Film Work 1975-2011 Ken Kobland

A camcorder diary and chronicle of public opinion in Moscow during a time of huge political, economic, and hence cultural, changes in the former Soviet Union. The tape reveals Kobland's own fascination with the diversity and complexity of Russians' reactions to such changes. It also represents a type of cultural exchange made newly possible by glasnost—Americans and Russians learning about each other on a popular, unofficial, direct level through video.

Moscow X is a presentation of the Independent Television Service (ITVS), with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

"...a rumination, a series of borrowed 'dialogues' out of an ongoing argument with myself. It meanders, mentally and physically, reflecting on the conditions of being human; on transience, consciousness and desire. It uses landscapes as provocations, as sites of contemplation. And between the landscape and the thought, i.e. between the radical presence of the physical world and the idea, there is, more often than not, a distance, disbelief or irony."

–– Ken Kobland

"A film about placelessness and Kobland's response to it--to throw the net of his soul wide, wider, over everything. Always two steps ahead of the viewer, the filmmaker weaves together images and sounds that didn't seem to belong together before, resulting in a sprawling work that is part confession, part provocation and part meditation on technology, consumption and spiritual death."

–– Isaac Mathes, CinemaTexas (2003) 

A one-hour heliocopter flight over the suburban sprawl of Long Island to Fresh Kills, the New York City Landfill on Staten Island; accompanied by an operatic audio-mix of bad-mouth talk-radio mayhem and historic nostalgia.

"Commissioned by La Sept, Paris to create a one-hour continuous camera take, Stupa is a 'mourning' commute from suburban Long Island to the New York City landfill. The audio-mix is composed of radio talk shows, JFK speeches, the soundtrack from It's a Wonderful Life, a hodge-podge of music and TV soaps. In the end it's pretty much an elegy to JFK.A one-hour heliocopter flight over the suburban sprawl of Long Island to Fresh Kills, the New York City Landfill on Staten Island; accompanied by an operatic audio-mix of bad-mouth talk-radio mayhem and historic nostalgia. "Commissioned by La Sept, Paris to create a one-hour continuous camera take, Stupa is a 'mourning' commute from suburban Long Island to the New York City landfill. The audio-mix is composed of radio talk shows, JFK speeches, the soundtrack from It's a Wonderful Life, a hodge-podge of music and TV soaps. In the end it's pretty much an elegy to JFK. Forgive me, but he just gets bigger and bigger as we go on." -Ken Kobland

This video is a response to Kobland’s experiences as a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) fellow in West Berlin. A journalistic collection of impressions of a haunted place, the tape evokes the landscape of past and present Germany through still images and archival film clips. Inter-cutting these images with footage shot on the plane (whether Kobland is leaving Germany or just arriving is impossible to say), Berlin: Tourist Journal constructs a portrait of this divided city through the eyes of an outsider.

Drawing from Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony, his letters, travel journals, and biography, this video layers fantasy, sexual obsession, morbidity, Romanticism, and boredom alongside the ghostliness of empty hotel rooms, aural atmosphere, and an homage to surrealist and horror films.

Co-produced by the Wooster Group, and featuring Ron Vawter

Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte

“Think of it as a prologue to a sleazy thriller. A sort of shaggy-dog plot of voyeuristic atmospheres.” This video is about the voyeuristic license of the camera: exposing, uncovering, glimpsing things obscured and revealed. A series of still images that fade to black, this piece challenges the viewer to construct the identity of the person behind the camera. Who is the subject and who is the object? Though a man’s voice outlines the piece, it becomes clear that a woman is photographing—we “spy” through her eyes.

Film and video maker Ken Kobland returns to the urban landscapes he filmed 20 years previously, such as the New York subway and the S-Bahn in Berlin. We leave, we travel, but it’s always the same images that we are drawn to. A moving road movie about eternal departure and arrival.

“A melancholy, semi-abstract video poem made up largely of blurred images shot from moving subway and elevated cars in New York City and Berlin. Woven into the film are fragments of a diary (despairing epigrams like ‘all meaning evaporates’) and a Russian ballad. Repetitive without becoming monotonous, the video evokes an urban sadness that is so insistent it becomes a whole philosophy of loss and resignation.”

—Stephen Holden, “A Thematic Feast of Avant-Garde Videos,” The New York Times (16 July 1999)

Note: The version in distribution was remastered and re-edited by the artist in 2021.  The original version is also available for research purposes.

A self-described “collage piece” of “stolen images,” Shanghaied Text starts with quiet Montana landscapes, among which are views of a powerful dam. When the dam breaks loose you find yourself “shanghaied” to places unknown, where Kobland confronts you with a provocative mix of historical, lyrical, sexual and political references. Using quotes and pieces from movies by Vertov, Dovjenko, and Buñuel, along with archival images of social protests from the liberation of Paris, the piece builds to an operatic culmination with Turandot’s final choir. Shanghaied Text is a remarkable, dense and gripping work that leaves the viewer pondering our political and cultural heritage, as well as the role and place of technology in our future.

This title is also available on The New McLennium.