The work of Dani Leventhal explores the complicated space that exists between decay and renewal, intimacy and disconnection and the sacred and mundane. The six pieces that comprise Dani Leventhal Videoworks: Volume 1 each examine these ambiguous emotional and psychic spaces through a use of montage that is at once both unstructured and dispassionate and lyrically sentimental. Each piece establishes structural comparisons between things that are thought to have intrinsic meaning and things that don’t, and through this juxtaposition, both the personal and the mundane, the intimate and the abject, the immanent and the ephemeral, achieve a synthesis through which the commonplace becomes transcendental.
DESCRIPTION
"This movie was collected for four years before being sprayed scattershot over 28 minutes of psychic mayhem. The line between living and dead is a frontier crossed and re-crossed here. The living are dead while the dead are animated, breathing, swimming, giving birth. Consumed by the animal life of the city, the artist undertakes a first person journey, producing diary notes from one of the most skilled lens masters of the new generation. The camera is her company in this duet of death, the instrument that permits her to see the impossible, the unbearable, the invisible."
— Mike Hoolboom for International Film Festival Rotterdam
"...one of the best films I saw at the entire [Rotterdam] festival, Dani Leventhal’s riveting video diary, Draft 9... the craft of montage is alive and well in [her] work: delicate and harrowing juxtapositions of skinned animals, the tattooed arm of a Holocaust survivor eating donuts in a coffee shop, neon flowers on a disco floor. In her work emerges something that is extraordinarily immediate, both fresh and painful, hard to watch and yet impossible not to watch."
— Genevieve Yue, Senses of Cinema
"A masterpiece of editing, Leventhal presents rich short clips and seemingly unrelated snap-shots of daily life. Beautiful, touching, and thought provoking, Draft 9 invokes deeper understanding of everything from our relationship to animals, to quotidian routine, to the legacy of genocide."
— K J Mohr
"A beautiful, powerful and difficult meditation on human ties to animals, nature and death in autobiographical clips that meld together to create this demanding and riveting story."
— LA Film Forum website