Leighton Pierce has made over 30 short impressionistic/experimental documentaries exploring the margins of memory and perception and the filmic construction of space and time. Many of his recent works focus on unsentimental close views of small events in domestic space. While always concentrating on the subtleties of sound/image relationships, these films are also visually unique as reflected in the cinematography awards these films have won.
Before concentrating on film and video, Pierce studied music composition (musique concrete, and jazz). Many compositional tendencies still influence his production process. Parallel to that, he also worked as a ceramist and a sculptor. Most of these films (since 1985) were made while he has been employed as Professor of Film and Video Production at the University of Iowa.
Every one of Leighton Pierce's films and videos listed in Canyon are festival award winners. For example, his two most recent films, GLASS and 50 FEET OF STRING won Best Cinematography and Best of the Fest respectively at the Ann Arbor Film Festival as well as top awards at Black Maria, Athens, Atlanta, and other national and international screenings. His work has also been screened and/or won awards at Oberhausen, Edinburgh, Marin County, New York Expo, Cinema du Reel, Hong Kong, European Media Arts Festival, Impakt and many other festivals. Retrospectives of his work have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive, Chicago Filmmakers and the San Francisco Cinematheque.
A film about editing, rhythm and a bit about character.
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival
Exhibition: Oberhausen Film Festival; Belgrade Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival and Tour; NY Filmmakers' Exposition; Athens Film Festival; Bellevue Film Festival.
1980, 16mm, color/so, 3.5m, $20
A character study showing the dissolution of the character's sense of self. The structure is based loosely on a pantoum structure in poetry.
Awards: Cash Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Merit Award, Athens Film Festival.
Exhibition: NY Filmmakers' Exposition
1981, 16mm, color/so, 3.5m, $20
A bank robbery repeats several times, each time within a different context and from a different point of view. Is there a double-cross? Why are the passersby so calm? The audience must reconstruct the event and assume the role of detective in this mystery of narrative space.
Awards: Award for Creative Excellence, Atlanta/Image Festival, 1984; Best of Expo, NY Filmmakers' Exposition, 1983; Cash Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1985; Cash Award, Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival, 1983; Cash Award, Bucks County Film Festival, 1983.
1982, 16mm, color/so, 7.5m, $20
Awards: Athens Film Festival; SF Art Institute Film Festival; Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; Finger Lakes Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival.
1983, 16mm, color/so, 3.5m, $20
Taking place in a laundromat, this film is an exploration of territoriality, paranoia and voyeurism. The space itself exerts an oppressive force on the characters as they strive to define and maintain their individual semi-private spaces in an essentially public place. The watched and the watcher are constantly shifting roles in a "hand-off" of the point of view.
Exhibition: Ann Arbor Tour, 1984
1984, 16mm, color/so, 6.5m, $20
The old man circles outside, looking for water with a dousing rod; the young woman circles inside, moving through a labyrinth-like house, dimly lit, all rooms connecting. Sometimes she is a narrator, existing both outside the film space and within it. The premise for this film is based on the conflict between what is inside and what is outside. It is an exploration of the windows between imagination and reality. The woman is looking for something; the old man thinks he knows what it is.
"A brilliant film." - R.W. Rowley, Athens Film Festival juror
"Images never what they seem, and always more than that ... a unique and powerful vision." - Karen Nulf, Athens Film Festival juror
Awards: Athens Film Festival, 1985; Bucks County Film Festival, 1984.
Exhibition: Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1985; NY Filmmakers' Exposition, 1985.
1984, 16mm, color/so, 14.5m, $45
A film about subjective experience. This film should be viewed as one would look at a painting or listen to a symphony. A dynamically quiet mood is created by the interplay between the densely structured sound track and complex figure/ground relationships in the images. The subjective point of view of a porch swing through a partially opened door is the image to which we constantly return as the tonic, the drone that is always present but not always perceived.
Awards: Atlanta/Image Film Festival, 1987; Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival, 1987.
Exhibition: Humboldt Film Festival, 1987; Athens Film Festival, 1987.
1986, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
An elegy, this is a poetic film about the dissolution of memory - not as concrete recall of the past, but as a reconstruction and recontextualization of a fading image that is transformed through time. Awards: Honorable Mention, Baltimore Film Festival; Best Art/Experimental, Bucks County Film Festival. Exhibition: "Independent Focus," WNET; Experi-88, Bonn; Athens Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Humboldt Film Festival.
1988, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
An impressionistic documentary on the small town cafes in the rural Midwest. While the cafes function as a focal point for many aspects of the rural subculture, they also reveal the limits and somewhat closed nature of that culture.
Awards: Oberhausen, Atlanta, Athens, Sinking Creek and Bucks County film festivals.
1989, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
Shot between 11:00 and 1:00 over a series of Thursdays while my infant son slept, this piece has something to do with the sensory pleasure of momentary solitude in a domestic setting.
Awards: Cash Award, Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; Cash Award, Athens Film Festival.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 4.5m, $20
Part 1: If With Those Eyes and Ears
Part 2: No Green at Ease in the Margins
Part 3: Principles of Harmonic Motion and Epilogue - White Picket Fence
While not addressing the issue in a very overt manner, this piece has something to do with the thrilling and "awful" process of actively engaging in perception and how we oscillate between forgetting and remembering that activeness as we age. In PRINCIPLES OF HARMONIC MOTION, I take a painterly approach to the image and rely on a subtle but carefully composed stereo soundtrack to amplify the sense of physical and psychological space. The images, sounds and structure are sometimes somewhat abstract while preserving a strong grounding in representation. Before the entire piece was finished I released parts 1 and 2 separately.
Awards and Exhibition: Independent Focus, WNET; Infermental; Cash Award, Athens Film Festival; Cash Award, Great Lakes Film Festival; Osnabrück Media Arts Festival; Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Cash Award, Humboldt Film Festival; Cash Award, Charlotte Film Festival; Cash Award, Sinking Creek Film Festival.
1991, VHS, color/so, 22m, $50 Home; $150 Other
All aspects by Leighton Pierce.
A narrow angle of a view, closely watched, on the Fourth of July.
RED SHOVEL is an impressionistic documentary focussing on a few moments in a small town along the coast of Maine on the Fourth of July (American Independence Day). The approach to image is very painterly with the simple view transformed "with Turneresque luminosity." Most of the unusual visual effect is from the careful use of a shallow depth of field and natural objects (blowing grass, bushes, etc.) to bend and twist the images into a languid sense of time. In the end the film documents a state of mind more than a particular spot. It also resonates with the ambiguous metaphoric threat of a national symbol impinging upon the child's toy.
Awards: Cash Award, Bucks County Film Festival, 1992; Kodak Cinematography Award, Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival, 1993; Juror's Award, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1993; Humboldt Film Festival; Cash Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival; MediaWave, Gy�r, Hungary, 1993; AVE Festival, The Netherlands, 1993; Osnabrück Media Arts Festival, 1993; Impakt Film Festival; First Place, Marin Film Festival, 1994.
Exhibition: American Museum of the Moving Image; National Gallery of Art; Robert Flaherty Film Seminar; included in Grey Suit #6 (a video art magazine).
1992, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
All aspects by Leighton Pierce.
An impressionistic painterly study of the work/play involved in learning simple things.
Awards: Humboldt Film Festival, 1994; Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival, 1994; Od Peculiar Cash Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1994; Juror's Award, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1994.
1993, 16mm, color/so, 4.5m, $20
All aspects by Leighton Pierce.
This is a film consisting of 12 sections all dealing in some ways with the slow and subtle repeated rhythms of daily life. The approach is highly painterly and impressionistic. The pace is slow with the intention of inviting viewers (those willing to go) into a more visceral and less verbally analytical state of mind. The "action," small events like the mail arriving, the storm coming, and the grass getting mowed, are secondary to the way of perceiving those events. In many ways this film reaches back into a kind of personal memory one might recall from early childhood.
Awards: Best of Fest, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1996; Best Experimental, Atlanta Film and Video Festival, 1996; Co-Best Experimental, Athens Film Festival, 1996; Juror's Citation, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1996.
Exhibition: Oberhausen Short Film Festival; Osnabrück Media Arts Festival; Image Forum, Japan; Impakt Film Festival; Robert Flaherty Film Seminar; Museum of Modern Art, NY.
1995, 16mm, color/so, 52m, $135
VHS Sale: $40 Home; $200 Other
All aspects by Leighton Pierce.
The partly diaristic, partly poetic pieces are the first three completed segments in a long series of films and videos. They all tend toward the meditative in their exploration of water as a perceptual nodal point in daily life.
1997, VHS, color/so, 9.5m, $35 Home; $100 Other
All aspects by Leighton Pierce.
A not-so-still life in the backyard with children, water, fire and a few other basic elements. This is another contemplative painterly piece in Leighton Pierce's on-going "Memories of Water" series. While the ultimate effect is intended to be poetic (and maybe even transformative), it is simultaneously a study in the laws of optics - an exploration of refraction, diffraction, diffusion, reflection and absorption.
"A window pane is a paradox of sorts, as it unifies two opposing functions. On the one hand it separates the 'inside' from the 'outside' while the two spaces still remain visually connected. Glass, like water, can also flow, and both substances also share the qualities of transparency, refraction, and reflection. It is in this last quality that 'inside' and 'outside' can merge into one image. The accompanying crystal clear soundtrack, which ranges from a groaning swing to a crackling fire, very effectively contrasts the diffuse qualities of GLASS." - from the Impakt Festival Catalogue 1998, Utrecht, The Netherlands
1998, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $25
VHS Sale: $35 Home; $75 Other
On the Road Going Through and You Can Drive the Big Rigs
While interweaving complex images, a dense stereo soundtrack and brief interviews with local people, ON THE ROAD GOING THROUGH is designed to provide a portrait of a fragment of rural life in Iowa. With traffic on the road functioning as the drone, ON THE ROAD GOING THROUGH creates a meditative, impressionistic view of a composite small town in Iowa. While actually shot in many towns, the tape implies a unified single town that is, after all, consistent with the subjects' shared concerns. The people talk about kids, dogs, traffic and storms as traffic repeatedly passes by in the background.
Awards and Exhibition: Independent Focus, WNET; Second Place, Marin Film Festival; Director's Choice, Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; Director's Choice, Black Maria Film and Video Festival; BACA; NO-TV.
1987-1989, VHS, color/so, 30m, $50 Home; $150 Other
A collection of five films including: THURSDAY, WHAT'S LEFT IS WIND, RED SWING, AND SOMETIMES THE BOATS ARE LOW and HE LIKES TO CHOP DOWN TREES
See film descriptions above.
1980-1991, VHS, color/so, 25m, $50 Home; $150 Other