Experimental Film

The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past. Evoking the ritualism of Aztec cosmology, this experience recalls lumbreras – circular excavation holes in archeological sites, such as the recently found Tzompantli (skulls ceremonial rack) at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The use of obsidian crystal as a nuclear filter in the chamber is also essential.

Experimental but heartfelt, all fiction + mostly video.

Featuring: phantoms, parakeets, some animation, much smoke, Super 8 hi-jinks, several actors.

Wittnerchrome, Exacto Knife, Fishing Line, Sewing Machine

The secret history of hobo and railworker graffiti. Shot on freight trips across the western US over a period of 16 years, Who is Bozo Texino? chronicles the search for the source of a ubiquitous rail graffiti--a simple sketch of a character with an infinity-shaped hat and the scrawled moniker, "Bozo Texino"--a drawing seen on railcars for over 80 years.

We came into the world under the sign of Saturn, the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. Saturn pulls the word down into its vortex and turns the flow of events into rings, lines and particles. There we are all invisible. There we have no face. There we have no name. There our present seems suspended. There we are all limbo.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Transmission from the Liberated Zones is an experiment which brings together Swedish statements and documents, accessed and presented by a boy through a low-fidelity feedback channel — an optical dimension created to move through time, and between tepid and tropic encounters.

An independent film portrait of singer/songwriter Elliott Smith in Portland, Oregon in 1996, wherein he plays three songs. The songs were done live acoustic--in his old studio, a living room, and a bathroom (it was quiet in there). It's also a small portrait of Portland, Oregon.

The songs are "Between the Bars", "Angeles", and a cover of "Thirteen" by Big Star.

This is Elliott as I remember him, at his simple finest as musician. 

Shot in black and white Super 8, this lyrical short follows a wandering, disengaged youth through grey afternoons. German Song features the hard-edged music of Come, an alternative band from Boston.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

Nobody counts the hours and nobody cares how the years are piling up. Souls begin and end. Then comes the night. A snow landscape of souls.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

The scales of the snake refract a trance and invocation. In the epicenter, the pyramids join Izcóatl's battle, the Obsidian Serpent propagates an exhortation: all the dances against the war.

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.

Pictures from Dorothy is a current day consideration of the symbolism of Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz.

Cast: Matilda Washington. Music: David Reid.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

A history of New York City from Prehistoric times through the Space Age, composed entirely from documentary street footage.

"The richness of Cohen's vision is found in his haunting imagery and the perception that the thriving city of New York is really the accumulation of humanity's failures, as well as its triumphs."

-- Steve Seid, Seduced and Abandoned: The Homeless Video by Sachiko Hamada & Scott Sinkler and Jem Cohen (Berkeley: Pacific Film Archive, 1989)

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

These are the western lands of the mind. The western tracks in the land. The western landscapes of our time. The wasted times of our lives. So is the rest of the Capitalocene civilization.

"Ben Russell continues his initial impulse for the series, the exploration of "naturally-derived psychedelia", with this cadenced phantasmagoria of negative imagery and negative space. The tendrils of sharp white trees become osseous arteries against the black void of the sky. The spiraling spine of a massive tree collides against a spanning pan of a branch twined into two through a mirroring effect. Representation morphs into abstraction as the film becomes a study in density and fearful symmetry in the forest of sight.

There has to be a way to win is the refrain. Three women fold clothes, stroll and shop as they discuss jealousy, murder and dead bodies. An enquiry into the generosity of women.

Players: Trina Vester, Karin Westerlund, Lise Kelleman.

Shot on location in Kobenhavn.

A hypnosis-inducing pan-geographic shuttle built on brainwave-generating binaural beats, Deep Sleep takes us on a journey through the sound waves of Gaza to travel between different sights of modern ruin. Restricted from travel to Palestine, I learned auto-hypnosis for the purpose of bi-locating. What results is a journey, recorded on Super 8mm film, to the ruins of ancient civilizations embedded in modern civilization in ruins, to a site ruined beyond evidence of civilization.

The Palace at 4 am is the experience of a fragile palace of collisions suspended in a montage vision. A hazy patchwork of structures. The Palace becomes visible only to repeatedly collapse in a liminal interference of the absence. An unrest landscape of the insight. Space-time of thresholds. This is The Palace at 4 am.

In Hyperthermia the cinematic body becomes overwhelmed by the luminous projection of outside political factors, causing the internal temperature of the celluloid to rise to dangerous levels.

Part of the paraconsistent sequence series.