I make films to impact people's lives in two ways. One is to tell stories that our culture excludes, or when included seek homogeneous ends. Secondly, I wish to create films that employ non-illustrative visually and aurally devices to tell these stories, thereby showing audiences that there truly are alternative modes of expression outside the corporate/Hollywood system. Don't get me wrong, I love Hollywood's excesses, its aural and visual barrages. I don't even care about all of the money Hollywood throws at films that I may find artistically or socially reprehensible. That's a business; its motive is clear and simple - profit. My motive is equally clear and simple - alternative. Rather than striving for homogeneous ends, however, I choose heterogeneous ones. Viewers of my work may relate to certain mass culture phenomena, e.g., pop music, movie plot synopses, magazine and postcard images (after all we do share a certain American culture no matter how we may try to distance ourselves from it), but my desired end is to make viewers see difference. Not all of us are alike. Sexuality, class, ethnicity divide us. Frankly, it's the ruptures, divides, and/or dissonance that interests me most. The in-between places that are so often absent from the dominant forms of enter- and infotainment.
I believe that film, and by extension video, need to be visually dynamic, socially engaged, and constantly attempting to break new ground. To be an artist in these last years of the twentieth century requires drawing from an increasing amount of sources (to the point of overwhelming) and to use, steal, appropriate and recontextualize them. MTV and advertising, however, have completely co-opted experimental. Fragmentation sells be it jeans, CDs, lifestyles, or food. To remain fresh amidst this mass co-optation and regurgitation of technique is what I see as my greatest artistic challenge as Y2K quickly approaches. My creative work over the last fifteen years stands as a response to the onslaught of our dominant culture.
Several formal ideas are at work in this film - originally a 15-foot shot of a nude figure crossing a beach. The first idea was to flatten out the film plane by stripping it of vanishing point perspective and concentrate on the two-dimensional graphic space. Next, an exploration of re-presentation - how a figure enters/exits the frame, multiple exposures, variation of the close-up/long shot, anchors (what viewers hook onto in graphic space). And lastly, allusion, most specifically homage to Muybridge and motion study - how a human walks through space. Original music composed by Heikki Koskinen is used in opposition to the figure's movement.
1983, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
Using various tonalities of a male nude, NUDE STUDY explores light, texture and graphic composition. Deconstruction of the model is explored using metric montage, mixing total body pans with extreme close-up fragments of the model.
1983, 16mm, b&w/so, 1.5m, $20
Appropriating Army found footage glorifying war games, induction and war, this film deconstructs the dominant American male mythology concerning honor, bravery, and nationalism. A critique of the continuing militaristic ideology proliferating in American society.
1984, 16mm, b&w/so, 7.5m, $25
What if an extinct civilization created a detailed document of its destruction? This question served as the organizing idea in this collage film of found images and footage shot in the eastern US. A group of survivors' testimony traces the last days of an industrial age displaced by an electronic age, a surprise ice age, and the germ warfare unleashed in its final days by the ruling class. Disjunctive, attempting to expose the ideological fallacies of our present world, the film fictionalizes one possible scenario for humanity's extinction.
1984, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 8m, $25
This work developed from a desire to mix major film categories (narrative, documentary, experimental) with aspects of my personal history and its relationship to chronological history between 1954 and 1969. The film reconstructs the past through the organizing concept of selective memory, a past constructed through found footage, rephotographed home movies, optically printed materials, static copy-stand icon photography (movie stars and rock 'n' roll performers), live action camera work, voiceover narration, and reprocessed popular music from the time period. The film operates seductively at times like the dominant narrative/documentary cinema, and alternately, through the use of rupture, becomes distancing and self-conscious. Personal history and historical events collide to deconstruct the ideological position of the period.
Awards: Best Film, Experimental Category, SF Int'l Film Festival, 1986; Palo Alto Film Festival, 1986.
1985, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 43m, $130
Moving from the tourist image to the found image, pastoral landscape to industrial landscape, the idealized object of desire to the "real," PRESENT TENSE explores obsession, desire, and consumption in the contemporary world. Centered on personal experience, the film uses the modern state to examine issues of gender, class, genocide, torture, and surveillance.
"PRESENT TENSE weaves together visual and aural contrasts of first-person narration, painting portraiture, travel diaries, and found footage, in a riveting appropriation of the filmmaker's gay identity. In the film, Walsh defines this self through the interplay of power relationships drawn from historical, personal, and cultural contexts by examining specific critical issues including physical attraction and death, militarism and annihilation, family relationships, and political community." - Jon Gartenberg, Museum of Modern Art
Awards: First Place, Experiments in Form, SF Int'l Film Festival, 1988; Grand Prize, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1987.
1987, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 27m, $80
"THE SECOND COMING is a triumphant mixture of science fiction, political agitprop, and experimental montage. In the near future, Christian fundamentalists attempt a coup d'etat in the US. Meanwhile, Carlos and Ben, two high school classmates in New York, are falling in love despite the homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic attacks of their peers. Together they join forces with an underground resistance led by teenagers who produce and broadcast videos challenging the fundamentalists .... THE SECOND COMING is a very angry, sometimes funny, and poignantly hopeful drama that will speak to your worst nightmares about the religious right." - Deborah Kaufman, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
"The revolution will be televised ... and the picture will not be pretty. The gay counterpart part to Lizzie Borden's lesbian/feminist Born in Flames, ... THE SECOND COMING shows how individuals can have an impact on a seemingly hopeless situation." - Cathy Phoenix, OUTFEST '96: The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival Exhibition: Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals in Turin, NY, Honolulu, SF, LA, Milan, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Montreal, MIX '96, Washington, DC, Hong Kong and Seoul; Big Muddy Film Festival, 1996; Chicago Underground Film Festival, 1996; and SF Jewish Film Festival, 1996.
1995, 16mm, b&w/so, 53m, $175