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Dani Leventhal Videoworks: Volume 1

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.

# Title Artists Run Time Year Country
1 Draft 9 Dani Leventhal ReStack 00:28:00 2003 United States
2 3 Parts for Today Dani Leventhal ReStack 00:13:00 2007 United States
3 Show & Tell in the Land of Milk and Honey Dani Leventhal ReStack 00:13:00 2007 United States
4 Litau Dani Leventhal ReStack 00:07:30 2007 United States
5 Recitation Dani Leventhal ReStack 00:02:00 2007 United States
6 9 Minutes of Kaunaus Dani Leventhal ReStack 00:06:30 2007 Lithuania, United States

Draft 9

Dani Leventhal ReStack
2003 | 00:28:00 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 |

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

3 Parts for Today

Dani Leventhal ReStack
2007 | 00:13:00 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | |

DESCRIPTION

Subtitled "The Refusenik", "The Zealot", and "The Father", this video takes us on a journey where Germans, Turks, Israelis, Palestinians, fathers, grandmothers, daughters and animals are together for 13 minutes.

Show & Tell in the Land of Milk and Honey

Dani Leventhal ReStack
2007 | 00:13:00 | United States | English | Color | Mono | 4:3 | Video

DESCRIPTION

In this piece Dani Leventhal recounts to camera her experiences of living and working in Israel, the fabled land of milk and honey of childhood lessons. With time spent in a metal factory and a battery farm for chickens, her harrowing tale includes stories of sexual harassment and sick birds. Against this background, there are idyllic images of bees and flowers, cows and calves, intimate caresses, dead birds. Every thing is worthy of Dani's gaze, and is transformed by the encounter, becoming more human or sacred, and we are closer to the pain and beauty of being alive. 

Litau

Dani Leventhal ReStack
2007 | 00:07:30 | United States | English | Color | Mono | 4:3 | Video

DESCRIPTION

A tapestry of images and sounds. Tango dancing. A conversation about heaven and hell, with illustrations. Horses nuzzle. A woman reclines. Silent soccer. Street entertainers play classical music. Travel is mysterious and sometimes fraught.

Recitation

Dani Leventhal ReStack
2007 | 00:02:00 | United States | English | Color | Mono | 4:3 |

DESCRIPTION

The Grandmother recites the Mourners' Kaddish over her granddaughter.

9 Minutes of Kaunaus

Dani Leventhal ReStack
2007 | 00:06:30 | Lithuania, United States | English | Color | Mono | 4:3 |

DESCRIPTION

"Inside a Lithuanian synagogue, young Domas Darguzs regales the filmmaker with a whispered, wide-eyed account of mythical events, while the film cross-cuts to images of farm-life. Kid brother of an Israeli soldier, Domas's stories are part fantasy, part hopeful ruminations of a courageous, young mind interrupted only by an impatient adult."

 — KJ Mohr