Experimental Film

This is a gaze of the body and a notion of spectator that the 90´s decade constructed, this is the audiovisual legacy of the 90's for our actual audiovisual control world.

Part of the paraconsistent sequence series.

A reflection on the phenomenon of the touring musician.

"I shot this film with a 16mm wind-up Bolex, and the 25th Anniversary tour of Dutch band The Ex, when they embarked on a 'convey tour' with about 25 performing comrades. If half the battle is getting there and half the battle is joy, then the other half is madness. I thank all of the musicians who float in and out — of the film, in particular, and my life, in general."

— Jem Cohen

Soundtrack music: Guitargument, an Andy Moor and Mia Clarke improvisation, arranged and edited by Jem Cohen.

"When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes. You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory. And then you'll close your eyes to the facts." These words are spoken at the beginning of this agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: "When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories."

An all-over textile constructed under the spell of Arachne, an audiovisual textile in five parts that exposes a web of raids in construction over the american houses, a landscape of protests under the webs of segmented time, the entrails of the american factory in movement through the endless american party.

In these lunar paths the moon is the celestial body of brilliant colors that crosses with its cyclical and mythical dance the dark space of our present time and in whose dance the moon enters, moves away, approaches and lies on itself in a cycle rhythmic of celestial agitation. These are the shamanic ways of the moon. Part of the Lunar Films series.

The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past. Evoking the ritualism of Aztec cosmology, this experience recalls lumbreras – circular excavation holes in archeological sites, such as the recently found Tzompantli (skulls ceremonial rack) at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The use of obsidian crystal as a nuclear filter in the chamber is also essential.

Aquarius is a film about horoscopes and hope, and coping with everyday life.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

Part of the paraconsistent sequence series.

“Drawing on the ancient Nahuatl concept of the animating soul or life force, Tonalli engages the ritualistic powers of the cinema, summoning fire, flowers, and many moons into a frenetic and mesmerizing in-camera collage. Here, amid thickly swirling images and textured abstractions, the gods of creation and fertility manifest, dissolving into iridescent colors and dense, corporeal rhythms.” NYFF59

Stasi is an audiovisual recall of the political and social substrates that sustain an actual system of images. Stasi is a recall of a system of images that, even now, dominates the global gaze of the world.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

Lumbreras is the historical and archeological place of the bones, ruins and detritus. A window thought time, an ancestral rhythm of the audiovisual materials.

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. 

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

This is a kinetic tribute to Sylvia Plath at a time of the pandemic vortex, a dissemination of suspended bodies in the liminal space. Haunted figures in the Capitalocene era.

In this 2006 interview, filmmaker Jem Cohen discusses his early interest in art, his family’s welcome antipathy towards commercialization, and his unconventional, anti-mainstream film practice. In particular, Cohen discusses his film This is a History of New York, and how this piece exemplifies his interest in the “territory of sensation” rather than simple visual descriptiveness. Cohen concludes by discussing the role of archiving in his practice, and how compulsive documentation of the quotidian and unexceptional can result in the empowerment of the everyday.

A Kafkian vision of the New World. The arrival of Karl Rossman to the contemporary Babylon under the spell of the paranoid avant-garde. Kinetic coexistence of the archaic forms in dissolution.

These are the ghosts of a haunted civilization, a culture of progress that hides the social and political horror behind the Olympic Games. These are the haunted figures in the Capitalocene era. A sinister dance of macabre abstraction. Part of the Hauntology series.

This sensualist's dream follows Louise Brooks look-alike Rodney O'Neal Austin on his search for the Beloved. From the cabaret to opium dens and dancing graces this homage to early sound film explores a world teeming with the mysteries of longing and death. Music by Trance Mission and Minnie Pearl Necklace.

Moving towards an unknown destination, a group of anonymous passengers float through an unidentified landscape. Built from Cohen’s archive documenting his travels, the film can be seen as a curious parable. The film's subheading refers to the Old Testament, Daniel chapter 11, verse 40:  “And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.” 

The Diaspora Suite

Filmed on location in Salvador, Brazil (the last city in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery) and Harlem, NY ( an international stronghold of the African Diaspora), Many Thousands Gone draws parallels between a summer afternoon on the streets of the two cities. A silent version of the film was given to jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee to use an interpretive score. The final film is the combination of the images and McPhee’s real time “sight reading” of the score.

“In The Girl Chewing Gum a commanding voiceover appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional; he only describes—not prescribes—the events that take place before him. Smith embraced the ‘spectre of narrative’ (suppressed by structural film) to play word against picture and chance against order.

This is the hauntological image of the sacred Mesoamerican snake. The contemporary flickering of his shamanic presence. Part of the Hauntology series.

In this interview with Melika Bass, a Chicago-based filmmaker and installation artist, Camilo Restrepo discusses how he became a filmmaker and how he chooses to document his native home of Colombia. After pursuing a degree in painting, Restrepo got a “regular job” but found himself pulled back towards creative pursuits. Equipped with a Super 8 camera, he set out to document his home honestly, and without an excess of materials.