Cinematic Artists

Unless otherwise noted, all works are video, color, and sound.

Craig Baldwin
Born in Oakland, California, 1952
Lives in San Francisco

Spectres of the Spectrum, 1999, 16mm film; 88 minutes

A hybrid of science fiction and thriller, with a strong documentary impulse as well, Spectres of the Spectrum tells of three generations of the Hacker family and their role in an underground rebellion against the "electromagnetic imperialism" perpetrated by communications corporations and the U.S. government. Baldwin constructed Spectres of the Spectrum out of found footage--archival footage, 1950s television shows, and other science fiction films. The fictional struggle of the characters against a pervasive and powerful global media organization makes clear how science has become ever more politicized.


Rebecca Baron
Born in Baltimore, 1968
Lives in New York

okay bye-bye, 1998, 16mm film; 39 minutes

In okay bye-bye, Rebecca Baron explores the relationship of history to memory, asking whether "image and memory can ever exist in the same space." okay-bye bye, which takes its title from the phrase shouted by Cambodian children to the U.S. ambassador as he fled Phnom Penh in 1975, combines spoken narrative, found Super-8 footage of an unidentified Cambodian man, and other partial images drawn from letters, memoirs, journalistic accounts, and conventional and official history. Using such a diverse range of sources, Baron questions whether something as monumental as the genocidal slaughter of Cambodians during the Pol Pot regime can be examined effectively with traditional methodologies.


Rolf Belgum
Born in Minneapolis, 1965
Lives in Minneapolis

Driver 23, 1998; 72 minutes

Rolf Belgum’s low-budget documentary tells the story of Dan Cleveland, a courier by day and an aspiring musician by night, and his efforts to succeed in the world of "progressive rock." Driver 23 is rooted in the traditions of direct cinema, with Belgum following Cleveland for more than three years and observing his struggles. Along the way, Belgum also highlights Cleveland’s fascinating obsessions and hobbies. The strength of the film lies in Belgum’s willingness to allow Cleveland’s dramas to drive the narrative with minimum intervention. But what makes the film truly poignant are the events, such as Cleveland’s marital problems, that neither subject nor filmmaker directly explicates.


Sadie Benning
Born in Milwaukee, 1973
Lives in Chicago

Flat Is Beautiful, 1998, black-and-white; 56 minutes

With Flat Is Beautiful, Sadie Benning continues the autobiographical impulse that defined her earlier films. Unlike her earlier first-person video shorts, Flat Is Beautiful takes a third-person look at an androgynous twelve-year-old girl who is undergoing the difficult transition from childhood to adolescence and facing questions about her gender and sexual identity. The two-dimensional masks that the characters wear become, in Benning’s words, a "metaphor for what is going on underneath." Shot with Benning’s signature PXL2000 "Pixelvision" camera, a now-discontinued children's camera made by Fisher-Price, Flat Is Beautiful also includes Super-8 and animated collage sections.


Robin Bernat
Born in Monroe, Louisiana, 1965
Lives in Atlanta

effortless: three préludes by Chopin, 1998; 3 minutes

For Robin Bernat, effortless: three préludes by Chopin explores "the manner in which we experience the dual nature of existence." Each of the three segments in the haiku-like sequence of videos is accompanied by a Chopin prélude. The slight slow motion and the limited elements in each frame confer a heightened significance to every detail. In the first segment, the wind in the leaves and the sprinkler’s graceful back-and-forth motion give the banal a newly seen beauty. In the final segment, the image of the sprinkler lingers well beyond the last piano note, leaving the viewer with a sense of the purely visual.


Jem Cohen with Fugazi
Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, 1962
Lives in Brooklyn, New York

Instrument, 1999, video, and 16mm and Super-8 film transfered to video; 115 minutes

Jem Cohen's Instrument is a cinematic portrait of the politically progressive punk band Fugazi, a group that adamantly refuses to work within the mainstream music industry. Shot over a period of ten years, Instrument mixes black-and-white and color, Super-8, 16mm, video, concert footage, fan interviews, and even an eighth-grade public access television show. Instrument shows significant input from the band, ranging from music composed specifically for the film, to participation in the actual editing process. Lacking the typical narrative of "rockumentaries," which build on triumph and failure, Instrument functions as a tacit yet strident critique of the corporatization of music.


Nathaniel Dorsky
Born in New York, 1943
Lives in San Francisco

Variations, 1992-98, 16mm film at 18fps, silent; 24 minutes

A montage of meticulously composed and edited images ranging from abstract to specific, from bustling city life to sublime nature, Nathaniel Dorsky’s Variations enters the realm of pure vision. Dorsky’s aim is to bring cinema back to "a direct connection with the visual world--the simplicity of seeing." Variations’s visual impact is so striking that we easily forget it is silent. Silence, however, is an integral and vital presence in Dorsky’s work. Moreover, Variations is projected at silent speed (18 frames-per-second, as opposed to the standard 24), the better to maintain what Dorksy has called "the flickering threshold of cinema’s illusion."


Theresa Duncan
Born in Detroit, 1968
Lives in New York

Jeremy Blake
Born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 1971
Lives in New York

The History of Glamour, 1998; 39 minutes

In collaboration with digital artist Jeremy Blake, Theresa Duncan wrote and directed The History of Glamour, a short, animated fiction film about the rise to fame of teen singer-songwriter Charles Valentine. The History of Glamour is a pseudo-"rockumentary" that explores both the dark and the potentially empowering implications of glamour. Along the way, the film critiques the cult of celebrity, most markedly in its parodies of the art and fashion worlds. The result is a hybrid work that creates a new film grammar, and a new glamour grammar, by combining the codes of fiction with reality, fashion with art, and animation with MTV.


Joe Gibbons
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, 1953
Lives in New York

Multiple Barbie, 1998, black-and-white; 9 minutes

In Multiple Barbie, Joe Gibbons plays a psychiatrist treating a Barbie doll afflicted with multiple personality disorder, which results in his murder when Barbie’s homicidal "Bobby" personality smashes his head in with a Barbie-sized hammer. Gibbons presents Multiple Barbie, shot with a Fisher-Price PXL2000 "Pixelvision" camera, as a fixed-camera, single-take film, but one periodically disrupted by close-ups of Barbie that appear to reflect her psychosis. Given the astonishing number of psychoactive and other drugs Gibbons has put Barbie on, as well as her muteness, one comes to see Barbie/Bobby’s actions as a rebellion against the Barbie stereotype--Barbie in revolt.


Jill Godmilow
Born in Philadelphia, 1943
Lives in South Bend, Indiana

What Farocki Taught, 1998, 16mm film; 30 minutes

Jill Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught is an exact remake of Harun Farocki’s 1969 German documentary entitled Inextinguishable Fire. Farocki’s original is a 23-minute, black-and-white, German-language film about Dow Chemical’s development of napalm B during the Vietnam War. Godmilow’s version, in color and in English, restages the original film shot-for-shot, often superimposing Inextinguishable Fire’s shots (complete with subtitles) over the newly staged scenes. What Farocki Taught challenges spectators to question conventional approaches to documentary while enabling Farocki’s original film to receive the American screening it was denied upon release.


Harmony Korine
Born in Bolinas, California, 1974
Lives in New York

Gummo, 1998, 35mm film; 95 minutes

Harmony Korine's film Gummo follows no particular narrative trajectory, nor does it end in any conclusive way. It presents a series of dispassionate vignettes--the effects of a tornado, two paint-sniffing adolescent boys, two teenage girls exploring beauty and sexuality--which are remarkable for their realism and lack of narrative rhythm. This meandering reflects Korine’s insistence, following French director Jean-Luc Godard, that a film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order. Korine has constructed a film in which the historical identity and daily concerns of Gummo's working-class characters are neither romanticized nor patronized.


Ruth Leitman
Born in Philadelphia, 1961
Lives in Atlanta

Alma, 1998, 16mm film; 94 minutes

Ruth Leitman’s documentary Alma can be read on three levels: as a portrait of an idiosyncratic Southern woman, Alma Thorpe, and her daughter’s discovery of dark family secrets; as an essay on the transition from disavowal to discovery; and as an exploration of humor as both denial and defense. The film belies the stereotype that working-class Southerners have little or no self-consciousness. Margie, the daughter, who co-produced Alma, is extraordinarily aware not only of the gap between her mother’s perception of life and its reality, but also--potentially--of the breach in her own perceptions. And Leitman offers neither clarification nor judgment about where the truth lies.


Les LeVeque
Born in Cortez, Colorado, 1952
Lives in New York

2 Spellbound, 1999, color and black-and-white; 8 minutes

2 Spellbound is a complex visual and aural document that bears the traces of twentieth-century cultural icons such as Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dalí, and Alfred Hitchcock. LeVeque cut down Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound to just under eight minutes, reversed every other frame, and added electronic dance music, prompting viewers to focus on Hitchcock's highly evocative Freudian themes of trauma and memory. The frame reversals generate what LeVeque describes as a "hallucination of transference," as characters mirror or are superimposed onto themselves or each other, becoming almost interchangeable. The result is a complex dance as surreal as the Dalí-designed dream sequence in the original film.


Sharon Lockhart
Born in Norwood, Massachusetts, 1964
Lives in Los Angeles

Teatro Amazonas, 1999, 35mm film; 40 minutes

Sharon Lockhart's photographs are replete with signs of cinematic narrative and sequence, while her films appear relatively static. Shot from fixed camera angles and void of drama, they attest to Lockhart's interest in the hypnotic minimalism of 1970s experimental film and Performance art. Teatro Amazonas was filmed from the stage of a 102-year-old opera house in Brazil. It observes the local indigenous and European population listening to a choral mass. The silence at the end of the mass is subsequently filled by sounds from the audience.


Anne Makepeace
Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, 1947
Lives in Santa Barbara, California

Baby, It's You, 1998, 16mm film; 56 minutes

In Baby It’s You, filmmaker Anne Makepeace points the camera toward herself and documents a year in which she and her husband attempt to have a baby. Combining traditional documentary techniques with sonogram and fiber-optic footage from fertility procedures, the film examines both the psychological and the physical traumas Makepeace endured. Intercut with the footage of modern reproductive technologies are interviews with family members and Makepeace’s revisitation of a decades-old decision to have an abortion. These narrative threads combine to create a compelling examination of a generation in the midst of redefining the contemporary family.


Errol Morris
Born in Hewlitt, New York, 1948
Lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, 1997, 35mm film; 82 minutes

Using a multinarrative approach, Errol Morris' Fast, Cheap & Out of Control weaves together four stories, whose only common themes are animals and obsession, in such a way that the spectator is able to make any number of connections among them. The film's aesthetic hovers somewhere between collage and pastiche, intermixing diverse elements such as stock footage, clips from old films, and animated cartoons. To circumvent documentary cinema's potential trap of exploiting the subject, Morris uses the Interrotron, a device he invented that permits an interviewee to look at his own image while simultaneously facing an interviewer.


Mandy Morrison
Born in New York, 1957
Lives in Brooklyn, New York

Desperado, 1997; 4 minutes

As the protagonist in Desperado, Mandy Morrison, dressed in a John Wayne mask and a gender-bending prosthesis, moves through a highly artificial Western landscape. This character, however, cannot embody the cowboy codes of heroism and masculinity endemic to the Western because of an overabundance, not a deficit, of sexuality. Though replete with the genre's visual vocabulary, Desperado's low-tech aesthetic and polygendered protagonist strip the Western of its familiarity to reveal an underlying ideology of conquest. Desperado simultaneously engages and resists its objects of investigation: gender, pop culture, consumerism, and the uniquely American ideology of Manifest Destiny.


Nic Nicosia
Born in Dallas, 1951
Lives in Dallas

Middletown, 1997, black-and-white; 15 minutes

In Middletown, a black-and-white, extended single-shot digital video, the camera repeatedly loops around Nic Nicosia’s suburban Dallas neighborhood, taking in events both mundane and bizarre. The video's elegantly unsettling surrealism derives from the intrusion of the odd onto the relentlessly normal street--all in one take. Tension builds between the circuitous repetition of the camera’s route and the unexpected progression of events. This tension exposes the conflict between the veneer of realism inherent to the unedited long-take aesthetic and the complex staging and choreography used to construct such a seamless environment.


Walid Ra'ad
Born in Chbanieh, Lebanon, 1967
Lives in Brooklyn, New York

The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, 1999; 18 minutes

Walid Ra'ad's The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs is a three-part video project investigating the possibilities and limits of writing a history of the Lebanese civil wars (1975-91). Each part of the series is a short, fake documentary presenting imaginary events constructed out of "innocent and everyday materials," such as photographs, household items, home movies, and video footage. Ra'ad's videos are "hysterical symptoms" that do not document what actually happened, but rather focus on the physical manifestations and effects of traumatic events. In a variety of small ways, the video asks a big question: How do we make sense of war?


Jennifer Reeder
Born in Columbus, Ohio, 1971
Lives in Chicago

Nevermind, 1999, 18 minutes

In Nevermind, Jennifer Reeder lip-syncs the rock band Nirvana's song "Smells Like Teen Spirit," an anthem for so-called Generation X-ers from the band’s breakthrough album, also titled Nevermind. Reeder’s performance is, as she puts it, "a non-narrative post-punk aria...about the manifestation of gender and rebellion in media culture." She slows down the song and decenters her own performing image, sometimes even drifting partly out of frame. By destabilizing the image, which makes it harder for the spectator to fix its iconic value, Reeder both seizes and critiques the conventionally male-gendered and phallic power of the rock star, a power whose patriarchal identity is often camouflaged by counterculture rebelliousness.

®^TMark
Incorporated in the United States, 1991

Bringing IT to YOU!, 1998; 11 minute excerpt

®^TMark (pronounced "art-mark") is a multimedia project that was incorporated as a for-profit corporation in 1991. An anti-corporate corporation, ®^TMark designed the 40-minute video Bringing IT to YOU! to promote its "creative subversion" of the dominant corporate structure. The video adopts presentation techniques ubiquitous in corporate culture--PowerPoint demonstrations, press releases, and news footage--to detail ®^TMark's past corporate sabotage. Its expository voice-over boasts that ®^TMark is the "industry leader in bringing subversive and blacklisted cultural productions into the marketplace." Using the protective legal loopholes enjoyed by major corporations, ®^TMark turns business practice against itself.

®^TMark is also represented in the 2000 Biennial by a website, rtmark.com.

Elisabeth Subrin
Born in Boston, 1964
Lives in Brooklyn, New York

Shulie, 1997, 16mm film; 37 minutes

Elisabeth Subrin’s Shulie is a precise shot-for-shot, line-for-line re-creation of a little-known documentary on Shulamith Firestone made in 1967, three years before Firestone published her pivotal feminist text, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Unlike many "mockumentaries," which open with a knowing wink to the audience, Shulie delivers itself "straight," reserving until the end the fact that it is a re-creation. Viewers’ responses to the film are forced into radical revision as the end credits roll. Ultimately, it may be more accurate to say that Shulie is less a mock documentary than a portrait of a documentary.


Chris Sullivan
Born in Pittsburgh, 1960
Lives in Chicago

Consuming Spirits (Part One), 1997-2000, animation; 40 minutes

In Consuming Spirits (Part 1), Chris Sullivan merges styles, techniques, and stories in an episodic narrative that explores the artist's childhood experiences in Pittsburgh with his family's Catholicism, alcoholism, and "apparent dysfunction." Sullivan uses three differently animated visual worlds to denote past, present, and the intermingling of past and present. Through visuals and a soundtrack that juxtaposes silence, dialogue, and bits of talk-radio monologues, viewers are lulled into the cadences and rhythms of the familiar while concurrently reminded of the dangers lying just under the surface.


Tran, T. Kim-Trang
Born in Saigon, 1966
Lives in Los Angeles

ocularis: Eye Surrogates, 1997, color and black-and-white; 21 minutes

Tran’s Blindness Series focuses on visuality and its metaphors. ocularis: Eye Surrogates, the fourth video in the series, examines the presence and effects of surveillance technology. Using a kaleidoscope of footage types and sounds, Tran brings to light the fear, eroticism, and boredom that surveillance technology can elicit. The latest video in the series, ekleipsis, centers on a group of hysterically blind Cambodian women residing in California and investigates the history of hysteria and of the Cambodian civil war. Both films are powerful essays on what and how we see, but they are even more compelling for the questions they raise about what it is we--by choice, by force, or by necessity--do not see.


Ayanna U’Dongo
Born in South Bend, Indiana, 1952
Lives in Oakland, California

Aborigitron: Affairs of the Hybrid Heart, 2000, color and black-and-white; approximately 30 minutes

Ayanna U’Dongo’s videos investigate sexuality, ethnic origins, and technique. In Aborigitron: Affairs of the Hybrid Heart, U’Dongo explores the complexities of black love. While a male voice-over reflects on the nature of love, we see the infamous videotape of Rodney King's beating and scenes from the 1992 Los Angeles riots that broke out after the police officers who attacked King were acquitted. These journalistic images are intercut with more formally composed footage from both nonfiction and fiction film. The polyphony of sounds, voices, and images reflects on the connections between love and hate, powerlessness and frustration.


Yvonne Welbon
Born in Chicago, 1962
Lives in Chicago

Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100, 1999, color and black-and-white; 60 minutes

Yvonne Welbon’s films often use autobiography as a starting point for an exploration of the tensions between official history and personal recollection. In Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100, Welbon combines the personal and the political in a biography of Ruth Ellis, the oldest living African-American lesbian. A "hybrid documentary," the film combines archival materials with narrative reenactments. At its center is Ellis, a lively centenarian who narrates her own history, as well as a century of American history. Living with Pride is an inspirational portrait of an individual who has faced triple oppression--as a lesbian, as an African-American, and as a woman--yet who never presents herself as a victim.