Time

"Persistence was shot in 1991-92 in Berlin, and edited with films by U.S. Signal Corps cameramen in 1945-46, obtained from Department of Defense archives. Interspersed through these materials are filmic quotations from Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1946). A meditation on the time just after a great historical event, about what is common to moments such as these—the continuous and discontinuous threads of history—and our attachment to cinematic modes of observation that, by necessity, shape our view of events.

An intense conversation between two people one evening leads to a pictorial love story about loss and longing. An homage to Eric Rohmer and the attention he paid to the tiny details of everyday life. An eternal story of love and separation.

Circles cycle and shift in scale in this video about, through, into and out of Carol Bove’s monumental sculptures starring the exquisitely talented dancer Katie Gaydos. Circles are celestial bodies, the pendulum, the metronome, playing against the hands of a clock as Gaydos’ body traverses the forest of Bove’s sculptures, reminding us that time is nothing external, but an integral feature of our interior landscape. Bove’s title Chimes at Midnight is a reference to Orson Welles’ film of the same name.

Billion Dollar Bimbo: A Musical is a story of a young Hollywood actress’s psychological roller coaster ride through loss and redemption. One day on set the actress witnesses her mother collapse in the middle of shooting. Thinking her dead, the woman quickly spins out of control, immediately descending into drug use and promiscuity. The daughter’s depression-induced mania is assuaged when the mother recovers, but only briefly. When the mother quickly dies, the forlorn daughter plummets again into hopelessness and seeks solace in religion.

Ensconced in my urban Los Angeles bed, I recount growing up "safe" on suburban Long Island. A cameraman from KCET filmed and lit the piece. This is the only film I ever made that was not filmed by a colleague, friend, or myself. As a result, it has a very different visual sensibility than the rest of my work. Commissioned by and co-produced with KCET, a Los Angeles PBS station, for their daily magazine program Life and Times. Also presented In New York City at The Jewish Museum in the exhibition, Moving Portraits 2000.

A rumination on Time, with a capital "T". Time and its ravages, which really just means its progression, its nature. Set off by an "old" poem, a T.S. Eliot poem that's literally haunted me for 30? or 40? yrs
... even before I became an old man myself.

(It's an old man's rumblings, and it never fails to move me. I used a quote from it in a film I made 25yrs ago, and the book still calls to me from its place on the bookshelf, its pages yellow, dry as bone.)

In 1971 Robert Smithson (1938-73) was invited to create an earthwork in the Netherlands on the occasion of the recurring outdoor exhibition Sonsbeek.

Big_Sleep™ explores problems in our archival urges. Via a single-channel desktop screencast, informatic elements ebb and flow—creating and relating interface absences. These gaps suggest that no amount of hard drive space can defy mortality.

A video letter to artist Nancy Holt, in homage to a shared interest in terminal lakes, framed views, monuments and time.  Filmed on and around the Great Salt Lake, Mono Lake and Meteor Crater.

The overlapping dot formations are taken from the four constellations Holt bored into Sun Tunnels (1976).  The film’s title is taken from a piece she wrote for Robert Smithson in 1978. 

A raunchy, explicit comic-opera ... (two years of looking out the window during a pandemic).

Raunchy /ˈrôn(t)SHē/

adjective: raunchy; comparative adjective: raunchier; superlative adjective: raunchiest

1. earthy, vulgar, and often sexually explicit... "a raunchy new novel"

Mature Audiences: Audio with sexually graphic material

–– Ken Kobland

The Making and Unmaking of the Earth turns to geology as both a metaphor for and a psychic container of women's emotional states and embodied experiences of physical pain. Combining archival footage of earth processes with interviews describing mysterious physical experiences and emotional attachments, this film explores how everything we bury deep inside eventually speaks through the geology of the body.

Big_Sleep™ explores problems in our archival urges. Via a single-channel desktop screencast, informatic elements ebb and flow—creating and relating interface absences. These gaps suggest that no amount of hard drive space can defy mortality.

At the age of twenty-four, Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh (b.1950), moved to New York, where he has created and documented time-specific, conceptual art performances since the 1970s. In this interview, Hsieh discusses his formative years and philosophical moorings. This dialogue includes description of the artist’s early period of painting, his military service in Taiwan, and the cultural atmosphere of a country then undergoing massive political change. Much of the discussion focuses specifically on Hsieh’s understanding of the relationship of art and life, his investment in “free thinking,” and the politics of documentation. For Hsieh, the ability to think freely is art’s bottom line—he believes the essence of his work lies in human communication. To this end, Hsieh insists that his work, though incredibly personal, is not autobiographical, but philosophical.

"In The Very Very End, Barber points to his medium's plastic possibility by somehow traveling into the future and the past, nodding to Neville Shute's apocalyptic 1957 novel On The Beach, while setting an end-of-days story in a 21st Century holiday resort.

Originating from personal affection toward Seoul, Twelve Scenes portrays the spectacles in daily life by juxtaposing urban space in a twelve month sequence. As the individual particles in a kaleidoscope create splendid illusions by being reflected on a mirror, Twelve Scenes shows our individual life, seemingly separated by time and space, actually composes the scenery in the kaleidoscope of Seoul. Twelve Scenes represents a 'moment for self-reflection' or 'small, but precious enlightenment on life'.

Set in Medellín, Colombia, Como crece la sombra cuando el sol declina (Like Shadows Growing as the Sun Goes Down) features tireless car traffic, jugglers at intersections, and employees on breaks, focusing on precise movements marking the repetitive flow of time.

This sun-drenched meditation contemplates on a youth's journey towards self discovery and his role in a new age.

It is TIME at a street corner in London... A collaboration between filmmaker Roderick Coover and writer Deb Unferth, this short marks the textual disintegration of the speaking clock in an unnerving portrait of technology, power, and the urban environment.