there is a certain glee and simultaneously a perverse rebellious streak within me which, when asked to write about myself and my work, forces me to phrase such incisive statements as "i really like dogs, i once met a man with a boil the size of a baseball on his neck which caused him to tilt his head to the right and consequently gave him the air of a pensive wonderer." however, given the amount of attention paid to experimental film and those who create it, there is little need to forcibly alienate oneself from an imagined audience. i make short poetic films which attempt to outline a decisive emotional ambivalence. there is a space between humor and utter misery in which i am constantly trying to burrow. this notion is more readily accepted in language, for writers are continually expanding their play with words, the myriad meanings a given word may have, its flexibility when placed beside another, as well as the emotional reverberations of sound and memory which decidedly affect all reception. i am interested in film which allows itself such double crossing and play. each of the films i have submitted for viewing vary considerably in content and yet are tied to one another by their form's gestalt, which is a stagey modesty contrived to show, ever more glaringly their desire to be read, well. i have tried to construct a body of work which supercedes logic and yet is entirely "understandable" the way music is moving and precise beyond explanation. (however i will make an attempt at some very brief explanations of the films i have sent.)
a short trip around, like a poem or a nostalgia for what you never had or knew anything about. we pick up speed around the equator. ANGUS MUSTANG is paralleling different travels, the physicality of travel pointed to, most clearly in the soundtrack and the pacing of the film, with the referees of travel's many orphans springing through the implied history.
1996, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
WOMAN STABBED TO DEATH is a short film concerned with both the apathy of human receptivity and the perverse nature of free floating paranoia so artfully engrained in women. it is a tiny horror film, with the soundtrack skipping blithely over the literal graves of millions and the metaphorical grave of one's feelings of safety.
1996, 16mm, b&w/so, 8.5m, $25
it's a love story, with the usual dashing figures and old habits of spelling, repetition and listing.
"In a certain way, the title tells you everything, the simplicity of S. Barber's FLOWER, THE BOY, THE LIBRARIAN is somewhat misleading in terms of its content or how the hidden poetry of those contents are discovered. The work hints at a vast space which takes the form of these three characters (the flower, the boy and the librarian) but, at the same time seems not to be fixed on these things, but to represent something else, something mysteriously luminous." - Gregg Biermann
1997, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
a playful and jolly look at war, illness and accidental murders. royalty and oceanic intrigue, more limbs and other body parts are removed, or floating free of their, well where they ought to be. i thought about soza boy and young private john ho, but what i made seems too pretty or abstracted, and it's funny. an unreliable narrator, perhaps, but also a woman i know who said "i'm serious about silly."
1997, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
a sonnet, the fifties family travel, through, say america, or time, a fascination with the exciting future, the image is purposefully jerky and toy-like with the casio keyboard beats a (faux) dated take on the serial pieces to come later. the entirely is falling apart, or so close to falling, toy machines. metamorphosis, there's not so much really put down, but a lot of pointing and elbowing.
1997, 16mm, color/so, 12m, $35
METRONOME is both the most straightforward, as well as the most difficult of my films. it is very dear to my heart. the radio play soundtrack is off-set by the intractable images "spaces." the former seems to balance precariously between kitsch and true heartrending emotion and the latter is referencing the asceticism of seventies minimalism (in experimental film) with the impenetrable intellectualism becoming increasingly moving as the film progresses. the marriage of these two elements is an odd tension, the tale of the play, the threat of limb extraction, asks the necessity of "whole and what the elements are which compose complete."
1998, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
it's pretty graphic, regis and his wives, the alcoholism, loneliness and misunderstandings, a stiff babe and toy computer-like scanning of the entirety, o'henry ending, resolution is delivered, that's an aria of cease.
"It's pretty cute, but I felt kinda sick watching it." - Anne Killelea
1998, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
a nautical haiku of sorts.
1998, 16mm, b&w/si, 4m, $20