"Stiglicz relies entirely on abstract vision in his ROSE .... A narrator plumbs the emotional echoes of nighttime in this theology of light." - New City, Chicago
Meditating upon flesh, longing, ghosts, disease, love, and the figure of the Mother, the voice of the narrator strives to draw pulsating and highly abstracted hieroglyphs and mutating fields of color into a poet's zone of emotion and embodiment.
Exhibition: Ann Arbor Film Festival and Tour, 1991
1990, 16mm, color/so, 8.5m, $25
A narrator shares the tale of Zeus' angry splitting of the original form of human bodies into two pieces, and the subsequent search of each lover for its soulmate. Set against a "Soul Space" (abstracted opticals of animal flesh and eyes in extreme closeup) and against vibrant, hi-con, color negative imagery of a Gay Pride procession (Chicago, 1990), the speech of Aristophanes (from Plato's Symposium) gives voice to the transcendent aspirations of all forms of love: bisexual, homosexual, and heterosexual.
Exhibition: Around the Coyote Chicago Arts Festival, 1991
1991, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
Set against images drawn from a Gay Pride procession (Chicago, 1991), the narrator's interior monologue gives voice to desire and fear in our Era of Decimation through AIDS. The voice experiences "slippages" and "displacements" from one psychic arena to another, even as the eye of the camera - and the eye of desire - strive to endure in their lyrical embrace of the subjects at hand. The narration appropriates texts from Roland Barthes and survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima in an attempt to "compare one ultimate reality to another."
Bridging the realms of documentary and visionary film, this work wishes to speak to people of all erotic and political persuasions.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $90
Images: Academy leader, coiled numbers and coiled time. A male torso originally shot in b&w, printed to produce a body of desert orange-yellow-white ... reprinted high-contrast negative to create a figure of thick, dense, indigo blue ... hands tied ... body strained ....
Dancing "under the Picasso" (Picasso's "Head of a Woman" in Chicago), a man and a woman whirl, coiled in energetic embrace. Clusters of bodies - a male horde - move in slowed time, red-blood-brown, veiled by vertical currents of dark water.
Texts: Fragments from Camus from A Happy Death: "... hungry for love ... eager for pleasure .... How long had he craved a woman's love .... The gods who burned within him cast him into the sea ...." Fragments from Sartre's Nausea: "... variations on existence ..." tunnel through, invade and seep into Camus' meditations.
"Stiglicz's works invest formalist traditions with a new and erotic urgency." - Chicago Filmmakers
Exhibition: Gallery 2, Chicago; National Poetry Association Poetry, Film and Videopoem Festival, SF; CEPA Gallery, Buffalo; Chicago Filmmakers, 1992.
1992, 16mm, color/so, 7.5m, $20
SCULPTED undermines (and mines under) the structure of language to enter the irrational quest of a man for the beauty of a woman. Looking (down?) upon a rectangle of warm light (a bed? canvas? mirror? window? peephole?), the narrator makes a definite pronouncement at one point: "I won't show you her beauty, her vulva." SCULPTED is a heterosexual meditation set against the primal zone of male bonding. Textual fragments drawn from works by Sartre, Beckett, Rimbaud.
Exhibition: Gallery 2, Chicago; Chicago Filmmakers, 1992.
1992, 16mm, color/so, 7.5m, $20
Five films by Jack Stiglicz: ROSE OF THE NIGHT, ARISTOPHANES ON BROADWAY, VOICES IN THE CHORA, COILED and SCULPTED
See descriptions above.
1990-1992, 16mm, color/so, 60m, $135