I have conceived, directed, shot, and edited over 30 award-winning short experimental and documentary films and videos since 1983. Most of my works are meant to be poetic—primarily using metaphor and metonymy. They dispense with the traditional narrative techniques that drive mainstream prosaic cinema, and seeks out the active viewer who is willing to co-create the work with me. I want viewers to work for meaning and have them connect the images rather than have language do that for them. A friend called my works "swiss-cheese narratives" because the viewer has to fill in the holes with his or her own experience to gain fulfillment. My films and videos are also "dreamscapes" where ordinary places and objects are transformed, juxtaposed, and diffused into dream-like environments which hypnotize the viewer and simultaneously challenge perceptions of reality.
Albert Gabriel Nigrin is an award-winning experimental media artist whose work has been screened all over the world. He is also a Cinema Studies Lecturer at Rutgers University, and the Executive Director/Curator of the Rutgers Film Co-op/New Jersey Media Arts Center, Inc.—a non-profit organization which screens and promotes independent, experimental and artistic cinema in New Jersey via the New Jersey Film Festivals, and the United States Super 8mm Film + DigitalVideo Festival. Mr. Nigrin has an M.F.A. (in Visual Arts/Film and Video) and an M.A. (in French Literature) from Rutgers University and a B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Mr. Nigrin has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts/ American Film Institute Mid-Atlantic Media Arts Fellowship Program and the Ford Foundation for his flm/video work. In addition, Mr. Nigrin was awarded a 2002 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Media Arts Fellowship. In 2004 through 2006, Mr. Nigrin's experimental films toured China via art galleries, media art centers and universities.
Albert Gabriel Nigrin's website: www.alnigrin.com
With Irene Fizer and Rosemary Passantino.
/GRID/LOCK/WED/LOCK/ is a claustrophobic film, where the camera forces the viewer into bent-over, upside down and twisted positions. The gaze is led into a cramped kaleidoscopic world of moving shadows and reflections. Yet the closed world of /GRID/LOCK/WED/LOCK/ reveals a drama - the union, separation and reunion of two figures lost in a labyrinth of fragments and cages.
"Whereas STRIPE TEASE playfully flirts with a theme of Desire, this film seeks to more completely outline its limits and consequences. Two shadow characters come to share an illusory world of form without dimension. These figures find themselves imprisoned, however, as they attempt to transform their shadows into substance. Electric fan blades, which flutter on the screen like an old silent movie, prevent the spectres from stepping off the 'stage' of their film arena and passing into the audience's reality. The mythical unity between spectator and spectacle shatters and the characters appear cast out of an allegorical Paradise." - Paul Young
Exhibition: National Women's Studies Association Conference Film Program, 1984; Introduction to Psychology, Rutgers University (class material), 1985-1986.
1983, S8mm, b&w/color/so, 17m (18fps), $50
With Irene Fizer, John Bartle and Rosemary Passantino.
"Stripes intrigue since they conceal and reveal, allowing as well as preventing perception and comprehension. What they overlay, they shred into even pieces, establishing, at the same time, an orderly and fissured image. (The glass shards, which appear later in the film, perform similarly: multiplying and thereby breaking up an image, which, although uniformly reflected, is not readily intelligible.) ... The camera teases: by leading the viewer on/in and then denying total apprehension .... A strip tease, a gradual, public derobing, titillates by prolonging the moment of complete disclosure; by perpetuating an in-between state, it excites the spectator. A cohesive narrative does not emerge; the images mean only to intimate - to tantalize." - Irene Fizer
Awards: Visionary Super 8 Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1984; Honorable Mention, Rochester Int'l Film Festival, 1985.
Exhibition: Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, Virginia; LA Filmforum; SF Cinematheque; Collective for Living Cinema, NY; Staten Island Institute of Arts & Sciences; Cable Television Network of NJ.
1983, S8mm, b&w/color/so, 15m (18fps), $45
With Dennis Benson, Irene Fizer and Andrew Daddio. Music composed by Michael Nigrin. Performed by the Carnegie-Mellon University Woodwind Ensemble.
"GRADIVA deals with a man who constructs/creates an idealized image of a woman, seductive but false. However, there also exists a real Gradiva, a person, who, seeking to slowly wean the hero from his obsession, consents to play at the ideal for a time so as 'not to awaken the dreamer too abruptly; gradually to unite myth and reality.' For Freud and Barthes the amorous experience stimulates the analytic cure. In Nigrin's film, Gradiva soon tires of the game. The film deals with the point of loss. Gradiva is intangible, fading in and out, always a step away, no matter the speed of approach. Gradiva is ambiguous, a mirror image, kind and gentle, false and deadly. The hero is caught in a web and is not as sympathetic as he may at first appear. He has consented to spin the web; he creates the scenario in which he is forced to act." - Dennis Benson
Awards: Cash Prize, First Festival of Experimental Film, Experimental Film Coalition, Chicago, 1984; First Prize, Athens Int'l Film Festival, Ohio, 1985.
1984, S8mm, b&w/so, 16m (24fps), $50
With Irene Fizer, Dennis Benson, Paul Young and Andrew Daddio.
"DOT TO DOT/TETE A TETE plays upon our contradictory desire for disorder and order, instituting a tension and a symbiosis between images of multiplicity, continuity, advancement, and those of delimitation, constriction, and finality. The opening credits, the single ticket on the screen, and the TV static rebound into infinity; the undulating, arcing Slinky becomes a humid tunnel into an undecipherable, endless space; the refracted landscape in the moving mirror multiplies into unintelligibility; the sensuous, red spin of the water, the spiral on the ball, and the sped-up sundial motion of the web and the academy leader (8, 7, 6, 5, etc.) are all representations of self-preoccupied motion, without a foreordained aim. By turning/returning into themselves, they become progressive and productive. The beatific repose of the woman and the exhausted sleep of the man draw upon the same notion: sleep, a turning inward, is perhaps the most provocative experience of boundlessness." - Irene Fizer
Awards: Keith Clark Memorial Award, Ann Arbor 8mm Film Festival, 1985; Second Experimental Film Festival, Experimental Film Coalition, Chicago, 1985.
1984-1985, S8mm, b&w/color/so, 16m (18fps), $50
With Irene Fizer (Part 1); Music by Michael Nigrin (Part 2).
Dependent more upon inventiveness than investment, these two works, ECHO IN HER EYES, PARTS 1 & 2, the first in a planned series of six, play upon the metaphorical linkage in the title of the aural within the visual; an echo resounding infinitely into the unknowable space of one's own eye. The visions always just on the edge of comprehension in ECHO IN HER EYES, PART 1, animate a still, pensive sleep. Their effect cannot be pinpointed as the impenetrability of sleep nor as manifest dream. The mirror similarly becomes either a pool of infinite reflection or an image forever unseen and torn from the sleeper - a mere surface.
"ECHO IN HER EYES, PART 2 enters the infinite reflections of the video camera itself, an experience of a technological void both kaleidoscopic and hypnotic." - Irene Fizer
Exhibition: Art Institute of New Jersey, 1985; Rutgers University, NJ, 1985.
1985, S8mm, color/so, 9m (18fps), $25
With Irene Fizer and Dennis Benson. Music composed and performed by Michael Nigrin and Jack Rusnak.
A woman sleeps. She dreams of a troubling encounter with a man at a futuristic cathedral. In this dream, the proliferation of a day's images is reduced and refined into more enigmatic renderings. The world of color and movement translates into one of stone, shadows and light. In the epilogue, the woman, now awake, lingers over the dream scenario which has just played; she prepares new variations. As such, the film poses the problem of defining the relationship between dreaming and waking consciousness. AURELIA was shot on location in Barcelona, Spain at the unfinished Sagrada Familia church designed by Antonio Gaudi. The film is based in spirit on Gerard de Nerval's novella Aurelia.
Funding was made available in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Awards: Quebec Int'l 8mm Film Festival, Montreal, 1987; MOAS Prize, Rochester Int'l Film Festival, 1986; Fifth Super 8 Film Encounter, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1987; Cash Prize, Ann Arbor 8mm Film Festival, 1987.
1985, S8mm, b&w/so, 13m (18fps), $40
With Irene Fizer and Paul Young. Music by William Nelson (SPIN ME ROUND) and Django Reinhardt (SHAKE WELL).
SPIN ME ROUND is a tribute to Hurricane Gloria. SHAKE WELL is a cinematic milkshake. "SPIN ME ROUND/SHAKE WELL is actually two short, quite elegant films, each performing exactly what the title predicts, but with a highly refined sense of space, composition and movement." - S.A. Barnes, Review of Third Experimental Film Festival, Chicago
Awards: SF Art Institute Film Festival, 1986; Third Experimental Film Festival, Experimental Film Coalition, Chicago, 1987.
Exhibition: SF Cinematheque; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; Zimmerli Art Museum, New Jersey; Berks Filmmakers, Reading, PA; Collective for Living Cinema, NY.
1986, S8mm, b&w/color/so, 5.5m (18fps), $25
With Irene Fizer, Dennis Benson and Christine Svevar.
The "X" and the bull's eye form the thematic basis for this psycho-dramatic film concerned with focalization, dream representation, the positioning of the camera vis-a-vis the spectator, concealment and revelation, the targeting of the gaze and the manipulation of refracted light.
Funded in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State.
Exhibition: Zimmerli Art Museum; Rutgers University, NJ; Collective for Living Cinema, NY; Tweed Art Gallery, Plainfield, NJ; Pingry School, Martinsville, NJ; Staten Island Museum of Arts and Sciences, NY.
1986, 16mm, b&w/si, 10m (24fps), $35
With Irene Fizer. BRAINWASHING, shot almost exclusively inside a car wash, is a hypnotic film which functions as metaphor for the drowning of the soul. The soundtrack consists of a condensed washing machine cycle: start, wash, rinse, spin, dry, off.
Exhibition: Collective for Living Cinema, NY; Film Co-op, Rutgers University, NJ; Staten Island Museum of Arts and Sciences, NY.
1987, S8mm, b&w/so, 5m (18fps), $20
With Irene Fizer.
LIGHT PHARMACY (or LIGHT FAR MAY SEE) consists of a series of film haiku preoccupied with the reflection and refraction of sunlight. Part 1 - shot in a Bruxelles, Belgium hotel room. Part 2 - shot in a moving train between Bruxelles and Paris. Part 3 - shot on the grounds of the Versailles Palace.
Exhibition: Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, NY.
1987, S8mm, b&w/si, 5m, $20
With Dennis Benson, Lisette Castelo, Allison Diamond, Craig Molino, Patrick Woody, Julie Chimerine, Caryll Balzano and Andre Anthony. Music: "The Beloved Eclipse" by Michael Nigrin. Shot on location in central New Jersey, TERRAIN VAGUE ("wasteland" in French) deals with two women who concurrently experience the same dream. In TERRAIN VAGUE, I am interested in formalizing the structure of film as a boundary between a known reality and a space with its own idiosyncratic image "code." However, this film is not preoccupied solely with dream representation, it is also concerned with focalization, concealment and revelation, separation and reunion, the manipulation of reflected light and geometric shot composition.
1987, 16mm, b&w/sound on cassette tape, 13m, $35
With Anne Burns. Music by Daniel Nigrin.
THE BURNING TEXT is derived from writings by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio and from photographs by Bill Brandt. In the film a vain woman commits the ultimate selfish act by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The Wizard of Oz in reverse. THE BURNING TEXT is the visual component of a multi-media performance piece by Moi, Je Nage ..., an experimental theater troupe based in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the multi-media performance, the movie usher, traditionally situated at the perimeter of the theater, is placed at the center.
This film was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts - American Film Institute, Mid-Atlantic Region Media Arts Fellowship Program. Administered by Pittsburgh Filmmakers.
Exhibition: Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY, 1991; LA Filmforum, 1991; Chicago Filmmakers, 1991; Northwest Film and Video Center, OR, 1991; Anthology Film Archives, 1991; Bruxelles Int'l S8mm Film/Video Festival, 1991.
1988, S8mm, b&w/color/so, 13m (18fps), $40
With Allison Diamond and Irene Fizer. Music by Anthony Phillips.
LIGHT PHARMACY: PART 4 is part of a series of "film haiku" concerned primarily with the reflection and refraction of sunlight and dream representation.
"A surreal fantasy - almost a homage to Maya Deren. Nigrin has a fine feeling for imagery and pacing." - William Sloan, Museum of Modern Art, NY
Awards: Second Prize, US S8mm Film/Video Festival, 1991; Cash prize, Exit Art Int'l Forum of S8mm, 1988; Honorable Mention, Athens Int'l Film Festival, 1988.
Exhibition: Anthology Film Archives, 1990; WNYC, PBS, NY, 1991; Downtown Community TV, NY, 1990; 911 Contemporary Arts Center, 1991; Cornell University, 1988.
1988, S8mm, b&w/so, 6m (18fps), $30
With Lynn Brunskill and Laura Firman. Animal footage shot by Burd Stover. Music by Michael Nigrin.
Three forms of capture. Shot in Piscataway, New Jersey; Death Valley, California; New Orleans, Lousiana.
Award: NEA/AFI Mid-Atlantic Media Arts Fellowship
Exhibition: Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY, 1991, Bruxelles Int'l S8mm Film/Video Festival, 1990; 911 Contemporary Arts Center, Seattle, 1991; Northwest Film and Video Center, OR, 1991; Rutgers University, NJ, 1991; Berks Filmmakers, Reading, PA, 1991; Chicago Filmmakers, 1991; LA Filmforum, 1991.
1990, S8mm, color/so, 13m (18fps), $35
With Anne Burns, Allison Diamond, Erica Mosner and Karima Wicks. Co-produced by Albert Gabriel Ngrin and Dennis Benson. Scripted by Dennis Benson. Music by Michael Nigrin ("Elizabeth's Empty Cup").
"All things want to fly. Only we are weighed down by desire, caught in ourselves and enthralled with our heaviness." - Rilke
"While brushing her hair in the oppressive and still heat of an August afternoon, a woman, Elizabeth, slips in and out of consciousness. Images, usually confined by sleep, escape their bounds. Elizabeth's thoughts and space are infringed upon. She is able to glimpse the possibility of the fulfillment of desire, but the implications of that fulfillment threaten her.
"ECHOLALIA was suggested by a Rilke poem ('Sonnets to Orpheus' 11, 14) that describes the tension that exists between the human longing for transcendence and the languor generated by other, less pure, desires. In ECHOLALIA a woman is presented with the opportunity for flight, but the value of that opportunity is tempered with lessons learned from the myth of Icarus." - Dennis Benson
Award: NEA/AFI Mid-Atlantic Region Fellowship Exhibition: Bruxelles Int'l S8mm Film/Video Festival, 1990; Edison Media Arts Consortium, NJ, 1991; LA Filmforum, 1991.
1990, 16mm, b&w/so, 13m, $40
Orestes likes to spend his lunch hour at the Park by the Raritan River. One day he feels a strange presence during his daily promenade - as if someone or something was following him. He is not mistaken. Having walked down a different path, he had disturbed the hibernating female phantoms that haunt the River. They awaken and begin to pursue him. The leader, Electra, pursues closest and piques Orestes' interest. ... Electra desires Orestes and his mortality and continues to track him until she confronts him again at a nearby house. However, this house has been occupied by the other three Furies, who force Orestes to turn on, or rather extinguish, Electra. ... The Furies pursue and capture Orestes and order him to drown himself in the River.
THE FURIES is a modern dress reworking of Aeschylus' classical play entitled The Eumenides. THE FURIES is recounted in silent film form with ambient sounds and vocalizations punctuating a musical soundtrack. Influenced by Abel Gance's three-screen Napoleon, Don Siegal's The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies and Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Immortal One, THE FURIES transforms these literary and cinematic threads into a modern parable.
1997, 16mm, b&w/so, 26m, $80