Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance

A Prayer For Nettie dramatizes the death of an elderly woman who was Cumming’s photographic model from 1982 to 1993, presenting an improvised series of prayers and memorials for Nettie Harris by people who knew her, and some who did not. In its ambiguous mix of tenderness and aggression, A Prayer For Nettie extends the traditions of the grotesque and the absurd. The fervent prayers of the actors are undermined by indifference, forgetfulness, and the presence of the camera. In the end, comedy turns the tables on piety and remembrance as Nettie looks up from the grave.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 1.

The police phoned. They left a message on the machine. They said he was dead. The video unwinds through stories of sex for rent, unclaimed bodies, cigarette burns, and other monuments of life’s long run from wall to wall. Cut the Parrot is three grotesque comedies in one: the stories of Gerry, Susan, and Albert. Songs of hope and heartbreak spill from the mouths of the performers. The order of impersonation rules.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 1.

Donigan Cumming’s improvisational style traverses the boundaries of tragedy and comedy, drama and documentation. In After Brenda, Cumming redefines the genre of popular romance. His abject hero is Pierre, a fifty-something male who has lost everything in the name of love. He is homeless and adrift, an unwanted guest with nothing to offer but a tale. After Brenda searches the hearts and rooms of his audience, seizing the evidence of sex, love, and survival.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 2.

An ailing, elderly man listens to a private performance in his room. The singing is a halting mix cross-cultural-Inuktitut and Country & Western. Transgressive and mesmerizing, Karaoke distorts the landscapes of sound and body.

In Inukitut.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 1.

A conversation about marriage and horses between two unseen men.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming: Four Short Pieces.

"I'm not finished. I don't know how long it's going to take. As far as I'm concerned I'm officially dead."

In his 50th year, Colin looks back on a life of drug and alcohol abuse. Four years into recovery, he is angry and articulate about addiction, treatment, and the romance of the street. In the chaos and claustrophobia of an ice storm, Colin waits to be reborn. His erratic angel is late.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 2.

Christmas Eve. A man alone finds someone he can talk to.

"Pétit Jesus, a man speaks in his native French about his loneliness, his desperate need for love. The content of his speech is a poem of his own creation which he holds in his hand (off-camera) and from which he recites. With tears and snot pouring from his face, and a voice wracked with sobs, his "performance" is compelling in its rawness, its stark honesty."

--Scott McLeod, Curator, Moving Stills, Gallery 44, Toronto, 2000

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming: Four Short Pieces.

Trip is inspired by the main oeuvre of architect Raine Karp--the concert hall designed for the city of Tallinn between 1975-1980. Considered the most important building realized in Estonia, Linnahall is a time capsule preserving the utopian ideas of centralized power and of egalitarian modernism, and an example of how architecture can stir public emotions in our times of corporate dominance.

A new episode in the Emotional Architecture series, Trip introduces Linnahall as an archaeological accident, as a stranded space ship and as a shrine for Soviet Union nostalgia. The voice of the architect, breaking facts about his ambiguous profession, the hallucinogenic wandering around the building, the nightmarish exploration of its guts--all are pleading for architecture as one of the drugs of this time, when drugs are part of life style. Tripping through architecture can be as fascinating as a night out--and potentially as dangerous.

The film pays tribute through its treatment and sound to Andrei Tarkovsky, and to his famous Sci-Fi failure, Solaris. While Linnahall was built for the glorification of the Moscow Olympics of 1980, some 500m from the construction site Tarkovsky was working on his masterpiece, Stalker.

The confession of a woman who took flight... A woman tells a tragic story straight to camera. The camera seems to be looking for the spot where the pain is, but the woman is too quick for the viewer.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Doinigan Cumming: Four Short Pieces.

To be a man, to be a hero, to be a wife: these conflicting voices inhabit the body of a documentary filmmaker as he re-enacts the climax of a Western morality play, 3:10 to Yuma.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 3.

System failure: A man repeats the story of a prison stabbing as something goes wrong with the tape.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance and Donigan Cumming Videoworks: Volume 3.

"What if... Colleen's life, in her own words, has been "wretched." She was sexually abused by her father, betrayed by her husband, separated from her children, driven by her love for a heroin addict to attempted suicide. Colleen has survived by taking responsibility for her decisions and dreaming of a safer place, sometimes relying on the kindness of strangers. if only I marks another hot summer in crisis. Colleen presents herself, broken and whole, to the camera.

"if only I is a moving portrait of a troubled soul, a failed suicide caught in the grip of the medical bureaucracy, and her helpmeet and champion, a recovering schizophrenic who has only recently dragged himself up from the streets."

—New York Video Festival, 2000

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance.

In My Dinner With Weegee Donigan Cumming weaves together two life stories. The central figure, a man in his seventies named Marty, remembers his experiences in New York as a young Catholic labour organizer and peace activist, his friendships with David Dellinger, the Berrigan brothers, Bayard Rustin, Weegee, and James Agee. This mixture of first-hand knowledge and gossip brightens Marty’s dark passage—he is old, sick, depressed, and alcoholic. The other story is Cumming’s in his fifty-fourth year, as he examines his own radicalism in light of the "wheezing dirty beacon" up ahead.

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance.

Voice: off is the autobiography of a forgotten man. Brain damaged, body violated, emotions crushed, Gerry who rarely spoke has now lost the power of speech. The video camera is his prosthesis and he borrows the memories of people who no longer need them. How can this be a comedy? It is. "Donigan Cumming looks at the violence of time that damages the body and exhausts memories. For the main character in Voice: off, Gerald, the illness is incurable. Two cancers are at work, one of which is attacking his throat. The first images are the irrefutable ones of a naked man who has reached old age and whose voice is failing. The capturing in real time of death at work is one of the terms of this dense and complex film. But Cumming also likes to go back in time in search of a state of innocence. In his studio he spreads out the photographs of Gerald's life. A new-born child, a little boy cherished by his mother, at boarding school, a charming teenager and a worried adult, these states confer on him different postures, different expressions, and reveal to the eyes of the filmmaker an unsuspected anguish. Among these pictures, one of Cumming reminds us how close he is to the family as a faithful and insistent chronicler. He holds his video camera, sticks to his subject and details the photos. With obsession he seeks for legitimacy in his approach in-between fascination with hints of morbidity and reflections of a metaphysical bent. Iconoclastic and brutal in its hurried search, Voice: off is strangely fraternal. One scene in particular reflects this. Gerald and a friend are standing in a small room. Time stands still. Nothing happens, they appear to be waiting aimlessly. Like characters out of Beckett's works they are left to the absurd fate of humanity." -

-Visions du Réel (Nyon, Switzerland, 2003)

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance.

Locke’s Way is the photographic path to knowledge, full of twists and turns, treacherously steep. What has happened down here? A family’s photographs tell us everything and nothing about the subterranean past. "One of the central questions of philosophy has always been: what can be known? Locke’s Way provides a vivid illustration of this perennial philosophical dilemma. In this short video, Donigan Cumming is preoccupied with the story of his older brother, who seems to have been brain-damaged and spent much of his life in institutions. Cumming sifts through old family photos and medical documents, commenting on what they do - or do not - reveal. With some desperation, he asks, "Was Julian (nickname: "Jerry") really abnormal?" If so, what was the cause? And how did this affect the rest of the family? Cumming speaks from behind his hand-held video camera, which picks up all the movements of his body and his laboured breathing. His reaction to the enigma of Jerry is as physical as it is psychological. At times he literally runs away from the problem by leaving the basement where the photos are stored and dashing up the stairs. But each time he forces himself to go back down and tackle the material. Upstairs his reactions are rational and adult; back in the basement he descends, into the emotional world of his childhood. Cumming has said that his main references for this work are the English philosopher John Locke and the French novelist Marcel Proust. Locke argued for an empirical approach to knowledge, while Proust relied on remembered experience. Locke’s Way pits these two approaches against each other, but the outcome - like the question of Jerry’s life - remains unresolved.

--Visions du Réel (Nyon, Switzerland, 2003)

This title is also available on Donigan Cumming: Controlled Disturbance.