Film or Videomaking

A rising moon and lowering standards in secular shenanigans highlight this documentary on the making of a sci-fi epic for mini-adults. The stakes are high and the porkchops well done as cast and crew blast off to kiddie dimensions only dreamed of by reformed perverts who revert back to more primitive states of fetishistic attire to usher in the new millenium.

A single-shot, choreographed portrait of the Foley* process, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition. The circular camera path moves inside and back out of a Foley stage in Burbank, California.  While portraying sound artists at work, typically invisible support mechanisms of filmmaking are exposed, as are, by extension and quotation, governmental violations of individual privacy. 

Martha Rosler (b.1943) received her BA from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1974. Rosler has produced seminal works in the fields of photography, performance, video, installation, criticism, and theory. Committed to an art that engages a public beyond the confines of the art world, Rosler investigates how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate everyday life. Rosler's work has entered the canon of contemporary art through a process of steady, stealthy infiltration. Lacking commercial gallery representation until 1993, her endeavors as a prolific essayist, lecturer, and political agitator enabled her agenda to trickle down through critical channels.

Shot in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, this essay uses transportation, video, and photography to examine images circulating in a historically charged, and presently war-torn and divided, Middle East. From images of camels in the desert to images of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the video looks at states of mind in relation to actual geographies. The video pays tribute to an unformatted and open-ended documentary approach, and examines modes of access to information such as travel, television and the Internet, while carefully displaying the resulting iconography.

Made collaboratively with the filmmaker's mom Deborah, I Can Hear My Mother’s Voice documents her process of learning how to use the filmmaker's video camera. As Deborah watches the footage she has recorded, she reacts to and describes the footage she sees––showing what and how she sees––while opening up a space between sense, memory, speculation, and grief.

The film is open captioned and audio described in English. Still image description: Light sparkles on blue water. A caption at the bottom of the image reads: "that's beautiful."

Operation Atropos is a documentary about interrogation and POW resistance training. Director Coco Fusco worked with retired U.S. Army interrogators who subjected her group of women students to immersive simulations of POW experiences in order to show them what hostile interrogations can be like and how members of the U.S. military are taught to resist them. The group of interrogators is called Team Delta, and they regularly offer intensive courses that they call "Authentic Military Experiences" to civilians.

A portrait of Luce Vigo, film critic, educator, and the daughter of pivotal French filmmaker Jean Vigo. Commissioned by the Spanish documentary festival, Punto de Vista, the film incorporates Luce's memories of her extraordinary life, reflections on her father, and images of Northern Spain.

Storyteller recomposes aerial shots from the Las Vegas casino skyline to create a slick, artificial world, reminiscent of science fiction. At first glance, the viewer might think of jewelry-like space ships floating slowly through the universe. When the camera zooms in on buildings and architecture, the detailed glitter and kitsch of the city hypnotically reveals something of pure beauty and madness.

The daily life of the Hunikui village of Sâo Joaquim, on the river Jordâo in the state of Acre. Augustinho, village shaman and patriarch, and his wife and father-in-law, remember the fetters of the rubber plantations and celebrate a new era. Now, with their land demarcated, they can once again teach their traditions to their children and grandchildren.

Direction: Zezinho Yube

Photography: Zezinho Yube, Zé Mateus Itsairu, Vanessa Ayani, Fernando Siã, Josias Mana, Tadeu Siã

Editing: Mari Corrêa, Pedro Portella and Vincent Carelli

Paternal Rites is a first-person essay film that examines the secret underbelly of a contemporary Jewish American family as they grapple with the aftereffects of physical and sexual abuse on their present-day lives. It is also a groundbreaking film about the nature of trauma and memory itself: the ways in which trauma encrypts in uncanny ways; the function of speech and narrative in the process of decryption; and the role of film and filmmaking in the practice of healing.

This turgid potboiler was made with my class at the San Francisco Art Institute. It steam-rolls a series of overheated episodes to a colorful climax of redemption and moral rectitude. The rest of it wallows in a swamp of spiritual rot and loose codes of clothing and domestic decency.

A myth illustrated on the stones of a waterfall, the reconstruction of a great communal hut, the attempt to recover objects kept for years in a museum in Manaus. In IAUARETÊ, Waterfall of the Jaguars the Tariano Indians, of the North-western Amazon, after decades of missionary catechism, decide to make a cultural record for future generations.

Direction: Vincent Carelli

Photography: Vincent Carelli and Altair Paixão

Editing: Joana Collier

Production: IPHAN / Vídeo nas Aldeias

This crime drama made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute is a mixed bag of colorful misadventures featuring a wayward member of the clergy and a corrupting, femme fatale with bangs. The couple open a casino of ill repute with money acquired during their murderous rampage upon the population of a small community of churchgoers. The action is fast and cheap because of the $400 budget, and the cast attractive because youth itself is always beautiful.