"Even though I can't explain why, a film that moves me deeply each time I see it ... enchanting!" - Stan Brakhage
"Certainty affirmed; certainty denied." - Ellen Robertson
1975, 16mm, color/si, 11m, $35
"I think Gary Doberman is an artist of film, and I can only name under twenty in the nation; yes, there are very few people I recognize as artists really dedicated to making works of lasting value in film and Gary is one of them .... And a very great one actually." - Stan Brakhage
1976, 16mm, color/si, 6.5m, $20
"Yesterday I took another look at the three film prints I own by Gary Doberman, FISHERIES, THE RHYME and THE MOIETIES and satisfied myself that, yes, the last several years his work has been THE most persistent influence on my films ...." - Stan Brakhage, Brakhage Scrapbook
"And most uniquely, it is an art of editing, where the emotional and conceptual flip from image to image .... At one point the screen goes nearly black, except for a faint, liquid shimmer of gray, giving an underwater sensation. Then the light increases, and we realize we are viewing the undersides of the fisherman's nets as they shake them out ... the movement of the nets being likened to the ocean they will be lowered into .... This is a magic all its own, showing that any scene, with its interplay of color, light and shadow can be viewed as a unique visual universe." - Krin Van Tatenhove
1975-1977, 16mm, color/si, 14m, $45
"Think of a couple of things like they say: 'Limits are what any of us are inside of ...'; 'Verse consists of a constant and variant ....' Already the world is here, truly, and anyone who has ever had experience of actual confinement - jail, hospital, body, army - common to the human state can't really be patient with any assumption that we need to do it to ourselves ....
"In this film there is a simple accessible constant which you will have no difficulty in recognizing. There is an equally apparent variable. So your question - to phrase it poorly - might be, what is it that is being measured here?
"The materials of this film are personal, comfortably so. Nothing in that way distorted or untoward. But the choices of the artist are both crucial and defining, and there is evident attention to what he has called boundaries.
"This ... is a beautiful film, factually, with a lovely shifting counterpoint in the pacing. Like an old slow blues, after some up-tempo number - so, read it and think." - Robert Creeley, Was That a Real Poem and Other Essays
1977, 16mm, color/si, 7.5m, $25
"... where beads of light searching out 'the beloved' do pulse with the beat of the filmmaker's heart in perfect contrapuntal rhythm with all else in the frame of that sequence." - Stan Brakhage, World Film Festival of Canada
1978, 16mm, color/si, 9m, $30
"This is a portrait of Brakhage in Brakhage's style. I can't see any justification for making this film." - Ken Jacobs
Jacobs was correct in his description, but he missed the implicit boundary question. A viewer described the film as "seeing yourself seeing through someone else's seeing." This film puts mediation into question; it talks in someone else's tongue while maintaining its own ontology. As a film preoccupied with mediation and boundary distinctions, the film is related to DOMICILE, Silent Window Thinking, FULL MOON NOTEBOOK, MARKS OF REFERENCE and consequently foreshadows the APORIAS.
"You have shown us the theatrics of discipleship ... the disciples like moths circulating around a flame ... the sensation that the entire film takes place in a cave illuminated by a central light .... If one were a disciple, the spell could never be broken, but the spell is broken in your film because you are not a disciple, rather your subject is discipleship, the theater of discipleship made conscious. It is very clear, it is a made thing, of discipleship, we are not asked to enter the web or to have a religious experience, but to think." - Ed Schwartz
1978, 16mm, color/si, 9m, $30
For Jim Healy.
NIMBUS was Robert Creeley's first choice to show in conjunction with a lecture at Rocky Mountain Film Center in 1978. This film owes much to Creeley's poetry and Edward Hopper's paintings, although no conscious consideration structured the working process - Hopper in the sense that Brian O'Doherty writes of the paintings as displaying "an observed, an observer and a witness."
1978, 16mm, color/si, 5m, $20
"Wanted to drop you a quick note to congratulate you on THE FUR OF THIS ANIMAL. Saw it recently ... and was very impressed and interested - made me want to see it a few more times. ... But your film, even though I see it operating through composition (pictorial plus time-based) did get me on the edge of my seat - the image quality throughout was really rather extraordinary. In addition, the film just seemed somehow more serious, which is I guess a matter of a kind of depth and subtlety. So anyhow, you kind of won me over to where my prejudices just melted away." - Fred Worden
1979, 16mm, color/si, 20m, $60
"As I said, but wish to imprint, MARKS OF REFERENCE is one of your very greatest films to me, Gary - a breakthru for my comprehension of yr working over these 'inner rectangles' for years in your films ...." - Stan Brakhage
1980, 16mm, color/si, 11.5m, $35
TRIVIA was Brakhage's choice out of all my films up to that point to be shown at the School of the Chicago Art Institute on a program with a Werner Herzog film. There was a definite poetic justice to this unplanned coincidental combination of TRIVIA with a Herzog film. TRIVIA could be described as the Old World in the New World, Bruegel's Icarus having a "bad day" in the New World, a New World Aesthetic response to Herzog's Old World sentimental Romanticism of the New World.
"There is myth, there are objects, and only for a moment can they meet, inform each other, and then part. If myth must inevitably unravel and if, at a moment in time, meet its diminished successor, that moment is this film." - Ed Schwartz
1980, 16mm, color/si, 15m, $45
"It hurt my eyes, there was too much TV in it." - Stan Brakhage
"Television is vulgar, a vulgarity thrown in the face of, against the fact of, serious art .... [Y]et vulgarity is impossible without its opposite; vulgarity implies good manners, propriety, a kind of aesthetic seriousness of measure .... The fact of television and the fact of its conquering our environment cannot be used any longer by the well-mannered Modernist as a manifestation of mere vulgarity .... [I]f the artist must continually fight to paint or give form to what he sees then Manet's fight to have the caf�s as a serious subject for painting is inherited today as the fight for the acknowledgement that television is what the artist sees." - Gary Doberman, "The Uses of Vulgarity in the Aporian Context"
"When you said you were working with televison, I knew you were on to something because television is forbidden territory." - Fred Worden
1981, 16mm, color/si, 11.5m, $35
"This is the one that is perfectly balanced ... this is the one which is the masterpiece." - Stan Brakhage (Comparing APORIA 1 to APORIA 2)
"Modernist thinking, with its emphasis on precise measure, could not anticipate that the immediate environment would be shared by a simulacrum. Television is our local." - Gary Doberman, "The Uses of Vulgarity in the Aporian Context"
"What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple?" - Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
1982, 16mm, color/si, 9.5m, $30
"After seeing this film, I can now really understand your need to differentiate what you're doing from collage. These films are not collage. It really is an image of an image [system]." - Fred Worden
"The roll bar! The roll bar, yes! ... very enthusiastic about this film!" - Kurt Kren
"Images cannot contain experience. Images can only contain the image of experience. The image is not an 'equivalency' of experience, it substitutes itself for experience." - Gary Doberman, "The Uses of Vulgarity in the Aporian Context"
1983, 16mm, color/si, 24.5m, $75
"... the line between public and private imagery." - Fred Worden
"This film completely delivers on all your verbal promises about what the Aporias can conceptualize. Your most important film up to this point." - Carl Williams
"In an aesthetic sense, the roll bar - the black bar on film created by the gap between the mechanical motion of the film strip and the electronic scan of the television - is the indexical sign, the physical scar of the unbridgeable gap between two mediums, two ontologies, forced to cohabit the same materiality, and in a larger sense much more, the physical manifestation of an entire conceptual rupture." - Gary Doberman, "The Uses of Vulgarity in the Aporian Context"
1984, 16mm, color/si, 11.5m, $35
"A narrative so to speak, a threatening environment, a space which opens up in a 'wall,' revealing, a threat that speaks across mediumistic boundaries." - Ed Schwartz An aporian myth would intertwine elements so that where one thing began and the other ended would become the subject of the film. An aporian myth would be analogous to recombinate DNA research where a thing is not merely just itself but also another thing simultaneously. Such a myth would fulfill the artist's responsibility to conceptualize context.
The film is based on the myth of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
1985, 16mm, color/si, 10.5m, $30