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.
1968 was the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, ten days after the massacre of students and civilians by military and police on October 2 in the "Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco."
A film about haircuts, clothes, and image/sound relationships.
"This four-minute film explores our response to stereotypes—aural, visual and ideological. Smith signals these stereotypes to the viewer through a chiefly associational system, which deftly manipulates the path of our expectations. The structure is stunningly simple and deceptively subtle. We are taken on a journey from one concrete stereotype to its diametric opposite, as images transform and juxtapose to, ultimately, invert our interpretation of what we see and hear."
—Gary Davis
While out shooting for a different project altogether, I encountered two sleeping men on a Manhattan street. A short time later, I was standing in front of Pennsylvania Train Station with the camera on a tripod, when one of the men suddenly reappeared. He stepped in front of my camera and began to speak, about his path in the U.S. military, from Panama to Afghanistan to Iraq, about his life. I decided to limit the piece to what I shot in that area in those few hours, with one key addition: the text from a classic children's rhyme.
–Jem Cohen
Memory in three acts. A boy opens his presents. Two men open a suitcase stuffed with photographs. An aging actress opens her heart to lost love and ancient rivalries.
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.
Pandora is one who communicates to the human world the powers of the night. These are glimpses of her visions.
Panzano creates a matrix where the three most taken-for-granted elements of any film (camera, subjects, and the spaces they inhabit) are all delicately at odds with one another — allowed to float freely, gauge the terrain, and stake out a compromise. It could have all come across as hopelessly vague and amorphous were it not for the fact that this is ostensibly a home and presumably a family. The strange rituals, comings and goings, arguments and reconciliations, and — most crucially — perpetual limbo are, after all, merely our own.
— Carlos Garza
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.
2005-2007 What is explained can be denied, but what is felt can't be forgotten. -- Charles Bowden Ghost: the outward and visible sign of an inward fear. -- Ambrose Bierce
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.
This is the burial hymn for thousands of souls in anthropocentric times. The ghosts of the American way of life. Part of the Hauntology series.
"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.
Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil-drilling platform set in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years.
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.
Pitayas are the sacred Mesoamerican fruits that grow on Mexican nopales, an ancient plant. This is the colorful body, the vibrant blood and the radiant skin of the open life.
Bracketed by the Fall of Berlin Wall and the Collapse of the World Trade Center, a decade that saw the ossification of the neoliberal project, the rise of third-wave feminism, the proliferation of digital media, and even, perhaps, the “end of history": postmodernism; the emergence of internet; the commercialization of gangsta rap, and independent film; AIDS activist; digital cinema, the Gulf War; rave and riot grrrl cultures; reality television; MTV. A new diagrammatic system.
Scratch of image. As a consequence of a global quarantine, an entire device emerged. With much of humanity locked up and eager for communication, a pandemic exhibitionism went viral. Covid-19 mobilizes an audiovisual pandemic. The result: a plague of viralized images.
