"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.
In two parts:
One – a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Petersboro, New Hampshire with the seasons passing.
Two – an experiment with green-screen chroma-key and a play between 2-D and 3-D space.
–– Ken Kobland
This work was restored in 2022.
Turning an ordinary object into a mystical experience, Life Saver Mandala is a short meditation on disintegration. This piece was made in collaboration with Peter Ivers.
A young man recovering from emotional wounds, defiantly re-enters the outside world that welcomes his return with all its abundant miracles.
sometimes, among the rubble of the endless forgetting and re-membering of our personal and collective histories, an artifact emerges. a clue, a document. hard evidence. maybe we struggle to contextualize these fragments, maybe we marry them to other fragments and build new narratives in an attempt to squint back through the past and explain to ourselves how we got here. the information is a short exclamation mark of a video, fragments asserting themselves as whole auto-ethnographies.
VIVA ÁGUA is a meditation on the philosophical work entitled ÁGUA VIVA written by Clarice Lispector in 1973. The film reflects on Lispector’s interior experimental monologue on the “instant-now” of time, the discomforts of language which are “beyond thought” and the harmonious dissonant reminders and remainders of that “sometimes what is seen is ineffable.”
Director and Editor: Cynthia Madansky
Cinematographer: Michele Paradisi
Performance: Joanne Burke
Voice: Livia Marques
Music: Zeena Parkins
... it's not what it used to be.
a personal album and homage, in my own way, to an influential film ... a closet-cleaning scrapbook of beloved photos and oddities ‐ and the gift of fire.
–– Ken Kobland
Repurposing an ancient confessional video diary made about 40 years ago, this 11-minute narrative creates a poignant and humorous conversation where both ‘selves’ question, enlighten, and warn one another about things in life that really matter.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
American sculptor and land artist Robert Smithson made art as a meditation on transition and change. Perhaps best known for his Spiral Jetty, an earthen berm that sits, occasionally submerged, in the Great Salt Lake of northern Utah, Smithson understood that his earthworks would be subject to natural and human forces and processes: erosion, rising water tables, and changing land use.
A huge isolated rock in the midst of the desert in Australia: Ayers Rock. I produced two contrasting films around this rock: Moments at the Rock was shot with an amateur video camera, amazing color changes, and time-lapsed compressed sequences; A Rock in the Light, edited with the music of Haruyuki Suzuki, is more visually structured, following the passing of time from the sunrise to the sunset.
--Takahiko iimura
"Takahiko iimura's Air's Rock is an ultimate landscape film."
--Katsuhiro Yamagucki, artist and author
“I could do wonders if I didn't have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.”
-- Ponce de Léon
A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to the power structures they are inherently part of. Each woman extends her reach to a subject she is outside of. Vever grew out of the abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren’s reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti.
A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke Loa, or god.
American sculptor and land artist Robert Smithson made art as a meditation on transition and change. Perhaps best known for his Spiral Jetty, an earthen berm that sits, occasionally submerged, in the Great Salt Lake of northern Utah, Smithson understood that his earthworks would be subject to natural and human forces and processes: erosion, rising water tables, and changing land use.
The dog in dreamland? Or at least one of us is…
–– Ken Kobland
“I could do wonders if I didn't have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.”
-- Ponce de Léon
The time is now! The present can be replaced in real time. Not quite yet by the future, but very easily by the past? eteam's video Track One is a replay of such time disjuncture. As they keep following the memory of a yellow cab that keeps driving through the now deserted streets of Taipei, their pastime augments itself with a mesmerizing sense of reality.
The Diaspora Suite
Oscillating between a street festival in Philadelphia, the slave forts and capitol city of Ghana, and the New Jersey shore, American Hunger explores the relationship between personal experience and collective histories. American fantasies confront African realities. African realities confront America fantasies.
Dani Leventhal gathered material for 9 minutes each day, then condensed it down to this 16-minute video montage of impressions which has a cumulative effect, accessed and read differently depending on the mental connections the viewer makes. It is presented as short scenes: documentation of the quotidian, on-camera monologues, and performative or expressive shots that are constructed. The material, while mostly generated as a diary, is heterogeneous enough to include just about any kind of footage.
Partially Buried explores a web of genealogical traces. In this work the artist probes the notion of sites of memory as well as site-specific work by focusing on the location of Kent, Ohio. Partially Buried references the year 1970 during which the artist Robert Smithson produced his site-specific work, Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University. By chance the mother of the child in the video was present also in Kent State in May of that year, studying experimental music. In May of 1970, four students were shot while attending a rally protesting the U.S.
The artist follows the British government's advice while self-isolating at home during the COVID-19 lockdown.
"Superimposing the stories of two women—the filmmaker’s late grandmother and the amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin—Home When You Return explores the psychogeographies of mourning through a variety of modes, from documentary to melodrama. Emptied and put up for sale following its matriarch’s passing, the family home becomes the site of a winding tour through polymorphic representations of the past in media and memory." - NYFF Currents
