My work comes out of the avant-garde tradition of film as visual art. Avant-garde cinema is an important and relatively young artistic project. While it maintains its scrappy integrity, and while many significant works have been created in subsequent decades, current practitioners have not fully moved out of the shadow of the prodigious 1960's and 70's. Consequently I've looked to new technologies to discover vast unspoiled frontiers no longer available to small gauge filmmakers looking to explore cinematic form. The development of new instruments has often determined the important aesthetic developments in artistic and musical composition. The meaning of digital technology lies in its ability to copy, but also in its plasticity. Its capacity to alter, mask, fragment, re-mix, super-impose, mutate, reflect, transmit and reframe are its prime currents.
Gregg Biermann's website: www.greggbiermann.com
"In Gregg Biermann's 17 minute MONTAGE allusive often abstract images - a silhouette, some trees, geometrical light patterns - are intercut to form repetitive and rhythmic sequences. But just when you think Biermann's using set patterns, the order switches. The mysterious aura that results leaves you feeling that the images are indeed trying to say something; you just can't figure out what that is. This is OK: Biermann wants to avoid simple narrative explanations." - Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
"Calling a film 'Montage' would be like calling a painting 'Renaissance Perspective.'" - Ernie Gehr
1990, 16mm, b&w/so, 17m, $55
A piece that begins much like my earlier film MONTAGE but unlike that film takes several surprising turns which seem to break the film's consistency but actually point its overall structure. YOU NEVER WORRY operates in an arena where meaningfulness is anything but perfunctory. An attempt to break open the ivory tower of structuralist film ends up with a resounding short circuit - but this might not negate the work. Dissonances between areas of unrelated subject matter pervert the purity of formal concerns. It is almost as if the process and subjects are actually at odds with one another. What is interesting about the use of appropriated imagery here is that one is never sure how to view the material. The lack of the familiar ironic position leads to some disturbing places. Finally in all of this phenomena ... a strangely emotional personal overtone.
1993, 16mm, b&w/so, 20m, $60
Text written by Sarah Markgraf
Material Excess is a large-scale animated movie, which borrows its
structure from Dante's The Diving Comedy. The animation is for the
most part created in a digital process related to the hand-made film
tradition. In a photo-editing program, scans of various objects are
placed on a digital image strip without regard for individual frames.
These images are translated into video sequences and the result is an
exploding jumble of images. By its very nature, the animation cannot
directly illustrate the various bits of narration that appear in the
soundtrack. The two things simply happen simultaneously.
Many cultures have beliefs and related depictions about what happens to the soul after death. Material Excess provides an exhaustive tour of the various neighborhoods of the afterlife. The voyage that you will undertake is similar to Dante's journey, however the sights have been changed to relate to our secular, postmodern, and existential setting. Our particular setting is one in which most of the world's resources are brought to bear to provide material items for our consumption.
The three major sections of the piece (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) are roughly equal in length. After making our way through the trees of dark wood, we find that Inferno is made up almost entirely of the junkmail that these trees died to make. This material represents one month's worth of the various fliers, catalogues, and circulars that appear in the mailbox of my suburban New Jersey home. Each advertiser is relegated to its own section of hell. The narration in this section is performed by a computer voice and relates various traumas of the shopping experience. It also contains material from Baudrillard's Impossible Exchange. Perhaps it is not an accident that Baudrillard appears in the Inferno as fast talking mastery over logic and language is often seen by the orthodox as opposed to true faith. Satan appears as the light of pure television.
The flatness and printed text of the ads gives way to the supple, textured, three-dimensional shapes of the concluding sections. Purgatory is made up entirely of useful items and the narration relates the gray details of everyday life. These include perfunctory communications and an authentic message from cousin Martha from Richmond.
Paradiso is constructed entirely out of junk food and new age music. Nothing in paradise needs to have nutritional value. The only requirement is pleasure. My best Monty Python accent posits the question of whether Jesus was ever truly happy as gummy bears and chicklets dance on the screen in what critic Fred Camper calls a "half ironic vision of redemption".
DVD, color, sound, 73 min, $30
A single frame from the classic film is transformed into six minutes of hyperactive animation. Although the process is entirely digital, it actually relates to the hand-made, or direct film tradition more than most computer animation. The technical part of it was that a single scan of a still from the film was made. Then that scan was then cut into long strips and placed into a long, thin image file in the photo editing program. The strips were copied into these long, thin, image files at several different resolutions accounting for different levels of eventual fragmentation in the segments of the movie. This image file has time-code on it and it allows the video editing software to split the file up into separate frames in the. Since I am not really cognizant of where the frames will be in the movie file when I am dealing with it as a single still image, there is an element of randomness in the compositions. There are several superimpositions and mattes going on at different frame rates later on in the piece as well.
(Winner, Grand Prize, Best Experimental Film-New Jersey International Film Festival, 2002)
2002, DVD, 6m, so
"I think Gregg is a virtuoso: I'm taken to startlingly unfamiliar places when I watch his work and I always am amazed at the depth and richness of the experience." --Mark Street, filmmaker
The Waters of Casablanca, 2002, 6 min, sound
A single frame from the classic film is transformed into six minutes
of hyperactive animation. Although the process is entirely digital,
it actually relates to the hand-made, or direct film tradition more
than most computer animation. For my piece, a single scan of a still
from the film "Casablanca" was made. Then that scan was then cut into
long strips and placed into a long, thin image file in the photo
editing program. The strips were copied into these long, thin, image
files at several different resolutions accounting for different
levels of eventual fragmentation in the segments of the movie. This
image file has time-code in it and this allows the video editing
software to split the file up into separate frames in the digital
video format. Since I am not really cognizant of where the frames
will be in the movie file when I am dealing with it as a single still
image, there is an element of randomness in the compositions.
Orange, 2003, 5min 30sec, silent
"Orange" is the third digitally animated piece of mine inspired by
the direct film tradition. This tradition includes works in which the
filmstrip is directly manipulated by painting, scratching, or
otherwise placing objects on it. This tradition was probably
originated by Len Lye in his hand painted "A Colour Box" from 1935.
To create my piece I cut up an orange into several pieces and scanned
the pieces into my computer. I then took the image files of the
orange pieces and "pasted" them directly into the video strip using a
photo editing software package. This technique then transforms the
orange pieces into what appears to be a random exploding jumble of
images when viewed.
Goat Song, 2003, 5 minutes, sound
The piece makes extensive use of split screen effects to transform my
primitive vocalizations into a sync sound video fugue of silly
proportions.
Material Witness 2003, 7 min, sound
Fleeting and effervescent images and texts from a NYC police exam are
interspersed with fields of shimmering color. Audio from a police
radio punctuates the images.
Cinema Study 2003, 5min, sound.
"Cinema Study" is a reworking of images and sounds taken from Orson
Welles landmark film "Citizen Kane". The piece breaks the frame into
multiple smaller rectangles, each with short video and audio samples
from the original film. Part of the activity of the viewer seems to
be the activity of keeping track of the images, which pop around the
screen, and how they relate to the sounds. All of the sounds in the
piece are in a precise synchronous relationship with the images on
the screen. The original narrative film breaks down almost
completely, and becomes an almost pure visual and musical experience.
Call it "Citizen Kane" the re-mix.
Pipes - 8 min, sound,
This piece features composer/flutist Wendy Luck, performing on
several different kinds of flutes. Pipes does not document a
performance so much as it creates a performance through my editing of
a small amount of recorded materials. To do the piece I had to make a
recording of Wendy playing various flutes. All of the audio and video
is in sync. I then broke the material down into thirty or so short
sequences, which range in length from a fraction of a second to a few
seconds. There are three distinct sections, although there is no
pause between them. The first section has a single stream of audio
and video, and new melodies and visual patterns are created through
juxtaposition. The second section has two streams of audio and video.
New melodies and visual patterns are created through juxtaposition as
well as superimposition. The third section has four streams of audio
and video. The four-voice canon of the audio in this section blurs
the individual melodic lines. The image becomes almost abstract due
to the four layers of superimposition. Because we have seen all of
the material before in the first two sections, it is possible to
sense that all of the audio and video remains in sync in spite of the
complexity.
Grapefruit, 2003, 2min, silent
"Grapefruit" explores the surface texture of a half grapefruit. The
scanned image of the grapefruit is placed in a 3-dimensional space
and the viewer moves around it as if it were a planetary body.
Cookie, 2003, 1 min,, silent
"Grapefruit" explores the surface texture of cookie. The scanned
image of the cookie is placed in a 3-dimensional space and the viewer
moves around it as if it were a planetary body.
Suspended Animation, 2003, 3 min, silent
"Suspended Animation" is a visually stunning and kaleidoscopic
chromatic study.
DVD Sale: 43 minutes, $35 home use, $100 institutional use
“I’ve just enjoyed a renewed acquaintance with some of Gregg Biermann’s recent work. In this work he has taken head-on some of the supreme moments of classical cinema and subjected them to a dazzling transformation in the digital domain. The results are exhilarating, surprising tours de force. They also have a zany quality that shows the artist to have a witty imagination.” —Larry Gottheim, filmmaker
Happy Again, 2006, 5 minutes, video, stereo
“Happy Again” is a digital age motion study inspired by the
"chronophotographic" work of Etienne-Jules Marey. The signature scene
from the Hollywood musical "Singin' in the Rain" is split into seven
layers. Each layer is moving at a different speed and is visible
equally in superimposition. At the temporally central point all
visual and audio elements coalesce in a single frame. The result
uncovers a new cinema, music and dance that are buried within the
familiar iconic sequence.
The Hills Are Alive - 2005, 7 ½ minutes, video, stereo
An iconic scene from the beloved Hollywood musical “The Sound of
Music” is transformed through a contrapuntal progression of split
screen effects. The resulting mosaic reveals haunting melodies and
reverberating dissonance.
Spherical Coordinates 2005, 8 ½ minutes, video, stereo
Technical Assistance: Francis Schmidt, Juan Leon Spherical
Coordinates is a new piece in my series of digitally animated pieces
in which iconic Hollywood films are reworked. This piece introduces
stunning dimensionality and perspective to the usually 2-dimensional
genre of avant-garde cinema. The camera moves in a variety of ways
examining the inside of a 3D animated sphere on the inside of which a
scene from “Psycho” is wrapped.
The Waters of Casablanca 2002, 6 minutes, video, stereo
A single frame from the classic film “Casablanca” is transformed into
six minutes of exploding and hyperactive animation. Although the
process is entirely digital, it actually relates to the hand-made, or
direct film tradition (which dates to the mid-1930’s) more than most
computer animation.
Cinema Study 2003, 7 minutes, video, stereo
“Cinema Study” is a reworking of images and sounds taken from Orson
Welles landmark film “Citizen Kane”. The piece breaks the frame into
multiple smaller rectangles, each with short video and audio samples
from the original film. Part of the activity of the viewer seems to
be the activity of keeping track of the images, which pop around the
screen, and how they relate to the sounds. All of the sounds in the
piece are in a precise synchronous relationship with the images on
the screen. The original narrative film breaks down almost
completely, and becomes an almost pure visual and musical experience.
Call it “Citizen Kane” the re-mix.
Paradiso (Material Excess - Part 3) 2003, video, 23 minutes,
stereo
Text by Sarah Markgraf and Additional Music by Ron Mazurek
Paradiso is constructed entirely out of junk food and pleasant,
relaxing music. Nothing in paradise needs to have nutritional value.
The only requirement is pleasure. In my best Monty Python accent a
voiceover posits the question “was Jesus ever truly happy?” as gummy
bears and chicklets dance on the screen in what critic Fred Camper
calls a “half ironic vision of redemption”. Paradiso is the final
section of my three-part Material Excess (73 min, 2002-03). Material
Excess is a large-scale animated movie, which borrows its structure
from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The animation is for the most part
created in a digital process related to the cameraless hand-made film
tradition. In a photo-editing program, scans of various objects are
placed on a digital image strip without regard for individual frames.
These images are translated into video sequences and the result is an
exploding jumble of colors and forms. By its very nature, the
animation cannot directly illustrate the various bits of narration
that appear in the soundtrack. The two things simply happen
simultaneously. “a remarkable achievement” —David Finkelstein,
Film Threat
Hackensack Motet 2006, 5 minutes, video, stereo
Recorded on Main Street in Hackensack, New Jersey and animated in the
same software that is responsible for 3D animated features like
Shrek, this video transforms an ordinary street scene into a
kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria with stunning depth effects. The
original audio composition has associations with early choral music
and thus imbues the otherwise worldly imagery with sacred, almost
cosmic qualities.
DVD Sale: 62 minutes, $35 home use, $100 institutional use