As an artist, Bill Brand has consistently been concerned with relationships of system to form and meaning. When his work first came into public view in the early 1970s, it was known for its formal and conceptual stringency and was associated with Minimal Art and Structural Film. In subsequent work he became increasingly interested in issues of representation, but continued his fascination with examining the material basis of the cinematic image. Visually the work went from being highly reductive to massively complex and it took on elements of social content and personal expression. Yet, throughout, the work continued to explore a widening field of systems - the material base of the medium, the semiotic system of representation, the social system of production and distribution, and most recently the biological and psychological system of the body as subject.
For three decades, Bill Brand's films have been screened throughout the US and Europe in museums, independent film showcases, colleges and universities. The work is includes in They Must Be Represented (1996) by Paula Rabinowitz, Documentary, A History of the Non-Fiction Film (1992) by Erik Barnouw; Allegories of Cinema (1990) by David James and has been written about in journals by Janet Maslin, Armond White, Paul Arthur, J. Hoberman, B. Ruby Rich, Jonathan Buchsbaum, Noel Carroll, Ian Christie and Jonas Mekas, among others.
Bill Brand is Professor of Film and Photography at Hampshire College where he was awarded the MacArthur Chair for the years 1994-1997. He founded Chicago Filmmakers in 1973, served on the Board of Directors of the Collective for Living Cinema until 1991 and is currently an Artistic Director of Parabola Arts Foundation which he co-founded in 1981. Since 1975 he has also operated BB Optics, an optical printing service specializing in 8mm blow-ups and archival footage.
Bill Brand's website: www.bboptics.com
"MOMENT is 'a demonstration-exploration of the line between human information and machine information: a dynamic revelation of film's basic unit, the frame.' Formally, it consists of seven permutations of a two-and-a-half-minute shot, each of which renders the natural image increasingly incoherent until, finally, coherence is miraculously restored. What we have actually witnessed is the progressive decomposition of the original material down to its ultimate constituent as information, by means of reversing its 'direction' in decreasing lengths; so that the final restoration is, in fact, the opening shot running backwards frame by frame." - Ian Christie, Studio International
1972, 16mm, b&w/so, 25m, $75
The slipping time between the dialed number and the hello at the other end.
1973, 16mm, b&w/so, 8m, $25
ACTS OF LIGHT 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.
This section 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.
1972, 16mm, color/so, 18m, $55
Here, by contrast, the film is richly sensuous. Again, 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 nearly 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. It starts black and progresses nearly to white. The varying rates of rotation determine the moment to moment combination of colors.
1973, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
In this film, 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" belongs to 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.
1974, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
CHUCK'S WILL'S WIDOW weaves a complex of feelings and personal associations into a swirl of landscape and abstract images. Jagged shapes swarm the surface acting variously as frames, veils, and component elements of the photographic image. Though formally extreme, the film's emotional qualities emerge in unexpected and subtle ways.
1982, 16mm, color/si, 13m, $40
The film is an impression of the 1982 folk festival at the Tracy and Eloise Schwarz farm in Central Pennsylvania. The festival, which was dedicated to Elizabeth Cotton (author of "Freight Train"), 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 which breaks up into a swarm of shapes derived from traditional Pennsylvania Dutch designs. While sometimes the music seems to animate the image, at other times 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.
1983, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
West Virginia industrial landscapes are imaged through a collage of mattes that transform the photographed scenes into a kinetic field of shapes and spaces. While the technique and the emotional tone are reminiscent of the earlier and more purely personal CHUCK'S WILL'S WIDOW, the new film extends the already complex visual idiom by inlaying social, personal and political subjects.
Woven into the fabric of the film 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 UMWA. His story is told through fragments of documentary interviews and by a poet whose own subjective text is a dominant theme in the film. The thematic elements and formal approaches sit in precarious balance. COALFIELDS has an original poetic text by Kimiko Hahn and sound composition by composer Earl Howard.
1984, 16mm, color/so, 39m, $120
Editor and Co-Writer: Joanna Kiernan; Cinematography: Zoe Beloff and Bill Brand. In HOME LESS HOME people who are homeless reveal homelessness from their own experiences dispelling common misconceptions and prejudices. Told as a personal journey, the film gives a broad analysis of the causes and conditions of homelessness while it analyzes news, TV reports and historical images of poverty. HOME LESS HOME presents new ways to look at homelessness, displacing the debate from questions of charity to ones of social justice.
"Bill Brand's remarkable documentary problems the lifestyles of the homeless population of our city and reveals perhaps the most frightening news of all. Many of those we see outside in cardboard boxes or sleeping bags are not drunks, addicts or lazy, but workers who simply don't earn enough to rent a room in New York." - The Film Society of Lincoln Center
"The testimony of many homeless people would have been a sufficiently urgent basis for any documentary film on this subject. But Mr. Brand goes further, offering a disquisition on the connection between the condition of the homeless and the consequences of studying it as a series of images." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Awards: Blue Ribbon, American Film/Video Festival; New Directors/New Films Festival, Museum of Modern Art, NY; Berlin Film Festival Forum of New Cinema.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 72m, $180
VHS Sale: $30 Home; $80 Other