Experimental Film

In two parts:
One – a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Petersboro, New Hampshire with the seasons passing.
Two – an experiment with green-screen chroma-key and a play between 2-D and 3-D space.

–– Ken Kobland

This work was restored in 2022. 

Endless Dreams and Water Between is a feature film with four fictitious characters sustaining an epistolary exchange in which their “planetary thought” is woven with the physical locations they inhabit, visual and aural characters in themselves: the island of Manhattan, the island of Majorca, in Spain, and the islands and peninsula that form the San Francisco Bay Area. The characters’ reflections and dreams enact what could be described as “an archipelagic mind,” linking worlds, time, and space.

Mother’s Day in Mexico is considered one of the most important family holidays of the year. Thousands of mothers have nothing to celebrate. They are the mothers of victims of forced disappearances. Mothers and relatives of the disappeared participated in the "March of National Dignity. Mothers searching for their Sons, Daughters and Justice."

A vision of our brother Deer.

This is the clinamen of our times, sparkling bodies into the spiral vortex as well as its chaotic spatial present. Part of the Scattered Geology Audiovisual series.

Two bizarrely costumed characters – a human ‘chicken’ in a fat suit, and an elaborate folksy creature called an ‘authenticity fetish’- meet and debate their plight. In an attempt to reconcile themselves with some unspecified trauma of mass biotechnoviolation, these two beings quiz one another in rhyme and animation on the origins and ontologies of their species. A sardonic meditation on the nefarious reality of intensive farming, Artificial Intelligence, and the perils of denying complexity.

Go-Rilla Means War is a filmic relic of gentrification featuring 35mm film salvaged from a now demolished Black Civil Rights Theater in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After finding the film unfinished and un-canned on the floor of The Slave Theater, Campbell collaborated with the unknown director (presumably amateur filmmaker Judge John Phillips who owned the Slave Theater) to finish the film.

Notes for a DejaVu is a paramnesic experience of the images where Jonas Mekas still lives and we can hear him comment on the memory of an imaginary trip to Mexico. This film is shot with an expired 16mm celluloid during a popular protest. This is a movie that remembers. This is a political movie.

Between 1892 and 1927, almost 16 million people came to Ellis Island attempting to immigrate to the United States.

This is an agitprop piece about the reflection and dispersion of an eroded slogan and claim: Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom).

These are icebergs in the night, spilling and melting their dense materiality over the frame of Western rationality. A hyperkinetic reminiscence of the last night of the Titanic.

This is Warhol's haunted painting and its circular detour. Oily and greasy suppuration, as well as enchanted absorption as a harbinger in times of pandemic vortex.

Blind Huber is a film interpretation of a poem by the American writer Nick Flynn loosely based on the life of Francois Huber, the blind 18th Century beekeeper, who sat before a series of hives for fifty years unlocking an unknown world.

Written by Nick Flynn. Cinematographer: Alex Stockwell.

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

A political composition on natural resistance. These images are an expiring breath in danger of extinction. These images become extinguished, consumed: a drop, a pure intensity which only appears when falling. In the presence of the image these audiovisual crowds become an affected body, assaulted by entropy. A face exhausted and reanimated by the continuous sound trance that traverses the battlefield. Faces for an eye that would not need to see.

An homage to Walter Benjamin and other time-traveling artists and expatriates that have inspired me, especially Chris Marker. Benjamin, fleeing from fascism in the 1930s, took refuge in Paris where Biblioteque Nacional became his home away from home.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

A modulation of the discourse produces a portrait of the philosopher Slavoj Žižek during a dialogue.

White Sands is an experiential film installation on the visible and invisible manifestations of the nuclear industry on the land, air, water and people of New Mexico.

Cinematography: Liz Cash
Hand Film Printing: Sylvain Chaussee, Niagara Lab
Sound design: Stephen Vitiello 

White Sands is available through Video Data Bank as a three-channel composite. 

Spell Reel is an archive of film and audio material from Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. On the verge of complete ruin, the footage testifies to the birth of Guinean cinema as part of the decolonising vision of Amílcar Cabral, the liberation leader who was assassinated in 1973.

Old Cat will eventually and pleasantly get to a destination. Shot in the summer of 2009, in a single take, on a lake in Virginia.

Cast: Chad Bowles, Marcus Bowles.

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

These are the remnants of mass culture in the collective unconscious that spill into reality. Part of the Hauntology and Post-Covid series.

This is an agitprop piece on resistance from the autonomy and indigenous sovereignty that hold in his own name, in his own letters, in his own sparks and embers of letters.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

“His heart was a dark cave filled with sharp toothed, fierce clawed beasts that ran snapping and tearing through his blood. In pain he left the work table and prowled around the room, singing to himself, ‘Who can I be tonight? Who will I be tonight?’”

—Alfred Chester, Exquisite Corpse (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967)

"This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher. Farocki's admiration for Straub was so great that he said of Between Two Wars, Perhaps I only made this film to earn Straub's recognition."  In this observation-driven film, Farocki documents the fulfillment of his wish. The film shows Farocki, under Straub's direction, rehearsing for his role as Delamarche in the film Klassenverhältnisse (1983). Anyone who has seen Farocki's documentary of the shoot will never forget these short scenes.