Black and white textural montage set to Japanese Jazz Bach. An exploration of the lyrical quality of random motion montage.
1980, 16mm, b&w/so, 4m, $25
Animated.
A combination valentine to - and trailer for an imagined biopic of Xavier Cugat set to his orchestration of La Cumparsita and featuring a vocal by Diana Shore.
Exhibition: Anthology Film Archives (in Tour of Experimental Classics); Ann Arbor Film Festival; Atlanta Film and Video Festival; Hof Film Festival; Marion County National Film Competition; Annecy Int'l Film Festival; Zagreb World Festival of Animated Film and others.
Collection: Museum of Modern Art, NY
1980, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $25
Animated.
A tango through the labyrinth of memory. An animated montage as a lyrical, non-linear approximation of the way the brain catalogs the stuff of every day life.
Awards: First Prize, Animation, Sinking Creek Film Festival; First Prize, Animation and Festival Tour, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Second Prize, Charlotte Film Festival; Second Prize, Bucks County Film Festival.
Exhibition (selected): NY Film Festival; Leipzig Film Festival; Berlin Film Festival; London Film Festival; Ottawa Film Festival; San Francisco Int'l Film Festival; Aspen Film Festival; Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Philadelphia Film Festival; Cleveland Film Festival; Virginia Festival of American Films; Hamburg No Budget Film Festival; Uppsala Film Festival; Oberhausen Film Festival; Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival.
Collection: Museum of Modern Art, NY
1992, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $30
Animated.
A rotoscoped animated montage - collage - collision film. A pre-apocalyptic subliminal narrative composed of over ten thousand paintings in a densely woven film about love, lust, life and regrets. Awards and Exhibition (selected): Second Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Festival Tour; First Prize, Marin County Film Exposition; Honorable Mention, Columbus Film Festival; Second Prize, Humboldt Film Festival; Second Prize, Big Muddy Film Festival; Silver Award, The New York Art Director's Club; Phila-film; Second Prize, Bucks County Film Festival; Golden Gate Award, SF Int'l Film Festival; Toronto, Ottawa, ASIFA and others. Telecast on Alive-TV (PBS), Canal Plus, ZDF. Exhibited (in short loops) on the Internet by Wired (On-line) Gallery.
Collection: Museum of Modern Art, NY
1994, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $35
Animated. As Producer, co-animator, camera and editing with Cecily Brown.
A celebration of sex. (Not for the kiddies.)
Has the dubious distinction of being the first film officially censored off the Internet.
Exhibition (selected): Telluride Film Festival; Honorable Mention, Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Seattle Film Festival; Leipzig, London, Hamburg and Mannheim film festivals.
1995, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $25
Animated.
A study in screen depth and bi-pack shooting. Rayograms in explosive shimmering colors. Awards and Exhibition (selected): Screened as an installation piece, Annenberg Center, Philadelphia; Knitting Factory, NY; Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Director's Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival.
1995, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $25
"Jeff Scher turns the table on his former teacher and mentor, creating an intimate dialogue between friends as well as a battle of directorial wills." - Jon Gartenberg, SF Int'l Film Festival
A portrait of Warren Sonbert.
Exhibition: NY Film Festival; SF Int'l Film Festival; Millennium, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY.
Collection: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Pacific Film Archive; Academy Film Archives.
1995, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $25
Animated.
Dancing in the street with thousands of objects picked up from the street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Filmed in delirious Black and White Hi-Con.
Exhibition: Ann Arbor Film Festival; Knitting Factory, NY; Mill Valley Film Festival; Northampton Film Festival; Sinking Creek Film Festival.
1997, 16mm, b&w/so, 7m, $30
Live Action/Animation.
A sentimental love song is revisited in psychedelichrome.
"Take whatever you got before seeing this one, kids, and you'll thank us!" - New York Underground Film Festival program
Exhibition: Premiere, Getty Museum, LA; Three Rivers Film Festival; Honolulu Underground Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; SF Int'l Film Festival; NY Underground Film Festival; Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Zagreb.
Collections: Academy Film Archives; Museum of Modern Art, NY.
1997, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $25
Music by Shay Lynch
BANG BANG is an experiment in bilateral symmetry and positive negative shooting in pursuit of color illusion in afterimage.
Premiere at the Museum of Modern Art, Ann Arbor Film Festival '99, Best Experimental Film; New York Underground Film Festival '99.
1998, 16mm, b&w/so, 4m, $50; VHS $25
While only running one minute, each trailer is constructed of ten individual films - spliced together in a mass and re-photographed on an Oxberry animation stand. The resulting film is ten films wide and forty frames long. Commissioned for the Sony Theater chain in New York.
Permanent Collection, Museum of Modern Art.
1997/98, 16mm, 2m, $40
There's no such thing as too much for the flying dog.
"The best short film about small dogs ever made." - Larry Kardish, Museum of Modern Art (purchased for Permanent Collection)
Exhibition and Award: Ann Arbor Tour, Robertisini Banana Slug Award for Surrealism; Humboldt International Film Festival, Oberhausen and others.
1998, 16mm, co/b&w/so, 5m, $40; VHS $30
Music by the Shyam Brass Band Mere Hathon Mein.
Hand painted Near East musical ecstasies. OR, a celebration of modern Turkish traffic in the former Constantinople.
Exhibition and Award; Permanent Collection Museum of Modern Art; Ann Arbor, Director's Prize, Black Maria.
1998, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $40; VHS $30
"POSTCARDS FROM WARREN pays affectionate homage to (Warren) Sonbert's globe trotting endeavors by creating an original collage from postcards that Sonbert sent to Scher over the course of their more than twenty-year friendship and collaboration. The film expands upon Sonbert's description of CARRIAGE TRADE as a 'jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects.'" - Jon Gartenberg, Guest Curator, Guggenheim Museum
Permanent Collection, Academy Film Archives, Museum of Modern Art.
1999, 16mm, color/so, 1m, $30