Jeffrey Skoller has been working as a filmmaker, writer, media activist and teacher since the 1980s. His works in both film and video explore a wide range of forms and concerns from essayistic investigations of third-world revolution and Jewish masculinity to experiments in the adaptation of literature to film. His films have shown widely in the US, Europe and Latin America and he has received a number of grants including NEA national and regional fellowships.
Believing that filmmakers must work politically as well as aesthetically to insure a vital experimental film community, Skoller has been an outspoken media activist and advocate for all manner of experimental media. He has served on the boards of Canyon Cinema and the San Francisco Cinematheque, as well as being a founding member of XChange TV, a network that distributed media made in Central America, and the X-Factor, a Bay Area experimental media advocacy group. He writes frequently on experimental film and has published articles in Cinematograph, Film Quarterly, Afterimage, Discourse among others. Skoller currently teaches film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
MOVING IN begins as a documentary on the growing problem of homelessness in San Francisco in the wake of Reagan-era budget cuts and ends as a meditation on the filmmaker's own relationship to the situation. Having moved into a "bad" area as a middle-class artist searching for affordable living and working space, the filmmaker is confronted with his own luxury of choice about where he places himself in the world while surrounded by people who have no real choice.
The film uses the filmmaker's "liberal guilt" about his own privilege to raise questions about whether or not it is possible to represent a world that the filmmaker has had little connection to without further exploiting, sentimentalizing or reinforcing the dehumanization of people who are victims of a political system that privileges greed over equality. MOVING IN is at once a film about homelessness and a question about how that situation is represented.
1982, 16mm, b&w/so, 18m, $55
As in everyday life, TOPOGRAPHY/SURFACE WRITING is a series of events, impressions, voices, ideas, sounds, images, texts and textures. In their constant flow they become a surface upon which we always move. Like Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," from which it is loosely adapted, the main theme is violence: physical, psychological, and environmental. However, the film does not give a portrait of violence in the conventional sense of representing it as spectacle or drama and therefore separate from the everyday, nor does it attempt to analyze or aestheticize the problem. Rather, the film attempts to show how integrated violence is in the very fabric of our lives. As the title suggests, TOPOGRAPHY/SURFACE WRITING is not an essay, but rather a mapping of new possibilities for seeing and thinking through the use of cinema that is neither authoritarian nor passive, but rather a challenge.
1984, 16mm, color/so, 37m, $120
This film is a modest attempt to better understand a situation that my own country's government and media have mystified and depersonalized by reducing the representations of Nicaragua to a war zone rather than a place where people live their lives. Using the process of making the film as a starting point for my own engagement with my subject, a world so different from my own, I begin with a question: As a North American, what is my relationship to Nicaragua?
"With the camera never settling on a solid, classical composition, Skoller conveys his personal response to the reality of daily life in Nicaragua. ... In a purposefully tentative and oblique visual style, using a reflexive voice-over soundtrack, Skoller constantly questions his place as filmmaker. ... An acute political awareness informs the act of seeing in Skoller's film." - David Schwartz, Curator of the American Museum of the Moving Image
"... visually captivating ...." - The Village Voice
Exhibition: 35th Mannheim Film Festival; Latin American Film Festival, Havana; Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.
1986, 16mm, color/so, 64m, $135
Adapted from a story by Marguerite Duras.
Text Performed by JD Trow.
Cinematography by Nancy Schiesari and Jeffrey Skoller.
"THE MALADY OF DEATH is an adaptation of Marguerite Duras's story of the same name - her text comprises the voice-over - which is a particular reading of the story in which word and image, in a complex interplay, explore male sexuality. The processes of reading are revealed to be complicated, poetic and political, as an unspecified narrator names and describes 'the malady' and tells of a man and woman's sexual encounters. The male 'you' is multiplied, depicted by many men, each photographed nude, variously fragmented and abstracted, studied and distanced. The 'she' the 'difference,' is literally absent from the image but present metaphorically, 'possessed' but not known. While societal connections between possessing sexuality, economically, and by force are explored in relation to male sexuality, the implication of the act of looking permeate all these discourses. The erotic depiction of the male body for both the camera and the viewer, the displaced and disembodied representation of the woman, and the structured alternation of image and black - at times like an eye opening and closing, but also suggestive of what culturally can and cannot be imagined - create a viewer who cannot easily possess the story, but who must rather read and reread." - Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive
1994, 16mm, color/so, 43m, $135
VHS Sale: $50 Home; $150 Other