of Heinz Emigholz. Angerame films buildings, streets, and the construction of bridges by making them visually dynamic and rendering them strange in a sketchily, futuristic way: they become cinematic science non-fiction. In Premonition the camera traces curves in the street and the lines of metal bridge struts in both wide shots and close-ups, creating the impression of a seemingly omnipresent camera in the film’s jumps between wide-angle shots and close-ups. Small details of movement break out of the unmoving, solidified world of this film: the wind blows a piece of paper over the street; two men pause far away at the water’s edge; buildings are mirrored in an imperceptibly trembling water surface.
The hyperrealistic soundtrack that Angerame employs in Premonition is calculated to irritate: the cries of seagulls, a car alarm, a flag flapping in the wind—these are all infused with a sense of the unreal. Moreover, Angerame’s soundscapes—and not only in this film—tend to a create synthetic, musical effects and heighten his films’ pathos-filled moods.
Angerame’s oeuvre is rich with antitheses to the City Symphony. The early El Train Film, for example, autobiographically motivated and already employing an advanced editing technique, deals with the utopia of continuous movement, of life as a journey. In the mid-1970s, Angerame relates, he lived in northern Chicago right by the tracks, where he could always hear the trains: “One could say they defined our life.” Accompanied by a delicate old folk song, Angerame’s El Train Film collects shots out moving trains and of the oncoming rails that cut through the wide, empty landscape in the sun: cinema as an awareness of life, as an expression of a lost counter-culture.
II. Refuse
The dilapidated, the ruined, and the thrown-away play a major role in Angerame’s cinema. One can always make a film out of a pair of disposable objects. With his 1984 film Hit the Turnpike!, Angerame experiments with an autobiographically ironic variation on the song “Hit the Road Jack”: the three-minute clip compiles in quick succession fragments of euphemistically formulated rejection letters, regretful replies, and negative reviews. Angerame productively uses the detritus of his filmmaker correspondence in a moving collection of cryptic signs, signatures, and logos.
In Battle Stations—A Navel Adventure (2001), one of the filmmaker’s most hermetic works, Angerame has his friend Leyna d’Ancona, dressed in a sequin top, perform a belly dance in a public space before the San Francisco Cinematheque in the harbor of Hunter’s Point. He then projects onto her body images from the location—not only artist studios, a train museum, and a police laboratory, but also of the largest toxic waste dump in the city. In this ambience of shipyard work and industrial and possibly radioactive waste, Angerame creates a kind of music video in which all manner of strange and even improvised documentary events take place. The filmmaker Bruce Conner, for example, crosses the harbor’s forbidden area with a Geiger counter and measures the level of radiation in the danger zone. They found, Angerame writes in the notes to the film, no traces of radioactivity in their measurements.
III. Passion
One could call Consume a partner film to Battle Stations (the artist himself uses the term “passion” for both films). Angerame’s experiment with stroboscopic cinema, a kind of trance film inspired by Theodore Roszak’s novel Flicker, interweaves eroticism and orientalism anew in the ecstatic performance of a dancer (Zhanna Kleiman) before the camera. Kleiman is exposed naked in the flickering light, percussive composition, and Angerame’s frenetic montage, which merges its protagonist (literally from top to bottom) into a vision that flows seamlessly from the concrete to the abstract and back into the concrete. This montage layers the ritualistic movement studies of the heroine’s body within each other so that they attain an artificial, graphic quality.
Cinematic speed is not the least of Angerame’s many passions. In A Ticket Home (1982) he works so quickly with concrete images that they morph into partial abstractions. There’s a droning in this film similar to that in the films of Dietmar Brehms, like the sound of far-off traffic, and quiet voices seem to be singing some strange song; a vague unease settles in. The film fastens onto figures and details: faces and wet streets, a pregnant woman, graffiti and people in an office; the flickering lane line of a highway, the sparkling of water. Angerame’s films are simultaneously banal and charged, familiar and full of secrets. They offer a phenomenology of the everyday. The filmmaker’s view is everywhere at once: in living rooms, above the clouds, in the bustle of the city, and in open nature. Angerame’s film poems are impressionistic, volatile, always-changing.
Angerame experimented a lot in his early work, some of which proved to be a dead end. Scratches, Inc. (1975) indicates directions the filmmaker would not pursue later. This short work sets an abstract scratch animation, in the tradition of Len Lyes and Robert Breers, to an atonal soundtrack that’s just as scratched as the image. Scratches, Inc. is a dance of white lines and points of light on a black field: a painting of movement.
IV. Death
In 2004 Angerame’s work took a surprising turn: Anaconda Targets, a found footage film made of one continuous, unchanged source, devoid of any formal complications. The film attacks the abstraction of war and delves into language—in marked contrast to almost all the filmmaker’s other works (with the exception of the answering machine vignette Phone/Film Portraits). Angerame doesn’t claim Anaconda Targets as his own: at the end of the film we read “Presented by Dominic Angerame.” The material comes from the cockpit of a war helicopter in the US bombardment of northeast Afghanistan in March 2002: video recordings of “Operation Anaconda,” which the American military had organized against suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban strongholds. By presenting the images without commentary, Angerame assumes the perspective of the aggressors, who aim for and kill living targets. The machine’s eye only sees outlines.
In Anaconda Targets Angerame again takes up one of his favorite themes: destruction. But this time he takes the reverse approach: away from details and the desire to penetrate the effects of annihilation, and towards an overview, the view from above, towards distance. Anaconda Targets is a document of the banality of the labor of modern war. On a black and white video screen from a great height what happens on the ground appears highly schematic. An off-screen voice remarks that one of the buildings is a mosque and is not to be shot at. We see cars attempting (vainly) to flee, to escape the bombs. We hear the soldiers’ heavy breathing and excited voices as they comment on dropping the bombs and hitting the targets. The computer has the last word, says the war and film theorist Paul Virilio. Everything seems so simple on the monitors: no blood, no bodies, no ruins, only stable gray and white and the quietly rising blossoms of the explosives on the enemy landscape. Anaconda Targets is an inverse snuff movie, a critical study of violence through mere presentation.
If cinema, according to Cocteau, means to see continuously death in one’s work, then Angerame’s films are better suited than others to illustrate this. Transitoriness is one of Angerame’s recurring themes, or, more precisely, the phantomlike, ghostly, and the past of the things, places, and figures recorded on film. Angerame also seems moved by a nostalgia for early cinema, and by an old love for the classic avant garde. I’d Rather Be in Paris begins with a short, doubly-reflexive scene: an editing table with film images that show a man with a camera. Then an agitated sea whose surf slams into the breakwater. These images are silent, totally factual, and occasionally also poetic, as if the Lumière brothers had filmed them. Nothing is “natural” in cinema, not even nature itself. The cinema of Dominic Angerame, libidinous precisely in its morbidity, sinks at the end of this film into the white of the negative, which is nothing more than the chemical reverse of night: in the end, for Angerame, white and black are interchangeable. This journey ends where it began, in the film studio: a man works on film images and hangs film strips up to dry. We sense the cold season through the window: the bare trees of the courtyard are the counter-thesis to Angerame’s sensorily “hot” perceptions, but at the same time, as the last image of this film, also a part of them.
Stefan Grissemann is a film critic and the author of books on Michael Haneke, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Robert Frank. He heads the culture section of the weekly magazine profile.
Dominic Angerame's website: www.cinemod.net
Dominic Angerame's email: dominic@cinemod.net
The intimate tale of a plumber's daughter.
1969, 16mm, b&w/so, 1m, $20
Documents my first days in Chicago, nearly living on the skids, working at Manpower ($9 per day), not enough for rent, no furniture, and hot dogs for dinner from the local Spanish grocery store. Somehow I borrowed a camera and a motorcycle and completed this film, as if it were a necessity of life. Susan has first moved into my life and this became a film of our relationship at that time.
1971, 16mm, b&w/so, 20m, $100
Soundtrack: A rare recording of John Cale's Loop (electric bass guitar with feedback). Subconscious collage of images. Random editing surprisingly produced this personal look into my life.
1972, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $35
Anti-war demonstration, 1968, New York City march to Sheep's Meadow, shows Vets against the war, Yippies, arrests, and flags of a half-forgotten revolution.
1968-1974, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
Soundtrack: Ed Sanders. Filmed in Buffalo, 1969, completed in Chicago, 1973. Acid in the park, broken images, danger symbols of the fleeting moments.
1969-1973, 16mm, b&w/so, 4m, $20
A light comical film employing the technique of scratching emulsion off the film, creating illusions of color and texture.
1975, 16mm, b&w/so, 4m, $20
We lived next to the Elevated Tracks on the far north side of Chicago and heard the trains all the time; you could say that it dominated our lives.
1976, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
Soundtrack: Subduing Demons in America, John Giorno; Actress: Lillian North.
A film dealing with the alteration of human scaling within the 16mm frame. The "star" walks from one edge of the screen, passes the center, but never reaches the opposite edge. Shot in extreme slow motion, this film creates an unusual and bizarre sense of timelessness and distance. This allows the viewer to become involved with every subtle movement within the frame. The "center" of the frame is constantly emptying itself, creating a vacuum, and is left entirely open, only to be filled again, not with images, however, but with the mind's eye. The space created in the center of the frame allows one to pass through the film and enter an inner dimension of visual perception.
A cycle is attained whereby the film, emptying itself, gives the viewer the space he needs so that he may feed energy back into the space. This film is a unique approach to dealing with space that surrounds filmic images.
Awards: Certificate of Merit, Chicago Int'l Film Festival, 1977; Fellowship Competition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1979; SF Art Institute Film Festival, 1980.
1977, 16mm, b&w/so, 9m, $35
An exploration of the phenomenon of constant change of visual perception and the dynamic alteration of image perspective. The frame as a window whereby the viewer's consciousness is both inside and outside. A graphic portrayal of the change of Chicago's seasons (from Fall to Winter) employing the technique of optical printing bi-pack. One foot of black and white film was shot for ninety days consecutively and printed with color footage of close-ups of the same scene.
Awards: Fellowship Competition held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1979; Completion Grant from the Illinois Arts Council, 1979; SF Art Institute Film Festival, 1980.
1979, 16mm, b&w/color/si, 4m (18fps), $20
(SFAI 1980)
A humorous parody on the condition of creative film studies in art schools and colleges in general. The sound-track is a composition combining the musical score from the film Ballet Mechanique and the voices of film students testing various pieces of film recording equipment and complaining about grades and procedures.
The visuals reveal a modern day mechanical ballet performed by the instructor (myself) on the dada chessboard of absolute reality to the automatic beat of an intervalometer clicking time away one frame per second, as he attempts to relay technical data to his students.
1980, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m, $20
July 5, 1980. Summertime, San Francisco's Chinatown. A gang of Chinese firework dealers dispose of their unsold goods to the glory of emulsified film. Negative explosions give way to the gateway of reversal images.
This film utilizes high speed negative film to enhance grain and image deterioration. Must be projected at silent speed.
Award: Cash Prize, Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival, 1981
1980, 16mm, b&w/si, 5m (18fps), $20
Going home - from west to east; return. Part of a series of turning points. Recording a journal in color language; shadows of faces. Realities and memories come out frame by frame. The rhythm of a summer vacation. Rituals of light to dark - manifesting form.
This is a translation of old friends and old places. A ticket home.
"This film journal assembles the memory-charged visual fragments of a cross country trip to the filmmaker's home. He calls it 'a respectful portrait of old friends and old places' but tension-filled images combined with the rambling chant and urban ambience of its soundtrack indicates that a more anxious attitude, perhaps towards a fleeting present, underlies this personal document and 'ticket home.'" - Lynn Corcoran, Media Study, Buffalo
"Snippets of sun-soaked home movie footage jumbled around kinetically becomes a wild whorl of color and motion that's like watching the spin cycle in a washing machine. Dominic Angerame with this film gives you the distinct impression that someone's handing to you their childhood memories on a silver platter." - Frank Young, The Tallahassee Flambeau
1982, 16mm, color/so, 9.5m, $30
"I'D RATHER BE IN PARIS depicts the filmmaker's visual concern with his physical environment by autobiographically exploring his alternatives: Chicago, San Francisco, and the editing room itself. These urban explorations tend to concentrate on high-speed assemblages of cityscape abstractions.
"Sprawling masses of concrete, plastic and steel seem to have captured the earth. Nature threatens only with the icy cold waves of Lake Michigan and an apocalyptically red sunset. Humans, for the most part hauntingly innocuous, are reduced to soul-less, miniscule organisms. Simultaneously random, repetitious, and absurd, their activities resemble those of amphetiminized rats in their proverbial maze. Even a Wim Wenders on-location film-shoot appears to be nothing more than men and equipment, standing around waiting.
"Only the editing room serves as a sanctuary. It is here that some semblance of order and tranquility resides. The camera pans the studio. But it too is drawn to the outside world ... the chaos, the confusion, the overwhelming massiveness. Light shifts dramatically, and through the window we glimpse a final image of this industrio-mechanized age the filmmaker so readily fears and transforms." - Roger Nieboer
1982, 16mm, b&w/color/si, 16m (18fps), $60
"If you have to beg, or steal, or borrow, Welcome to Los Angeles, City of Tomorrow." - Phil Ochs, to whose memory this film is dedicated.
First impressions of LA, Forest Lawn Cemetery, the Tropicana Motel, and the sandy beaches of Venice and Long Beach.
1982, 16mm, b&w/so, 3m, $20
Sambhogakaya (longs.spyod.rdzogs sku) means enjoying the wealth of the Five Certainties.
"Sambhoga-Kaya describes a body that enjoys the wealth of purified visions. Herein dwells the enlightened one while embodied in superhuman form. This is the first reflex on the heavenly planes and represents phenomenal appearances. It is the essence of the mind, the celestial state and the divine body of perfect endowment. The 'mind being' as the uncreated and of the voidness, vacuous, ready to reach the point of Dharma-Kaya, which is the primordial essence." - Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Book of Liberation
Although purists in the study of Tibetan Buddhism and its teachings might think my use of the term Sambhoga-Kaya to be sacrilegious as a title for this piece, I feel that it is the only way in which to express the effect of the work. The path takes many forms and manifests separately with each, and this is my awareness of such a state as Sambhoga-Kaya.
1982, 16mm, b&w/si, 6m, $20
I was hoping to strike it rich on our honeymoon in Reno. In a way I did, seeing that the camera was filled with very rich imagery in recording this visual journal of our brief visit. The soundtrack is a creation of Katie Steinorth who translated the Buddhist chant of "Om Ma Ni Pad Me Hum" into the words "Oh, Money Bring Me A Home."
1983, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
Music: Ray Charles
The ultimate rejection film. A compilation of many of the rejection notices and letters that I have received during my fifteen years of making films. "Films that offer an intelligent glimpse of the personal struggle and/or foibles of their creators seem destined for a warm reception in any festival. In the world of independents, a short like HIT THE TURNPIKE! is the finest way to end a lengthy screening. For those unfortunate enough to have suffered the agony of rejection or decision, HIT THE TURNPIKE! is the kind of film that encourages you to leave the disappointment behind.
"Angerame alternates extreme close-ups of his many rejection slips with pointed compilation. The found footage ending the film sums it up: the sight of a surfer being towed through flood-ravaged streets tells us that even when disaster strikes, there's fun to be had." - Kevin Howe, Lamp
"The filmmaker has turned failure into success ... if his last name is pronounced 'Anger-Aim' he is well served by it." - Gerry Goldberg, Lamp
1984, 16mm, b&w/so, 2m, $20
"VOYEURISTIC TENDENCIES is not so much a film about voyeurism as it is about our tendency to be voyeuristic. That tendency, nurtured by the filmmaker's carefully crafted succession of visual teases and exploited by the camera's ability to become our eyes, becomes increasingly evident as the film progresses. The camera teases the viewer, in this case, co-voyeur, not with sexual or erotic innuendo, but rather with graphic and aesthetic challenges. The partially opened window of a woman's dressing room forces us to realize our urge to see more. That urge comes not so much from a longing for exposed breasts, but as a need to make the picture whole, and to know more about these hidden worlds. This type of cinematically-induced self-realization makes VOYEURISTIC TENDENCIES a powerfully human film.
"Most of the people we view appear to be merely going through the motions. Their actions seem hauntingly void of emotion or thought. By temporarily becoming voyeurs, we were hoping for bigger and better things, e.g., passion ... melodrama, but are left with only a secretary nervously tapping her nails." - Roger Nieboer
"[A] perfect sex film for the '80s. We are teased, cajoled, lured and finally snubbed as we learn one possible answer to what has happened to sex; it has been subsumed in our society's current confusion between artifice and reality." - James Irwin
1984, 16mm, b&w/so, 17m, $75
VHS Sale: $50 Home; $200 Other
This film utilizes a telephone answering machine as the basic structure. During the past year I kept all the messages recorded on this machine, and then asked many of my friends for permission to shoot a ten second filmic portrait of them, with the messages used as a soundtrack. The resulting work is this piece which becomes a statement of the modern society and our technology at work.
1985, 16mm, b&w/so, 6m, $20
"In a superb manner, CONTINUUM builds from the bottom up a complex and finely woven picture of a day-in-the-life of labor, or a work, in progress, and without end, microcosmically reflecting a history of any labor and many an art.
"Through elegantly overlaid, constructionist windows of geometric form, we see into the turgid furnace of man's multifarious tasks, and, as in a vision, behold the ballet of his tools and accoutrements: steaming tar, turning pulleys, swishing mops, changing lights and sewer-plates, acetyline torches and sandblasting serpents, snorting sting of jackhammers and gleaming jewels amid grime where undinal heat makes the atmosphere buckle.
"And in the midst of it all - the streets, the bridges, the roads, the roofs, the endless river of communication cables and the windowed monoliths of jutting superstructure - there stands man, that somewhat Sisyphian, but irrepressible beast; not so much brawny as dauntless, to wit, wired for the thing-at-hand, welded to the task made a titan in collective will.
"The film is like a dream you can't put your finger on and can't forget, because the very truth of it is so evasive, suggestive, labyrinthine. And then it dawns on you, or rather circumnavigates you: the very fact of life is heroic, makes heroes of each of us, every man, woman, and child, from the carpenter unto the architect, and the whole of it is so thoroughly interdependent, so very closely interwoven." - Ronald Sauer
1987, 16mm, b&w/si, 15m, $75
VHS Sale: $50 Home; $200 Other
"A somber, gong-like tone opens DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT: the first image is a small light in darkness, a delicate flicker that grows to become a welder's torch. We are led into the film by a suggestive imagistic shorthand: 'the rise of man' is attended by the building of structures, and cities, a montage of the emblems of civilization. The end of the film brings a series of unnerving images - one reminiscent of an eerie jack-o-lantern from childhood memory: a skyscraper looming in the night, a bank of windows lit up like its gaping mouth. As fog and clouds rush in fast frame across the sky for a dizzying, synesthetic effect, Kevin Barnard's soundtrack pounds an urgent wail to the rhythm of climax spending itself in question, in philosophical ambiguity, not release. An almost palpable centrifugal force seems to move the final moments of the film into a spinout.
"This is history without narrative, an abstract summation of what happens when human beings move stuff around and make something of it, grow tired of what they've made and demolish it using other things they've made, and then start all over again. What we build, what we destroy, what we find useful to do both, how we let our interaction with them describe what we call human - these are some of the ideas Angerame's DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT suggests." - from an essay by Barbara Jaspersen Voorhees, 1990
1990, 16mm, b&w/so, 13m, $50
VHS Sale: $50 Home; $200 Other
"There's an exquisite despair and a dooming ambiguity suspended in the cool morning clarity of Dominic Angerame's new film, PREMONITION. It's short and bittersweet, like a prelude by Debussy, and promises a broad integration of the aesthetic elements of his work. ... But ... there's also a painful consciousness of the vanity of all things human and their transience ....
"PREMONITION, despite its sadness, does not judge modernity and its Gargantuan feats of engineering, but, on the contrary, admires them, in the fullest aesthetic sense of the word, like a traveler turning a bend in the road whereby an enormity of landscape is revealed, overwhelming his ego, freeing him up toward a larger question while simultaneously diminishing his particularity in the very grandeur of it all. ...
"Modernity, what happened to your highway? You tower over us, then you disappear. The arch and ribs of the guardrails seem so real to us. ... The casually defiant smoked cigarettes upon you. The sincerely healthy played tennis in your shadows. You were close to our places of work downtown. The seagulls' cries echoed in your ribcage. Gone.
"[T]he film hides its meaning, comes in like the tide but still disappears. ... A fragment of a circle, abstracted. Near the bridge. The highway snakes along. Adolescents tagged it. A jogger like a flea on its back. And emptied of cars it's its own worst indictment: now that we're not busy with it, what can it mean?
"PREMONITION is not about a defunct highway to have done with, it's the painful inventory of a desired and questionable relationship gone down." - Ronald F. Sauer
Exhibition: SF Int'l Film Festival, 1995; Pacific Film Archive, 1995.
1995, 16mm, b&w/so, 11m, $50
VHS Sale: $50 Home; $200 Other
Sound Design: Amy Leigh Hunter
In November of 1993 I was diagnosed as having coronary arterial disease. A subsequent angiogram revealed that open heart surgery was necessary - it was almost immediately performed. This angiogram was filmed originally on 35mm motion picture film. In March of 1995 my apartment burned down in the early morning hours and my girlfriend and I escaped with our neighbor down the rear fire escape as lethal smoke was enveloping us. I was able to return to the scene the next day in order to film the aftermath. This film is a blend of footage from these two episodes and explores the temporal nature of the lives we live.
Exhibition: Pacific Film Archive, September 1998; Cineprobe, Museum of Modern Art, NY, June 1998; Athens Int'l Film Festival, May 1998; Impakt Film Festival, May 1998; Ann Arbor Film Festival, May 1998; One Person Showing, University of Colorado, Boulder, November 1997; Bug Cinema, Denver, November 1997; Fairfield Arts Festival, September 1997; Mill Valley Film Festival, October 1997; Pittsburgh Filmmakers, April 1997; SF Int'l Film Festival, May 1997; Berks Filmmakers, Reading, PA, March 1997; Millennium, NY, March 1997; SF Cinematheque, March 1997.
1997, b&w/so, 9m, $40
VHS Sale: $50 Home; $150 Other
Sound: Kevin Barnard, Ray Guillet, and Kyle Newhall;
Sound Design: Amy Leigh Hunter.
After the 1989 quake the city of San Francisco decided to tear down the Embarcadero Freeway once and for all. The climate of dread evoked by PREMONITION is followed by a primitive yet seductive "tableau" of twisted metal. The bulldozers are prehistoric monsters that tear bits of metal and stone from the vulnerable concrete. Angerame films the spectacle in extremely precise shots that surgically unveil our obsession with destruction and technological decline.
"[A]n exquisite black and white surrealist depiction of the Embarcadero Freeway demolition, in which dinosaurlike tractors gnash at an organic tangle of steel reinforcements. ... Inanimate objects and heavy machinery become living metaphors for generation through the director's signature use for high-contrast, time-lapse and double exposure cinematography. Like a moving gallery installation, the 23-minute piece is composed of individual shots so precise and emotionally evocative that each could stand on its own as testimony to Angerame's astounding talent." - Silke Tudor, SF Weekly
"... a metaphorical approach to architecture could be found in quite a few works and this is why the organizers put them together in a separate section. In this section, the most remarkable film was IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS by Dominic Angerame, a film that combines shorts of the tearing down of the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco with industrial music - a proposal of an ambivalent interpretation of human break up and break down." - Andreas Denk, Kunstforum, July-September 1998
Exhibition: Pacific Film Archive, September 1998; Hamburg Int'l Film Festival, June 1998; Cineprobe, Museum of Modern Art, NY, June 1998; Viper Int'l Film Festival, May 1998; Osnabrück Media Arts Festival, April 1998; Impakt Film Festival, May 1998; Ann Arbor Film Festival, March 1998; Rotterdam Film Festival, Jan. 1998; Venue Nine, SF, Jan. 1998; Cracow Film Festival, Poland, November 1997; Sofia Int'l Film Festival, Bulgaria 1997; Film/Arc Film Festival, Graz, Austria, November 1997; One Person Showing, University of Colorado, Boulder, November 1997; Bug Cinema, Denver, November 1997; Film Arts Festival, November 1997; Mill Valley Film Festival, October 1997; SF Cinematheque, March 1997; Fairfield Arts Festival, September 1997; Victoria Theatre, SF, May 1997; Pittsburgh Filmmakers, April 1997; Berks Filmmakers, Reading, PA, March 1997; Millennium, NY 1997.
1997, 16mm, b&w/so, 25m, $90
VHS Sale: $50 Home; $200 Other.
1997, DVD, b&w/so, 25m, $35 individuals; $50 institutions
Starring Bruce Conner, a Belly Dancer, a geiger counter, and a toxic
waste dump.
Sound design by Amy Leigh Hunter
Leyna d'Ancona and myself went filming at the Naval Shipyard at Hunter's Point a few weeks ago. My original concept for this film was to have my friend, Leyna perform a belly dance ritual in front of the Cinematheque office and I would superimpose images from the "macho" naval station...a perfect blend of yin and yang...ships and a navel...
However, when we arrived it was high noon and the shadows were awful....workers were honking horns at Leyna as she belly danced...I had a hard time coming up with the correct exposures...and we were both frightened by the earthen mounds we saw covered with plastic and anchored down by haystacks...It was extremely distracting...and we had heard that there were toxic materials from radioactive ships all around...so I decided to shoot this toxic material as part of the film...Leyna kept saying..."Dominic...stay downwind" as the currents ripped my hair backwards...
We stopped at the pier and I cautiously stepped down a rusted metal stairway to the water to get footage on an abondoned submarine walkway...and we traveled to the main shipyard where workers were deconstructing a ship...We were stopped for papers and ushered off the set...we were on top secret ground...I now discovered I shot the entire previous shots (more than 100 short takes) with the variable shutter closed...and told Leyna of it...
We shrugged and headed for higher ground a hill over looking the pier where the workers were. I rewound the film and opened the shutter...hopped in the back of the flatbed truck and took out the 100mm lens...perfect...for a rather close view of the top secret activity...and began to shoot the first sequence...we are stopped again...Leyna jumps out shaking her chest...I hunt for the permit...the guard says..."that's my boss' signature" and drives away...I shoot...have no idea if anything is to come out...I run out of film...
And soon I smell smoke...thinking it is a barbeque...and Leyna runs out of the bathroom saying the whole place is on fire, and indeed there is a wall of flame and smoke outside of Daygo Mary's...clientelle running out to save their cars...we bust through the front gates, flames licking the side of the truck...I am furiously rewinding film to shoot...hop out of truck and shoot the fire...children are throwing stones at us from the nearby hills and...certainly we are in Dante's Inferno...fire trucks finally arrive...put out the blaze, me and Leyna leave, glad to be back to some sort of civilization.
The next week, Bruce Conner and myself decide to go to the site with a geiger counter to see of the toxins are radio active...After more than 45 minutes of driving and testing we find no radioactivity...
This film is a diary of this experience...
2001, 16mm, b&w/so, 5.5m, $30
VHS Sale: $50 Home; $100 other
Music by Molto Vox, Kevin Barnard on guitars and processing and Barbara Jaspersen on vocals.
A film that seems to be partially created by the magic that only pixies can create. I went out shooting with my Bolex with the intention of shooting a series of very short one second movies. When the film was returned to me by the lab I discovered that superimposes over the images I had shot were images that I did not shoot. There appeared superimposed images of various women flexing their muscles and posing for some unknown camera person besides myself. This film is a result and a sort of homage to pixies wherever they may be.
2003, 16mm black and white/color sound 3 minutes $20
Starring Zhanna. Gamaya ("Lead Us") a Sanskrit mantra performed by Zhanna, recorded and mastered by Zak May.
This is a haiku and offers a prelude to CONSUME
2003, 16mm black and white/color sound 40 seconds $20; free with the rental of CONSUME
Starring Zhanna. Pomolusya ("I Will Pray") Ukranian Prayer performed by Zhanna, recorded and mastered by Zak May. Excepts from "Lyrical" and "Chaos" from the tribe recording of Gabrielle Roth and the Mirrors with permission from Raven Recording
Inspired by the novel FLICKER by Theodore Roszak, this film was intended to explore the images captured in the flickering light of multiple projector beams. By utilizing superimpositions within the camera, one could experience the pulsating light and explore hidden imagery through use of the "Sally Rand" that Roszak refers to.
However, once production began...the projector beams began to put both myself and my actress into a trance state due to the strobe light it presented...the resulting film turned into a trance by natural evolution and in essence the film becomes even more...
It becomes an exploration into oneself and the sense of seeing and being at the same time...both an inward journey and an outward one...
"Transient
Illusive
Soft
Flowing
Loving
Dissolving
Trusting
Focusing
Praying
Allowing
Igniting
Embodying
Burning
Disintegrating
Abandoning
Surrendering
Revealed
Taken Over
Consumed"
—Zhanna
"By way on an elegant invocation of the merely probable meanings of lost histories and ethnic otherness as manifest in the hand signalings of a dancing muse rippling towards us as if to kiss the head of a king cobra, we're soon left floating and alone only to realize-- and here is the rub, that the king and not beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and this, being you, the viewer, is about to be torn apart like the yearling consorts of great antiquity.
"A bloody good time is to be had for all. After setting us up at the haunted banquet of all but lost meanings, we're given just enough time to realize that we're the gypsies, the gypsies of love lost and shredded contexts. And we're drawn out of the shadowy curtains of the far east, out of Indonesia, through Sufiland and the Great Hungarian Plain, past the Ukraine and into Africa again, thrown in some Cuba and Haitian Voodoo, if you will, until you realize eventually that it is you who've become the subject of this dissembling smorgasbord down the gullible and into the belly of the beast we go, down, going down for the count of love…"
Before you can scarcely catch your breath, suddenly the feast and is bleeding and you're bloody it. You're fully awake now and love's tearing you apart. Your body is becoming the Serenghetti of appetite, in savageness, the ground of being itself alive, eating itself numb into satiety, blindness, night. Just hang on. This too shall pass out. Wake up and smell the coffin. Egypt can't be that far off. The bottom line. The ground floor of the pyramid scheme. You can count on Isis in a crisis, brother. She'll have you in stitches come the Spring. Limbs rise up laughing with the disinterred perfumes of loss and renewal. But right now you'll have to chill into something Tibetan. And remember to say tanka. Tankas for everything. And Kaliuga to you too, yearling. And yes, I'm happy to have been of use. Bon appetit. And I didn't really know, it ís true, that I could be a twelve course meal for you. You all, I mean. No, I promise, nothing personal. I won't take any of this personally. Let's keep it simple. Whatever it takes then, after all, to be restored to this throne of blood and light.--Ronald F. Sauer
2003, 16mm black and white/color sound 10 minutes $40
"We don't have time to get scared, everything happens in a few seconds."
"The sight lights up just in front of the windshield, everything is ready for the computer to do its work."
"It's the computer that has the last word." - Paul Virillio
About 2,000 troops from the US led military coalition were engaged in close in combat on March 4, 2002 with small pockets of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the rugged terrain of northeastern Afghanistan as part of an operation called Operation Acaconda.... The footage in the piece is filmed and audio taped from a US gunship helicopter that was part of this mission
Screenings:
New York Film Festival
Toronto International Film Festival
Onion City Film Festival
2004, VHS/DVD, b&w/so, 12m; $25 Home Use, $50 Other
Limited edition DVD compilation, signed and numbered.
DVD Sale: $100 individuals, $400 institutions
Limited edition DVD compilation, signed and numbered.
DVD Sale: $75 individuals, $300 institutions
Includes: A TICKET HOME, I'D RATHER BE IN PARIS, and HONEYMOON IN RENO
1982-1983, VHS, b&w/color/so, 29m, $50 Home; $150 Other
Includes: VOYEURISTIC TENDENCIES, PHONE/FILM PORTRAITS, and HIT THE TURNPIKE!
1984-1985, VHS, b&w/so, 25m, $50 Home; $150 Other
Includes: SCRATCHES, INC., EL TRAIN FILM, A FILM, FREEDOM'S SKYWAY, ART INSTITUTIONALIZED (SFAI 1980), and THE MYSTERY OF LIFE (AS DISCOVERED IN LOS ANGELES)
1975-1982, VHS, b&w/color/so, 28m, $50 Home; $150 Other
DVD $50 individuals; $100 Institutions
DVD $50 indviduals; $100 Insitutions