Expedition/Travel

Opus Luminis et Hominis (Works of Light and Man)

A commissioned portait of Pamplona, a small city in the North of Spain, shot and edited there in under 2 weeks. The film is a humble set of observations of place, people, atmospheres, and local rituals. (It is also a tribute to the art of film projection). As there is a large presence in the town of the conservative religious order, Opus Dei, which translates to 'Work of God,' I chose to name my film, Works of Light and Man.

-- Jem Cohen

Jem Cohen

Le Bled (Buildings in a Field)

A collaboration with writer Luc Sante made in Tangier, Morocco, a city where neither of us had ever been. En route from the airport to the city center, we found ourselves amazed by the landscape outside of the car windows; a massive construction project under way in all directions. While not in itself unusual, we were by struck dumb by the epic scale and seemingly incomprehensible plan of the development and were drawn to return together to this puzzling zone.

-- Jem Cohen

Jeanne C. Finley, John Muse

Manhole 452

Despite assurances from local municipalities, a fact of life is that Manholes blow sky high more frequently than most people realize. Manhole 452 directs the viewer’s attention to the shapes, sizes and patterns of manhole covers on Geary Street in San Francisco, and then plunges deep below into the manholes themselves to explore the hidden threat that lies below.

Daniel Eisenberg

POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg

This three-disc DVD box set contains Eisenberg's four thematically connected films - Displaced Person, Cooperation of Parts, Persistence, and Something More Than Night - made between 1981 and 2003, exploring the ongoing implications of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the relationships between the past, present and future, and how the meanings of events transform over time. The disks are accompanied by a booklet with a contextualizing essay by Scott Durham and an artist interview with Domieta Torlasco, along with titl

Daniel Eisenberg

Cooperation of Parts

The fragment contains within it an implied reference to something that was once whole. It suggests damage and violence, time and distance. These qualities I found were integral to my own constitution, and it was with the making of Cooperation Of Parts that this became clear.

“Misfortune makes and breaks you.” I have the misfortune of a history of disruptions, and the fortune of having that history to work with.

Deborah Stratman

Kuyenda N'kubvina (Walking is Dancing)

Kuyenda N’kubvina looks at how thought and culture propagate in the slender nation of Malawi. Weaving our way through video halls, book stores, dance floors and radio stations, in cities and small villages, we meet Malawians who traffic in ideas, reflecting the rhythms of Malawian contemporary life. The video was instigated by the filmmaker’s relative ignorance about the people and culture of southeast Africa, and accompanies her as she seeks out individuals and infrastructures that channel and articulate Malawian identity.

Deborah Stratman

Ray's Birds

Ray Lowden keeps seventy-two large birds of prey, five deer and some wallabies at his place in Northumberland, England. He’s had ten days off in twelve years and loves what he does. The film is a little homage to his variously coy, imperious, curious, stubborn and comic raptor menagerie.

-- Deborah Stratman

Mike Kuchar

High Rising

Rock and ice soar among the clouds.

-- Mike Kuchar

Birthday Suit with scars and defects, Lisa Steele

Radical Closure, Program 5: The Trace That Remains

How useful is personal testimony to History? The most abstract of all the works that focus on personal narrative in this program is certainly Lisa Steele’s Birthday Suit with scars and defects, in which the artist gently caresses every scar on her body, names it, dates it, and describes the circumstances in which the scar was inscribed. These are traces that defy memory, and that indeed become an alternative memory. Steele’s video presents us with an abstraction of oneself, almost a schema of the body as it becomes a register of violence.

Radical Closure, Program 4: Intensive Care

Named after Hatice Güleryüz’s haunting short film, with its disturbing yet iconic images, this program presents unsettling situations narrated with both considerable emotional investment and critical distance. In her work Intensive Care, Güleryüz films a boy’s circumcision, then tilt’s up to the boy’s silent, angelic face. In another work, The First Ones, she films a group of school children singing the national anthem; a take on nationalism made with so much love.

Dana Levy

Desert Station

In the midst of the 2011 revolution in Cairo, a few beduins listen to their car's radio near Jericho, a place which looks like the end of the world. Within moments this desolated landscape transfers into a busy tourist attraction as a bus full of Polish Pilgrims enter the landscape.

Jennifer Montgomery

Notes on the Death of Kodachrome

This piece purports to be about the discontinuation of the much-loved format, Kodachrome, and with it the further endangerment of super-8 film. But it has other agendas of reclamation and personal reckoning that are its true subject matter.

Jennifer Montgomery

Deliver

Like a generation of viewers, I was profoundly affected by Deliverance. But I have always been troubled by the hegemonic structures of gender proposed by Boorman and Dickey. Hence, my version is played by women: myself, Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, Su Friedrich, and Meredith Root, all experimental filmmakers who work as academics. While faithful to our respective male characters, we also play ourselves.

George Kuchar

HotSpell

This final weather diary travels through some rough inner and outer domains. Social interactions blend more smoothly than the clash of air masses which threaten to clobber a prairie town in a vortex of violence.

Flashbacks and flashpoints flare-up along with thunderheads that loom and boom with vibrations of doom, their every move charted with vivid vibrancy on videographic maps which detail developing devastation.

Desire and death are in the air along with some aromatic wisps of ethnic edibles, so be sure to sniff it all.

George Kuchar

The Butchered Beefcake

This video diary visits two sites that exhibited my visual works this past year, culminating at the VOLTA ART SHOW in N.Y.C., where I sold some paintings and a photograph.

The underling theme of the diary deals with some bloating, scarring and beefcake exposure while on the road to an acting gig where I'm scheduled to play a BI-SEXUAL, paraplegic in heat.

There are some in depth scenes of me working out the romance/sex routines with a young and attractive, male co-star. The all-girl crew appears to be getting off on the whole thing and I don't blame them!

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