In a way my life as a filmmaker began in 1955 when I received a Bolex camera. At the time I was an art student at the Pratt Institute. They had no film courses, so the Bolex was my introduction to filmmaking. It used 8mm film, which was really 16mm film. ...
Over the next forty years, I went from the hand-wind Bolex to another hand-wind camera, the Bell and Howell 70E; then an Auricon; then an Arriflex S and BL.
By necessity my first films were shot without sound. Sound was added in post production: MEET ME, JESUS (1966) and A LION'S TALE (1968). An exception was THE TASMANIAN DEVIL (1965) a cinema verite style documentary about a dragster automobile and its builders, shot with an Auricon and Nagra.
Then came the five-part OOBIELAND series. It started as an exercise for a production class I was teaching at Columbia University. ... We used outdated color stock from CBS. ... [It] became the basis for parts one and two of OOBIELAND: INTRODUCTION TO OOBIELAND (1969) and UBI ESTERAM OOBIAE? (1969). They toured Europe as part of a Museum of Modern Art program.
In 1969 I moved to Vermont. My films got longer, more controlled and slower-paced. They had a narrative, though minimal. They required actors, a crew, and sync sound. At one of MoMA's Cineprobes devoted to my work, I was introduced as an experimental narrative filmmaker, I believe based on the style of the Vermont films ....
For the past few years I've been working with the computer and video: BIRDS 2/93 (1993); A WARM DAY COMES AFTER A LONG WINTER (1995); RELATIVES IN X, Y, AND Z (1996); and THE WINDOW (1997). It seems as if I'm back to the OOBIELAND days: drawing on film, but now the computer screen; and experimenting with the possibilities.
Using the cinema verite technique, this is a personal documentary about the roadster automobile (the Tasmanian Devil) built for drag racing, and the men who built and raced it to a world record in the AA/A class.
1964, 16mm, b&w/so, 20m, $60
The theme is apparently the birth and growth of civilization, its ultimate destruction and rebirth; however, MEET ME, JESUS is actually about loss: the loss of innocence, dignity and hope. The film's final irony is our usual compensation: "If these wings should fail me Lord, meet me with another pair." MEET ME, JESUS is a compilation film using found footage as well as original material and hand painting on film.
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1967; Gate Theatre, NY, 1967; Wellesley College Film Festival, 1968.
1966, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
A film about a daydreaming young man in pursuit of the elusive woman of his dreams, where the dreamer is continually thwarted by the intrusion of the filmmaker's own tricks.
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1968; SF Int'l Film Festival, 1968.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 13m, $40
Using hand-painted film, animation and an inventive soundtrack, INTRODUCTION TO OOBIELAND is an exploration of gateways: a repeated series of movements from the familiar and safe to the unknown and dangerous. Cycles are left incomplete. Chases are never consummated; the day ends with no promise of rebirth. In this way the film touches on our oldest instincts, leaving us saddened and scared by the knowledge of a world that will never know freedom through the completion of action; safety through the sanctification of place.
Awards and Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1969; Third Prize, Harvard University Experimental Film Festival, 1969; Foothill College Experimental Film Festival, 1969; Ann Arbor Film Festival and Tour, 1970.
1969, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
The Princess of Oobieland is interviewed in a television studio in New York City. Her responses, sometimes only barely discernible over the whir and clang of obscure machinery, are testimony to the closing of those gateways which we encountered in PART ONE.
Awards and Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1969, selected to tour Europe with a program of US experimental films; Underground Cinema 16 Tour, 1970.
Collection: Museum of Modern Art, NY
1969, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
Someone attempts to find Oobieland. The realm of artificial sound encountered in PART ONE is left behind; there is a terrible silence. The television studio of PART TWO is left behind; big trees and snow populate the visible world. Somewhere a boundary is crossed; the viewer is caught up in a cycle of meetings with strange inhabitants of that short space of time we call winter solstice. Awards and Exhibition: First Prize, Midwest Film Festival, 1971; Second Prize, Monterey
Experimental Film Festival, 1971; Fourth Prize, Hawaiian Int'l Film Festival, 1972; Athens, Greece Film Society, 1973; Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, 1974.
1971, 16mm, color/so, 35m, $105
In the kitchen of a Vermont farmhouse four people come to sit around a table. The silence of solstice holds them together. Before a ritualized meal they each tell a story. Their stories are ominous, yet, as in PART ONE, they are incomplete. Earlier, the Terrible Mother has passed on her powers to a young woman. At the close of the film this young woman enters the farmhouse and with final simplicity restores the old order.
Awards and Exhibition: First Prize, Midwest Film Festival, 1972; First Prize, Monterey Experimental Film Festival, 1972; First Prize, Bellevue Arts Film Festival, 1973; Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, 1974.
1972, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $80
In EPILOGUE TO OOBIELAND there is a return to the hand-painting technique used in PART ONE. An animated lion roars three times and appears to end the OOBIELAND cycle.
Exhibition: Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, 1974
1974, 16mm, color/so, 1m, $20
Special Package:
All five OOBIELAND films can be rented together for the price of $125.
The search after truth (or what appears to be truth) can be an adventure. Within this film, the adventure takes the form of interviews that attempt to discover the physical and moral make-up of a young man who has just been drafted into the army. It is the time of the Vietnam War. The form of the film is complex, weaving together a narrative about a fictional character seen in the film through photographs, and documentary material of people who discuss the character, believing he and his situation are real.
"From the several films I have seen (particularly SOLSTICE and THE TERRIBLE MOTHER), Walter Ungerer comes across to me as an extraordinarily gifted, enigmatic, individual film-artist, with a final visual compositional sense, a mature intellectual literary component, a sure control of his medium, and an uncanny knack of investing the most ordinary setting and circumstances with a more than natural reality in the service of saying something subtle but important about human life." - Edgar Daniels, Filmmakers Newsletter
1971, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 66m, $200
A man meets a woman at a deserted railroad station somewhere in northern New England. It is the middle of winter; snow is falling. The two drive to a remote farmhouse. Two strange children, who never speak, appear at the window; an old woman calls them away. First isolation, then alienation, overcome the couple. The woman has a dream, then disappears. Nothing is explained. Only footprints remain in the snow that covers the supernatural landscape. THE ANIMAL is a film about unutterable loss, fate and the unknowable.
Awards and Exhibition: Golden Athena (Best Feature Film), Athens Int'l Film Festival, 1977; Tours Film Festival, 1978; Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1978; Florence Int'l Film Festival, 1979; Hong Kong Film Culture Center, 1982, retrospective showing of American independent films; Atlantic Int'l Film Festival, 1983.
1976, 16mm, color/so, 75m, $250
A sensuous woman, an angry artist, a mysterious puppet maker, suspicious townspeople, mischievous kids; these are the characters in THE HOUSE WITHOUT STEPS. The setting is contemporary Vermont, but it is Walter Ungerer's Vermont; the landscape, though beautiful and tranquil, is charged with an ominousness familiar to Ungerer films. Everything takes on a greater importance; time loses its boundaries. Through Ungerer's vision, people are transformed into inhabitants of a world that is at once ordinary and strange.
Awards and Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, 1981; Athens Int'l Film Festival, 1981; WDR/West German Television, Cologne.
1979, 16mm, color/so, 90m, $270
THE WINTER THERE WAS VERY LITTLE SNOW is a visual mood poem using the barest narrative form to convey the feeling and time of crisis for a man in middle age. His marriage has collapsed, he is without a job, and his father has died. There is no reality; only an indistinguishable mixture of images and moments drawn from some space in time that could be his past, his present, or his future. THE WINTER is a document of a man's struggle to understand the meaning of his existence as he comes to the realization of his own mortality.
Awards and Exhibition: Merit Award, Athens Int'l Film Festival, 1983; Critics' Choice Award, Atlantic Film and Video Festival, 1983; Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1983; Bronze Award, Houston Int'l Film Festival, 1984.
1982, 16mm, color/so, 75m, $250
This documentary chronicles the September 11 th attack on the NYC World Trade Center. It features a series of interviews filmed in Vermont (Ungerer at the time was living and working in Vermont) of responses to the disaster that have not been widely heard in mainstream media. The film explores issues that center around the tragedy: root causes of the attack, the meaning of patriotism, the use of American military force to protect US corporate interests in the Middle East, how America and US Government policies are perceived abroad, and the role of the media throughout the crisis.
Included is footage recorded at Ground Zero shortly after the attack and again several months later.
DVD Sale, 2003, 79 minutes, $20.00 home use; $220.00 institutional use
A film that defies categorization, Down The Road is at once an experimental film and also a documentary. It illuminates three dreadful years in filmmaker Walter Ungerer's own life, the shocking and painful end to a seventeen-year marriage. Pain and pathos is depicted in other people's lives as well: the onset of Parkinson's disease for a friend, and the loss of a husband from diabetes for a grieving, despairing wife.
Interwoven are clips from Ungerer's films along with footage of his former wife and daughter during a more blissful time.
Using computer software, visual delineations that make people and objects recognizable, are blurred and obscured. Figures dissolve into other figures, leaving only shadows. What is real, and what is a dream? What is the past and what is the present? Where is the future?
The film is a journey about mortality we all face.
DVD Sale, 2005, 94 minutes, $25.00 home use; $225.00 institutional use
This is a collection of four of Ungerer's 16mm works created between 1965 and 1973: Meet Me, Jesus; Introduction to Oobieland (Part One); Ubi Est Terram Oobiae? (Part Two), and Solstice (Part Three). See film descriptions above.
2005, DVD, 61m, $20 home; $220 institutional use
Walter Ungerer is known for his feature length narrative works of the ‘70s and ‘80s such as The Animal and The Winter There Was Very Little Snow; and his more recent computer generated films, Kingsbury Beach and Untitled 2.1 . This collection covers the timeframe when he began working with the Amiga computer, Deluxe Paint and Brilliance software to when he moved to the Macintosh G4 with Photoshop, After Effects, Boris FX and the Media 100; roughly from 1993 to 2002.
BIRDS-2/93
Using the Amiga computer a world is created of poetic imagery: animated birds flying about a lone human figure pondering his existence.
1993, 1:58 minutes
THE WINDOW
An interior space is described as a cell of confinement from the outside world. Only a window offers escape. This is another Amiga computer generated film.
1997, 3:54 minutes
DON'T MIND THE MAN WITH THE CAMERA
Five individuals are asked questions about where they live and where they would like to live. In the process of giving answers more is revealed about each of them. They are from Brazil, Czech Republic, Greece, New York City, and Vermont.
2001, 24:28 minutes
KINGSBURY BEACH
Digital stills and video footage of a child on a beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts are manipulated and obscured to create a nostalgic atmosphere of remembrances. The Amiga computer has now been replaced by the Macintosh. The editing program is the Media 100.
1999, 6:21 minutes
UNTITLED 2.1
Abstract and recognizable images flow together in conflict and harmony with contrapuntal music effects to create a confrontational atmosphere ending in resolution.
2001, 9:40 minutes
THE AWAKENING
The film parallels the short treatise The Awakening of Faith by Asvaghosha which provides a comprehensive summary of the essentials of Mahayana Buddhism. That treatise discusses the question of how man can transcend his finite state and participate in the life of the infinite while still remaining in the midst of the phenome
2002, 9:45 minutes
2005, DVD, color/so, 61m, $20 home; $220 institutional use
VOLUME ONE includes:
THE TASMANIAN DEVIL (1965)
MEET ME, JESUS (1966)
A LION'S TALE (1968)
THE MAN WITH THE UMBRELLA (1973)
I ANNA, I THREE (1989)
EIN SONNIGE UND RUHIGE LAGE (1991)
This is a collection of early experimental shorts shot on 16mm film except I, ANNA, I THREE, which was shot on 3/4 inch Umatic SP, and EIN SONNIGE UND RUHIGE LAGE, shot on VHS. THE TASMANIAN DEVIL is a documentary about the auto drag racing team of George Snizek and Charlie Dodge from Oceanside, Long Island, New York.
VOLUME TWO includes:
BIRDS 2/93 (1993)
ANNA'S AMAZING MOVING ANIMALS (1994)
A WARM DAY COMES AFTER A COLD WINTER (1995)
RELATIVES IN X, Y & Z (1996)
THE WINDOW (1997)
ONCE A YEAR FOR SEVEN DAYS (1998)
LUNCH WITH CLARA (1998)
DON'T MIND THE MAN WITH THE CAMERA
This is a collection of more recent experimental shorts all shot on VHS, Mini-DV or created in the computer; where they were edited and manipulated with various computer software programs.
VOLUME THREE includes:
UNTITLED 2.1.2 (2002)
THE AWAKENING (2002)
LESLEY'S SONG (2003)
91 LE GRAND (2005)
These are four films using vastly different styles. Untitled 2.1.2 uses abstract, hardly recognizable shapes and colors to create a person's emotions as they experience tension and chaos. THE AWAKENING is shot in a straightforward almost documentary style to convey a person's spiritual birth. LESLEY'S SONG mixes direct recording with fractured, contorted computer altered imagery. 91 Le Grand is a time-lapse recording from dawn to evening over several months of a winter, as seen from the interior of Ungerer's home.
VOLUME FOUR includes:
RANDOM BITS OF UNKNOWN SIGNIFICANCE (2007)
A WEEK IN NORTHERN GERMANY (2007)
These are two films shot with an inexpensive digital still camera capable of shooting shot video bursts. The inobtrusiveness of the camera afforded Ungerer the opportunity to record unguarded moments in people's lives, while he was on a trip to England, Germany, and Switzerland in 2006. The result was RANDOM BITS OF UNKNOWN SIGNIFICANCE. Using the same camera, A WEEK IN NORTHERN GERMANY was shot in November of the following year while Ungerer was touring northern Germany doing film presentations.
1965-2007, DVD Sale $20 Home use, Institutional use, please inquire.