A young girl drying her hair; a woman wringing a cloth washed in the river; a funeral in the early yellow light.
Note: Must be rented with THE CHINESE TYPEWRITER for $95.
1978-1981, 16mm, color/so, 3.5m
An essay with concentric analogies: body language, style of writing, and the styles of education and administration, THE CHINESE TYPEWRITER was photographed in 1978 after the fall of the "Gang of Four."
Type is set by hand and then machine for the "letter" press, and the pages are bound. School children are drilled; they study, they dance. Life and work is taken in snapshots and then passed around. The sounds of history and ideology in music and noise, spoken English and Chinese mix didactic. Teacher is administrator is helmsman.
"Barnett brings to the surface the country's fierce and vital mechanistic energy, while leaving the fragrant residue of humanity.
"[THE CHINESE TYPEWRITER] exemplifies the politically committed film that defies the strict rubric of avant-garde." - Gregory Solman, Boston Phoenix
"An alarming, funny, gorgeous work!" - Susan Orlean, Boston Phoenix
1978-1983, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $90
The first episode of a serial in which every episode is identical.
1970, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
Junkfilm assemblage from 50 prints of a trailer for a James Bond film.
1974, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
"The film is (more than any other I have encountered) caught in the act of saying something, and we are just as free to contemplate the act itself as the things said." - Konrad Steiner, Cinematograph #1
A rare reversal print which should only be rented for projection under the best circumstances with excellent picture and sound reproduction and a well-cleaned and maintained projector known to be scratch-free and gentle to prints.
1975, 16mm, color/so, 53m, $150
A meditation on a few frames of film in which a woman turns earth with a spade.
1977, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20
Junkfilm assemblage with favorites from Italian Opera.
1979, 16mm, color/so, 18m, $55
"Although constructed from thousands of still images of Chicago, ENDLESS maintains a complex relationship to the photographic image. Time and space seem to compress or implode into a contradictory experience - one which is fluid, yet static, sculptural, yet two-dimensional, of the present yet of the past. The images are layered both horizontally and vertically, creating 'endless' variations of time and space which are unable to be contained within the fixed boundaries of the film frame." - Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive
1987-1990, 16mm, b&w/si, 45m (18fps), $135
Self-portrait in San Cristobal.
16mm, color/si, 5m, $20
On August 19, 1991 when Mikhail Gorbachev was nearly overthrown in an attempted coup, ABC news sent Gary Henoch to Moscow to cover the events that followed. Henoch had been ABC’s Moscow producer/cameraman in the early 1980’s and he was astounded at the changes in Russian following the collapse of Communism. He asked his friend, Russian scholar Harlow Robinson to join him in Russia to document the impact of the changes in Russian society. Upon his return, after weeks of filming interviews and street scenes in Moscow, Yoroslavl, and Rostov Veliky, he turned the footage over to a well-known PBS series, but the rough-cut that emerged appalled him and he pulled the footage.
Some months later I was editing an industrial that Henoch had shot. He stopped by the editing room and we fell into a conversation. I was impressed that such an experienced hand would show up and ask if there was anything I needed that he failed to get. Was there anything he could have done better? In fact there was nothing. He was by far the best cameraman whose footage I had the honor to edit.
He told me the story of his trip to Russia and asked if I wanted to see the material. There was forty hours of it, and it blew me away. I saw in it the results of a civilization that had had its belief system knocked out from under it.
He saw that my passion for the footage was genuine and offered to give it to me to do with as I pleased. Over the next eleven years, in my spare time, and in between other jobs, I would work on the footage, solving one structural problem after another, until I finally became satisfied that I had caught the essence of the story.
An Anagram is an essay in changing parts. It trades in what Paul Auster calls “a syntax of the eye, a grammar of pure kinesis.” It wears the soul of historical disappointment on its sleeve.
Limited edition DVD (NTSC), 42m, $175 sale