Following the death of my friend Drew Lynch to AIDS, I composed this film using footage of him and myself. This poetic journey leaps from New York City to the desert in a shot my Bolex recorded while spiraling out the window of a 5th floor apartment.
Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road ...
When did it start? ...
I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is -
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city ...
—Rainer Maria Rilke's Lament
1994, 16mm, b&w/so, 11m, $35
Awarded Best Black-and-White Cinematography in a Short Film at the 1996 Cork International Film Festival, NOT FOR NOTHIN' is dreamy yet streetsmart, lushly photographed and spiked with wit. Rodney O'Neal Austin's distinctly modern, tongue-in-cheek vamping eschews campiness in favor of an air of gothic mystery, playing full tribute to the screen goddess Louise Brooks." - Michael Fox, COVERArts, New York
An homage to early sound film, a sensualist's dream that follows an androgynous cabaret performer on his search for the Beloved. A poetic narrative whose excessive, expressive visual style insists on the insertion of the androgyne/queer protagonist into an historic epoch of cinema from which he/she was absent or merely inferred: the late silent era. A document of San Francisco performer and visual artist Rodney O'Neal Austin (the film's co-conceptualist) and his band Minnie Pearl Necklace. Visual art by Meg Mack and Diane Hopkins, music by Beth Custer and a cameo by Jose Sarria, the legendary chanteuse of the historic Black Cat Club.
"[O]bnoxiously Fellini-esque." - Chicago Reader
1996, 16mm, b&w/so, 29m, $85
French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, reflecting on her novel Memoirs of Hadrian said, "the distance I bridge between myself and Hadrian is above all, the distance which separated me from my true self." This project began as a document of the East German town of Halle where I'd traveled with my German lover in 1991. It was post-reunification, and I was struck by this desolate ghost town. While working with the footage five years later, my memory of Halle opened onto the life of Bauhaus painter Lyonel Feininger (recalling a retrospective of his Halle paintings when I was there). Research into his letters led me to his wife Julia, who in translating his letters but not her own had written the autobiography of her own absence. Combining my own text images with those of Feininger, this autobiographical portrait of my own absence longs for a time and a relationship that slipped away.
Awards: Best Experimental Film, CSU Media Arts Festival, 1998
1997, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 13m, $40
2000, 16mm, b&w, 18.5m, $55