Experimental Film

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

We hear a female voice with a subtle Jamaican accent speak about her life. Sometimes we see an image; a bird, two birds, fire, someone digging a giant hole, cake, a red anvil with an effervescent essence, and sometimes we are left in the dark with only our imaginations in this sound-driven video. Along the way we consider the nature of human existence, the transfiguring power of sex, and the physicality of words.

The film suggests a link between three political figures from the history of Mexican resistance: the Soldadera (woman guerrilla fighter), the Zapatista (member of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation), and the Normalista (students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School).

A call from the beginning, the ancestral water, the everlasting belly from where life cries out.

Colonial Transfer vindicates the eidetic chasm that produced the arrival of television in the cinema as well as the absorption, transduction and digital expansion of television and historical film archives, all linked by the negentropic outburst of a source code in trance. This is the state of ever-expanding media landscape in the post-covid quarantine. Our state of space-time.

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. 

Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin deals primarily with monumentality, narcissism and the ways in which our heroes are embedded into our identities, and manifested through the body. Through a variety of gestures, the pervasiveness of this practice is highlighted alongside its ultimate, inevitable failure. The viewer moves through various stages of anxiety, idolization and actual touchdown with 1970s gay sex icon Peter Berlin himself, capturing both the apparent and the hidden.

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.

"In the late 1980s I saw ads in New York for a telephone 'Confession Line'.  To call in and 'confess' was free; listening in incurred a by-the-minute charge. The soundtrack was built from a collection of these actual, anonymous calls. Adultery, theft, and regret; ghosts spun through phone wires and televisions. An installation version was created for the 1992 Worldwide Video Festival (Amsterdam).

Soundtrack: Jem Cohen with Ian MacKaye.

This title is also available on Jem Cohen: Early Works. 

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. 

... it's not what it used to be.

a personal album and homage, in my own way, to an influential film ... a closet-cleaning scrapbook of beloved photos and oddities ‐ and the gift of fire.

–– Ken Kobland

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.

This slow-motion film is a glass snow globe with dancers who topple and bounce off the sides of the frame. Re-purposed by Breder at his Dortmund retrospective as Weisse Tasse in which a video was projected on the side of a white cup.

"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.