Michael Robinson Videoworks: Volume 1

Through a concurrently indulgent and skeptical experience of the beautiful, the video draws an uneasy balance between the romantic and the horrid. A nihilistic monologue (from Frank O’Hara’s play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.

— Michael Robinson

“More than any other work of Robinson’s, The General Returns achieves something heady, ethereal, altogether mysterious and nearly impossible to define. This was my introduction to Robinson, and the immediate reaction was a mixture of seduction and befuddlement, the sense that an audio-visual world for which I had no available vocabulary or affective framework had just opened up before my eyes.“

— Michael Sicinski, Cinemascope, Winter 2008

This title is also available on Michael Robinson Videoworks: Volume 1

A very special episode of television's Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.

— Michael Robinson

“If you see one 11-minute video this year, make it Michael Robinson's magnificent, hilarious, and terrifying Light Is Waiting (2007). The primordial, extreme slo-mo soundtrack is like a glitch mix from beyond the grave by DJ Screw. Robinson's seizure-inducing blasts of stroboscopic light rival those of the Austrian film experimentalist Peter Tscherkassky. And I haven't even mentioned the Olsen twins … Light Is Waiting exorcises American pop cultural demons via video the way Kenneth Anger did with film in 1964's Scorpio Rising.”

— Johnny Ray Huston, San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 2008

This title is also available on Michael Robinson Videoworks: Volume 1

A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist re-make/drag show, circa 1992.

"Robinson recycles his family's home movie version of Poltergeist, made when he was ten, into a raw look at the performative."
— Onion City Film Festival

This title is also available on CHANNELING: an invocation of spectral bodies and queer spirits and Michael Robinson Videoworks: Volume 1

A charred visitation with an icy language of control: "there is no room for love". Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness.

— Michael Robinson

"The work combines scenes from a 1950's Soviet version of The Snow Queen and footage from the 2004 feature The Day After Tomorrow. In completely different idioms, both films tackle grand themes: the Roland Emmerich blockbuster revolves around the impending end of the world brought upon by natural disaster and the adaptations of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale recounts the archetypal story of love’s triumph over evil. In Robinson’s film, scenes from the former are manipulated in digital editing to become an almost unrecognizable, darkly wavering, prismatic cityscape, alternating with animation snippets of a little girl and boy in struggle with the villainous queen. All Through the Night contains no original footage and no nature photography, thus composing a completely interior, psychological landscape reminiscent of a dream that is sweet and ominous at the same time. In that sense it is emblematic of Robinson’s approach as a whole, combining far-flung imagery that doesn’t cohere in any conventional narrative or stylistic way but creates its own, oneiric logic."

— Henriette Huldisch, Aurora: The Infinite Measure, Fall 2008

This title is also available on Michael Robinson Videoworks: Volume 1

Plagued by blindness, sloth, and devotion, a troubled scene from Little House On The Prairie offers itself up to karaoke exorcism.

— Michael Robinson

“[T]he often ingratiating nostalgia of the long-running drama Little House On The Prairie takes a free fall in an unsettling sequence of agony metamorphosing into Exorcist-like bodily possession. Made for the PDX Film Festival’s ‘Karaoke Throwdown’ and thus featuring another instrumental track of the Thompson Twin’s eponymous song, the longing lyrics absurdly subtitle a slowed-down passage of Melissa Sue Anderson’s character rising upon waking, shaking in convulsions, and smashing a bedroom window with her hands (all while her husband tries in vain to hold her).”

— Henriette Huldisch, Aurora: The Infinite Measure, Fall 2008

This title is also available on Michael Robinson Videoworks: Volume 1

A dark wave of incest and magic burns across the tropics, forging a knotted trail into the black hole. Taking its title from the V.C. Andrews novel (a sequel to Flowers In The Attic), and weaving together texts from Shirley Jackson, William S. Burroughs, and Stevie Nicks, the film constructs a collaged narrative of three star-crossed siblings searching for one another across the unstable landscapes of their respective exiles.

— Michael Robinson

“Robinson's work continues to evolve at a rather shocking pace; this isn't a filmmaker content to replicate his considerable successes, nor is he afraid to tread into some convoluted zones of human psychology. In an act of dense, ambiguous symbology akin to Deren's breadknives and Anger's roman candles, Robinson shows us a woman finding a marbled, peach-colored glass ball in the dirt. She shatters it to find it contains a collection of golden nails. As Thorns continues, Robinson's imagery becomes more explicitly tropical: a male figure walking right to left with long fronds for raft-making or building shelter; a pileup of fronds by a tree; and the swaying of seaweed under the waves. Thorns is a film that is bursting with information, some of it specifically character-driven, some of it evocative of an all-pervasive ambiance.”

— Michael Sicinski, academichack.net, Fall 2009

This title is also available on Michael Robinson Videoworks: Volume 1

Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escourts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.

“Looking to a future beyond death, Michael Robinson's These Hammers Don't Hurt Us, one of the filmmaker's most sophisticated found footage concoctions yet, combines Michael Jackson's Remember the Time music video with footage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and roughly a dozen other sources, creating for the late pop star a solemn passage into a bedazzled Egyptian afterlife tenderly ushered by his real-life confidante.”

— Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot, Winter 2010

This title is also available on Michael Robinson Videoworks: Volume 1