My work ranges from abstract hand-manipulated pieces to work that recontextualizes found footage, to films that involve written texts. Each film attempts to investigate new terrain, and avoids being confined by a specific look or mood. I like to work the surface of film to create rich visuals which I shape in a very intuitive, personal way. Since I started making films in 1983 I've always gone back to painting, bleaching a marking frames one by one; I'm exhilarated by this tactile relationship with film material. I like the way these abstract films (WINTERWHEAT, ECHO ANTHEM, MISSING SOMETHING SOMEWHERE, BLUE MOVIE, SWEEP) allow the viewer to be drawn into unfamiliar worlds.
Other films (LILTING TOWARDS CHAOS, EXCURSIONS, WHY LIVE HERE?) paint portraits of characters wrestling with their alienation from place. These films juxtapose narration and imagery so that the viewer is challenged to pick up the pieces. The films flutter between states, combining elements of fiction writing, diary, travelogue, landscape photography and documentary.
My interests in filmmaking are restless and peripatetic. I've made films about the American flag, soft-core pornography, a Brooklyn walk, a trip to Mexico, abstract shapes on black leader, and day-to-day life in Tampa, Florida. Each new project sends me spinning in a new direction. Because I reject the constraints of traditional production values and develop my own process for each new film, any subject seems possible.
"... confronting notions of home and community in an age of unprecedented transience and instability." - SF Cinematheque
"... a cartographer of interior landscapes forged from film chemistry, optically-printed materials, documentary/diary footage and journal entries." - LA Filmforum "Provocative ... engaging ... Street leaves us with the very real sense that you take your possibilities and limitations with you wherever you go." - The Los Angeles Times
Mark Street's website: http://www.hi-beam.net/mkr/ms/ms-bio.html
A visually chaotic manipulation of film emulsion.
1983, 16mm, b&w/so, 4m, $20
A diary film with a confessional edge, shot in upstate New York.
Exhibition: KQED-TV, SF, 1989
1985, 16mm, color/so, 12m, $35
1985, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
The continuation of a chronicle of a journey to Alaska.
1985, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $20
The last of a trilogy of films chronicling a journey to Alaska.
1985, 16mm, b&w/so, 4m, $20
An abstract study of color and sound made by painting film.
Exhibition: PS 122, NY, 1988
1986, 16mm, color/so, 9m, $30
An alternately meditative and chaotic portrait of San Francisco's Mission District.
Exhibition: Collective for Living Cinema, NY, 1988
1988, 16mm, color/so, 18m, $55
WINTERWHEAT was made by bleaching, scratching and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about the farming cycle. I wanted to manipulate the found footage to create lulling, hypnotic visuals while also suggesting an apocalyptic narrative. Though the images can be viewed purely for their graphic idiosyncracy, a quiet but persistent theme of destruction winds its way through the film.
"Street plays the images in a variety of ways, stating, varying and altering his theme with a symphonic sense of invention." - Calvin Ahlgren, San Francisco Chronicle
Awards: SF Int'l Film Festival, 1990
Exhibition: SF Cinematheque, 1989; Denver Int'l Film Festival, 1989; Film Arts Foundation,
1989; US Film Festival, Park City, Utah, 1990.
1989, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
FRACTIOUS ARRAY was made by painting and bleaching a variety of film and print stocks. The film deals with issues of control and manipulation as they relate to abstract imagery.
1990, 16mm, color/si, 7m, $20
LILTING TOWARDS CHAOS is a chronicle of a three-year period of my life. The film attempts to capture the disgust one can feel at being solipsistic and self-involved, but also hints at the good that can come out of such introspection. The film delves into my thoughts about my particular emotional situation, but also shows my attempts to deal with the world outside, if only on a visual level. LILTING TOWARDS CHAOS invites the viewer to examine what I have chosen to show him/her about my life at that time, and determine which musings are honest and useful, and which are circuitous and self-defeating.
1990, 16mm, color/so, 21m, $60
Using hand-manipulated images, ECHO ANTHEM attempts to uncover the underbelly of jingoism in 1991 America, and show its destructive conclusion. In a perverse twist, the film invites the viewer to be at once soothed and repulsed by the seething display of the flag and what it leads to.
The film establishes a tension between visual beauty and narrative and thematic concerns. ECHO ANTHEM is made up of three sections, each suggesting the same sequence of events. The viewer is challenged to fluctuate between states - from being engulfed by the visuals to being concerned about the narrative particulars and thematic possibilities.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
MISSING SOMETHING SOMEWHERE is a textured celebration of that which can't be apprehended, battened down or burdened with specific meaning. Three visual chapters appear, each with its own rhythm, each suggesting a different sense of place. Snatches of narrative and fragments of memories brush up against each other, separate and fuse as truncated images burst into being and then disappear again just as quickly.
1992, 16mm, color/so,17m, $50
A smattering of repeated performances culled from old porno films and hand-painted. A man bends over a body, but what we really notice is the wall behind him. A woman stares back at the viewer with annoyance. On the soundtrack Ana�s Nin declares: "but while I'm doing this I feel I'm not living."
1994, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $25
In EXCURSIONS, a cast of characters sift through their experiences as travellers in Mexico and Guatemala. A woman's relationship sours in the face of paradise. Two men beg a Mexican woman to sing for their tape recorder. A filmmaker wrestles with self-consciousness. A character from Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano fights off delerium tremens. Their voices mingle to inform film footage shot in the area and reworked on an optical printer. "Real" journal entries mix with faux diaries, sound recorded by travellers on location, and excerpts from a novel to explore the boundary between travel and imperialism.
1994, 16mm, color/so, 26m, $75
WHY LIVE HERE? explores three characters' reaction to their environments - San Francisco, Florida and Montana. In the film each character develops a particular relationship to place. One moves back to Montana to help with a family business, another moves to SF for the cultural climate, and a third moves to Tampa, Florida for a temporary job. All wonder why they are where they are, and what they might be missing elsewhere. Through the musings of the three characters, the film considers notions of home and community in an age when people move all over for all reasons.
"... confronting notions of home and community in an age of unprecedented transience and instabilty." - San Francisco Cinematheque
"... a cartographer of interior landscapes forged from film chemistry, optically-printed materials, documentary/ diary footage and journal entries." - LA Filmforum
"Provocative ... engaging ... Street leaves us with the very real sense that you take your possibilities and limitations with you wherever you go." - The Los Angeles Times
1996, 16mm, color/so, 50m, $135
A day like any other: Brooklyn beckons so they dart out into it. Daughter and father traipse from playground to subway and back home again. The 18-month-old cackles and the 32-year-old tries his best to keep up. They stumble upon a fruit vendor, a street preacher and a wall of city sound. Negative and positive hand-manipulated images collide and shimmer as they walk and talk their way through spring in the city. Maya babbles but her father is mostly silent: he can't believe that he'll never meander this way again.
1998, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $25
A stab at depicting fatherhood: fleeting images burst onto the screen only to recede from view just as quickly, suggesting transition and decay. Tendrils of images cluster together and then dissipate. A snowy walk, kids on a lawn, a boat ride... my daughters flutter around me; their activities enthuse and infuse my own daily rhythms, affording great joy but also making it clear that all things change all the time.
2000, 35mm color/si, 7m, $20
16mm (reduction print), color/si, 7m, $20
Images shot on walks in the forest with an old, twisted 35mm camera. The film trudged through the camera, on a last mission. I buried the film in the front yard. Let the dirt on the film kiss the dirt in the ground. Maryland humidity wore it down to its wisps. Much later, sound recorded in Brooklyn. Teenage skateboarders smoking cigarettes and jumping off the steps at my local subway entrance. A Russian festival in the park, much singing and speechmaking, all incomprehensible to me. The schism between the country and city, so clear at last.
2002 35mm, 5 minutes, color/sound $25
An homage to two ramshackle cities, made up of hand processed footage shot while wandering. I meander city streets with a camera, looking to be haunted by unfamiliar vistas. I find solace in the forgotten landscapes, odd voices on a ham radio, shimmering water in a desolate harbor. Later I attack the film, moving this way and that, trying to squeeze it against its will, wrest strangeness from the everyday.
2004, DVD, 7 minutes, color, sound $25 Home Use; $50 Institutions
Director, Producer, Editor: Mark Street Cinematographer: Andrew Black
In Rockaway, three teenage girls from Queens celebrate their last night of high school on the edge of New York, where the city meets the sand. Their wild stabs at adulthood confuse and haunt them as they struggle to define themselves in the face of a future they can’t imagine. Rockaway shows the last vestige of a fleeting adolescence caught between suburb and city.
“Combining elements of fearless childhood with the sadness of moving on, Rockaway combines unique monologues and flashbacks with outer-city scenery and abandoned architecture to create a sweet and powerful look into the future of narrative cinema.” —Ron Wilkinson Monsters and Critics.com
Read the Monsters and Critics Review
Read the thirteen.org Review
Tribeca Film Festival, 2005; Rooftop Films, NYC 2005; Long Island Film Festival, 2005.
DVD, 2005, 75 minutes $50 Home Use, $100 Institutions