Poetry

Nine Gates

Wojtasik's Nine Gates explores the possibility of transcendence through sexual passion: averting the gaze from the objectification of the other, the female body or the obscure enemy, to the vast and microscopic details of the body unknown to the viewer, becoming a meditation on love beyond definition.

Stephanie Barber

Healing

The video hovers tentatively between therapy, documentary, poetics and mystic traipsery and ends, like all good things, in surrender to song. There is a challenge presented (the challenge to engage earnestly with the piece as it requests) to fall into the breathing and pacing presented, and the challenge to view the video as a discrete piece of art at the same time. The piece relies heavily on the text, the disembodied Virgil through which the words become musical, instructive and (due to the absence of image) visual.

Matt Wolf

I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard

Modesty, whimsy, and clarity of design grace the work of Joe Brainard (1941-1994), an artist and writer whose evocations of memory and desire perhaps found their greatest expression in his memoir-poem I Remember.

Mike Kuchar

Meltdown

Waiting to die and waiting to live is the same thing to him that chants: "Let me not be mad... let me not be MAD... LET ME NOT BE MAD!"

-- Mike Kuchar

Stephanie Barber

the visit and the play

A playful and dark conversational study—wrapping prose poetry into the recognizable conversational form and allowing both connections and missed meanings. First the ladies visit, the image—a roving camera lovingly viewing a still image—calls up both the progress and stagnancy of their talk, then they go to watch a play—on a television, in a snow garden. In many ways the play references the cadence of the ladies' conversation—the tedious animosity and lack of attentive or appropriate response.

Mike Kuchar

Tickled Pink

He is mute flesh that the stroking of fingers can bring to sing.

-- Mike Kuchar

Cecilia Dougherty

The Writers Series

The Writers Series is a series of video portraits of writers whose work I love.

-- Cecilia Dougherty

Cecilia Dougherty

Kevin & Cedar

I arranged a visit to poet/novelist Kevin Killian’s South of Market apartment in San Francisco to shoot a portrait of him, and when I arrived he had a guest, poet Cedar Sigo. They had corresponded earlier, but were meeting for the first time, and Cedar agreed to participate in our video shoot. This is perhaps the least planned, most verité and documentary of the videos about writers so far. Our immediate plan was for Kevin to read one of Cedar’s poems and for Cedar to read one by Kevin.

Cecilia Dougherty

Eileen

This video is an unabashed fan letter to poet Eileen Myles. As in Laurie, my desire was to romanticize the poet, but not through her writing so much as through her reputation as the natural born child of the New York School and the Beats. I shot the movie as I imagined Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie shooting Pull My Daisy, a film that left an impression on me chiefly of the struggle between form and formlessness, plan and improvisation, sketch and story.

Cecilia Dougherty

Leslie

In the early 1990s, I went to a reading by Leslie Scalapino at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. I could not understand the writing, which can seem difficult and unwieldy to a reader unaccustomed to language poetry, and understood less the more I tried. After a certain point in the reading I stopped trying to figure it out and I let the words seep in. My reward was an effortless understanding of how her poetry works.

Mike Kuchar

Litany of the Seven Kisses

OverRiped words from the lips of an OverExposed boy decorates this litany in pink with purple bruises.

-- Mike Kuchar

Mike Kuchar

Midnight Carnival

Revelers at a masquerade ball enter an UnderWorld of guilt, vice, pain, chaos and redemption.

-- Mike Kuchar

Deborah Stratman

...These Blazeing Starrs!

Since comets have been recorded, they've augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage.

Dani Leventhal

Shayne's Rectangle

In Shayne's Rectangle, Dani Leventhal's moving and mysterious prayer for healing, a horse farm and a casual poolside dissection are the nodes between which a series of patiently taken sharp turns maneuver through moods both intimate and detached. The camera pursues, observes, offers, reflects, and is reflected. Things clear and things indistinct interact rhythmically, resonantly, producing a volatile and haunting visual prosody.

-- Jeremy Hoevenaar

Dani Leventhal

Tin Pressed

Opening with jarring violence, Dani Leventhal's Tin Pressed proceeds to negotiate a balancing act between the bewildering tonal variances of daily life - with all of its unnamable and enchantingly fragmented specifics - and the gravitational urge to construct both private and shared narratives. The world discovered through these images revolves around multiple centers. The camera's odd equanimity feels both generous and dangerous. Leventhal's deft oscillation between elision and inclusion reveals a brief but vast taxonomy of beauty, peace, longing and terror.

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