In this interview, African American filmmaker and DJ Ephraim Asili (b. 1979) discusses his upbringing, education, and creative process. Born and raised around the city limit of Philadelphia, Asili’s childhood and adolescence were imbued with hip hop music, Hollywood movies and television.
The Pyramid used to be a mountain.
"In the film, images of plants, rocks and occasional mountaintops flicker by so quickly they almost evade perception. Extreme colour-tinted close-ups and the use of a rhythmic, drum-forward jazz soundtrack create an effect of a syncopated collage of geometric forms. The collective seems to call into question the audience’s ability to ascertain the significance – whether historical or geographical – of the vaguely identified, eroded sites presented."
–Ela Bittencourt, Frieze
It’s a delight; not fragile yet.
It’s not hockey bashing and blades.
Not the escapades, or a snake.
It’s an expanded definition of drawing.
Everglades is a project Levy began while a resident artist in Florida's Everglades National Park. The unique natural environment of the Everglades has been devastated by decades of wetlands drainage for purposes of industrial and residential development, and today it is threatened by fracking and deep water drilling. At the same time, efforts have been made to restore some of the original ecosystems through a process of re-flooding, not unlike the restoration of Lake Hula in the north of Israel.
Extractions parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension industry. As the filmmaker reviews how these industries have affected her, she reflects on having her own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.
A woman recounts her story of the mass exodus of Palestinians from Jerusalem. Beginning with the arrival and ending with the departure, the tale moves backwards in time and through various landscapes. The events are neither undone nor is the story untold; instead, Farther than the eye can see traces a decaying experience to a place that no longer exists.
Fifeville is a film about a neighborhood in Charlottesville, Virginia. It focuses on the details, gestures, and material life of the citizens of Fifeville as they communicate their understandings of the neighborhood’s changing landscape. Although Fifeville is set in Charlottesville, it could be Any Black Community Experiencing Gentrification, USA, 21st Century.
Co-director: Corey D.B. Walker. Crew: bh103a.
This video captures the playfulness of the Videofreex as they frolic in the first snow of 1971. With joyful excitement, David, Bart, Chuck, Nancy and Skip pass the camera back and forth to explore the possibilities for video under the new weather condition offered by flurries. While Nancy tapes, David and Bart create fictional characters stranded after a plane crash. Annie, Francis and the resident dog, Mushroom, join the group for further snowy shenanigans. Later, Bart tries to interview the local snowplow driver for an episode of Lanesville TV, but without success.
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.
Forest Mind is a video work that emerges from the artist’s longstanding interest in the human interaction with the natural world. In a series of recent art projects, she has shed light on the cosmology of Indigenous communities and their political struggle to keep their forests alive.
An instructional road trip clarifies how to prevent a baby from choking. The giver of said instructions communes with stray dogs along the ocean front. She builds seaside graveyards, petit and monumental sand mountains. She nourishes the sand graves with fresh breast milk.
Provincetown, Cape Cod.
A reconstructed 'landscape' inspired by a drive down 6A. The norm when driving of watching the landscape approaching and receding, and the side-show of dioramas.
–– Ken Kobland
This work was restored in 2022.
A two-part study of the self-sustaining lifestyle of a communal farm in Vermont.
A Yosemite gargoyle climbs two gothic arches.
This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.
Mono Lake and Yosemite Valley, in California, highlight this excursion into the constipated crevices of once highly-active fumeroles that splatttered magma and chunks of hot rock onto the Western landscape. Now the vents are blocked by eating disorders that rob our nation of its free-flowing and fertilizing heritage. We follow a woman as she sinks into a dark, inland sea of great natural beauty, unable to deposit her own organic pile into the rich mineral build-up that reaches skyward toward the creator who dreamt up this exquisite landscape.
The fear of bridges.
The Situated Cinema Commission Project for WNDX - Winnipeg’s Festival of Film and Video art
Director of photography: Eric Cinq-Mars
Consultant: Daniel Watchorn
Music: Frères Lumières
Design: Sébastien Aubin
This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.
"i am very grateful that my 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) series has shown internationally over the last couple years and is recognized by viewers, reviewers, critics, and curators as doing decolonizing work as a feminist project that queers and glitches the Western genre. 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) questions the quintessentially American Western in the forms of experimental films and games that are made from glitches and noise, pushing boundaries of legibility and tipping over threshold states of stability.
Craggy, ice-encrusted peaks soar skyward as blue lagoons lap incessantly to the drumbeats of big city behemoths hellbent on halibut and hashbrowns! The magic and grandeur of glacier-masked real estate is here for all to see and digest in this bountiful serving of natural delights.
Going Around In Circles continues Holt's interest in perception and point of view. A board with five circular holes is placed in front of the camera. The holes are covered and uncovered to reveal five people enacting a set of activities that involves walking between five spots and turning in circles.
Goodbye Thelma synthesizes footage from the 1991 film Thelma & Louise with footage of the author’s own making to create a mysterious, and at times disturbing, exploration of traveling alone. In contrast to the dramatic events of Thelma & Louise, this story is one of suspended fear, which inverts stunning vistas into unsettling and uncertain landscapes.
THE GREAT CURDLING is a Folk-Sci-Fi film. It’s a darkly comic musical exploring the feeling that collective reality is at tipping point. A middle-class family are adjusting to a new kind of happy, now they have consumed a transformative liquid technology that helps re-structure them from the inside.
The third in a film triptych, Lefkosia was shot from within UN controlled territory on the border between south Cyprus and the Turkish occupied North. Like the previous two parts, this episode explores the landscape’s composition along the current borders of Europe. It presents a silent camera traveling along a heavily guarded border, where even photography is forbidden without permission.
This title is only available on Radical Closure.
Ground Effect is an investigation of the constantly shifting, 80km long line in Israel, where rainfall amounts to less than 200mm a year on average. This line, which aligns with the global desert belt, cuts from the east, near the West Bank, to the west, near the Gaza strip. It is where I grew up, an area divided between industrial scale agriculture, nature preserves, ancient and recent ruins, Bedouin towns, encampments and olive groves, artificial pine forests planted on contested lands, rural Jewish communities, and military practice zones.
Here You Are Before the Trees is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
Here You Are Before the Trees traverses Indigenous presence in the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and the areas in-between. Each screen focuses on different homelands and their complex relationships with history, landscape, power and institutional means of oppression.
Set in East Berlin in 1977, this short experimental documentary interviews the Dadaist artist Hannah Höch as she reflects upon her experiences living and working during in 1920s Berlin. Höch compares the sociopolitical landscape of Berlin in the 1970s to its romanticised past of the Wiemar Era, while questioning the usefulness of nostalgia as an emotive tool.