Wednesday, April 28, 2021

The Devil's Haircut



Two variations of the same modernist haircut forty years apart. Each changed the direction of culture. Made of footage from Pandora's Box, A Hard Day's Night, and The Conformist.

The Devil's Haircut
2021
3:00

 

 


Sunday, November 29, 2020

The Flapper

After a devastating WWI came Modernism in full force, and with it the modern woman who bobbed her hair, danced to jazz, and expected the same independence as men. Along with the new “wild” woman known as flappers came a new cultural trope, the vamp, the dangerous woman, later to be called femme fatale. These women were usually pared with women of traditional simple virtues for contrast. Vamps dressed in the latest modern clothes, casted spells on men, and sometimes tempted them to commit murder. The man who was “bewitched” was forgiven, and the blame went to the modern woman.

Made of footage from Night of the Hunter, Metropolis, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and Orphans of the Storm. 

The Flapper
2020
4:00


Monday, August 10, 2020

French Asylum



In 1792 my 4th great grandfather Antoine Lefevre brought his family to America to escape the chaos of the French Revolution.  Rather than opting for the shelter of another city, they traded their comfortable Parisian home for land in the uncut wilderness west of the Appalachians mountains. Other Parisians followed and created a colony of exiled nobles, clergy, and bourgeoisie all living in very roughed conditions seventy-five miles from the nearest town. They called their colony French Asylum, or Azilum. 


2020
09:40

Monday, November 11, 2019

WITCH


In 1692 my 7th great grandfather, Constable Orlando Bagley arrested his 70 yr old neighbor Susannah (Goody) Martin for being a witch.

2019
4:22

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

ANTARCTICA


Antarctica is a collage of scratched and erased footage from world cinema, news reels, advertising, TV game shows, cartoons, and home movies marking the path of our own destruction. The protagonist is Antoine Doinel of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows who is still running from his damaged past. He is in exile, cut off from any livable place to call home. The polar ice on the continent of Antarctica is melting, but at the same time the location is an unattainable refuge, relatively untouched wilderness, a cool escape from a hot planet. His journey unfolds as a visual dreamscape through the history of cinema marked by ghosts who have been left behind.

2018
44 mins.

Saturday, August 11, 2018

JUDY'S WORLD


For Judy Barton, Hitchcock's common girl.

Made from footage of Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Rear Window, and The Ring.

Alfred Hitchcock, born in 1899 came of age with cinema and flappers, the reckless modern women who bobbed their hair, and smoked and drank as freely as men.




Wednesday, January 24, 2018

WAR TO END WAR: Joie de Guerre

War to End War: Joie de Guerre, 2018

Featuring manipulated footage from Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory & G. W. Pabst’s West Front 1918, as well as excerpts from Johann Strauss’ Emperor Waltz. The waltz was composed in honor of the newly formed alliance of Austria’s emperor Franz Joseph I and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Joie de guerre (joy of war) is a conundrum best illustrated by a quote by Henry Kissinger, “By war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.”



Wednesday, October 18, 2017

ELDORADO


Made of footage from Glengarry Glenross, Bonanza, news footage from three major hurricanes and forest fires occurring during production, and news footage of the 2010 BP oil spill.

El Dorado, the fabled lost city of gold is also the name of a luxury Cadillac, and first prize in David Mamet's Glengarry Glenross real estate competition. Bonanza was a term used by miners to describe a large vein or deposit of ore. The fictional Ponderosa Ranch of the TV show Bonanza was near the Comstock Lode discovery that began the silver rush of 1859.

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
-Ronald Wright

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

BEWARE OF FLOYD THE BARBER



A cautionary tale of repressed tensions in small town America, Beware of Floyd the Barber is based on footage from the classic TV program The Andy Griffith Show, and inspired by Hitchcock and the Nirvana song Floyd the Barber. Set in small town America, The Andy Griffith Show featured an eccentric group of likable characters, and evoked nostalgia for an idealized simpler time.




Friday, June 30, 2017

NEW FILMS FOR ANTARCTICA

I've been working hard on new films that will be included in my first feature Antarctica. Each of these short films hopefully will be shown in film festivals and micro-cinemas while the feature is being developed. Projected date for the feature is 2019 or 2020.

Still from Boating Song,  2016, 04:18

Still from Stagecoach, 2016, 05:20

Still from MEOW, 2017, 03:21

Still from The Starving Class, 2017, 02:57








Thursday, September 22, 2016

ANTARCTICA

Little Jean-Pierre Leaud from 400 Blows is still running.  Only the frames of film that contained him have been hollowed and scratched. He is still running to escape a damaged past, but the damage has multiplied and exploded into a post apocalyptic dystopia. He is no longer running to an ocean he has never seen, but to the only hospitable location left. The melting continent of Antarctica.

Antarctica is the first chapter in what will become a feature length experimental film. Each chapter will be self contained, but together they will create an epic journey across erased and scratched frames of cinematic history.



Tuesday, November 17, 2015

ELECTION YEAR

A meditation on politics and the political beast formed by footage of the first nationally televised debate. The debate is known for displaying their differences through the power of appearances, but news accounts also claim they presented remarkably similar agendas. They both emphasized national security, the threat of communism, the need to strengthen the U.S. military, and the importance of building a brighter future for America.

Friday, July 3, 2015

TALL TREES IN MARSEILLE

Tall Trees, a film about a 1914 bank robbery in Sedro-Wooley, Washington will have its European/ French premiere at Festival Images Contre Nature in Marseille. Nine photos from a scrapbook my father kept about his father Emrys Hughes, pictured with the gun tell the story of the fate of the robbers.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

LUCKY AT EXPERIMENTS IN CINEMA

Experiments in Cinema turns 10 this year, and it seems that Bryan Konefsky has had his hands tattooed for the event with pause and play buttons. This gives you an idea of his dedication to the festival, and filmmaking in general. My film LUCKY will be in the opening day line up, and I couldn't be happier. There's a great list of films and filmmakers spread out for the whole week of festivities.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

EXquisite Corpse Cinema Travels

EXquisite Corpse Cinema, a program of experimental films I commissioned for EXcinema is traveling this month. Today on January 14th it screened in Newcastle, UK. On the 25th it will go to Ruma, Serbia, then Belgrade on the 28th. On January 30th I will travel to San Francisco to present it at Artists' Television Access. Here is a trailer for for it. My contribution is Tall Trees.


Sunday, December 7, 2014

Tall Trees at EXquisite Corpse Cinema

On Tuesday December 9th my latest film will premiere in an exquisite corpse program at Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle. Tall Trees is based on photos from a family scrapbook recording the search for bandits after a bank robbery that took place in 1914 in Sedro-Wolley, Washington State. My grandfather (second from the left) was a member of a posse sent to capture the bandits who attempted to escape into Canada. Until recently all I knew about the robbery was the text written on nine photos documenting the event.



Thursday, November 20, 2014

How to Draw Clouds in Maastricht

Out There is a two part exhibit in The Netherlands. The first part was from Oct. 10th- Nov. 9th in Maastricht. This is a photo of How to Draw Clouds shown on the streets of Maastricht. The second part of the exibit will be in Rotterdam in February. The Rotterdam info isn't on their website yet, but it will be soon.

Friday, October 17, 2014

LUCKY AT ANTIMATTER

Lucky will have its Canadian premiere tomorrow night at Antimatter Film Festival in Victoria BC. It looks like a very good program as usual and the title of the 9:00 program is "Close the Lid, Gently".

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

How to Draw Clouds at Out There

How to Draw Clouds will be included in Out There starting October 10th in Maastrich. The following is from their website.

"The two-part exhibition Out There with venues in Maastricht (October / November 2014) and Rotterdam (February 2015).  Set up in collaboration with the Dutch Photography Museum in Rotterdam, is showing present-day landscape images by contemporary artists who work with various media such as video, photography and ‘net art’. Distributed over two exhibition zones and two cities 50 artworks are put on display that are part of the 500-year-old tradition of landscape art and at the same time stretch and make current the traditional frames of meaning through new techniques and views.

From the 17th-century Hollandse Meesters (Dutch Masters) until the beginning of the 20th century a ‘landscape art work’ has always been a momentous representation of the culture of which the work was part. The landscape painters not only presented their views of nature, they also captured relevant changes within that culture. In his book Filosofie van het landschap (Philosophy of the Landscape) (1970) philosopher Tom Lemaire argues that landscape art has lost its relevance as image carrier of a culture and that the 20th-century representations of the landscape in painting and photography are merely iterations of past moves and no longer incite new insights.
Due to the rise of digital technology and media at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries fine art and the ‘landscape genre’ have undergone a radical development. The ways in which 21st-century man observes and interprets the world and gathers information has fundamentally changed.

In Out There contemporary video projections and video installations are matched with the latest digital landscape photography and computer-generated artworks that bear direct links to social media, Google Maps, Google Earth, Streetview, GPS, satellite images, security camera’s, webcams, flickr and Instagram. The omnipresent and ‘makeable’ image forms the basis of new and exciting landscape works. The world today is fragmented and highly dispersed and hence requires different visualisations, interpretations and explanations.

By means of moving images, slide shows, stop motion or digital editing present-day moving and ‘still’ landscape works address social, political, ecological or ethical issues and thematize notions of time, standstill and movement. The myriad images that make up the collective memory of art history are used to tell new, meaningful narratives. Narratives about how we relate to the rural and urban landscapes and the image culture of today."

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

September Screenings

Still from Everyone I Have Ever Known, 2007


I have a couple screenings coming up soon. On Saturday the 20th Other Cinema in San Francisco will screen Yugoslavian Home Movies. Earlier this year in May they premiered my newest film Lucky. Yugoslavian Home Movies was made of footage gathered from a residency at Academic Film Center in Belgrade, Serbia last year. On Tuesday the 23rd EXcinema will screen one of my early films made in 2007, Everyone I Have Ever Known. This film is written and narrated by Seattle poet Larry Crist.