Film Format: 16mm

  • Didre Novo

    A blistering life-or-death run through cinema’s graphic jungle. “Didre Novo”, the second act of the “Shadows and Caves” triptych, establishes the second set of scientific criteria the language of movement on screen. Is it possible to perceive sound as movement? The perception of depth is the cave path ahead of us, and the sun’s light is beginning to diminish with every footstep we take.

  • Pepper Steak

    This is the final confrontation with uncertainty. The sheer terror and joy of tomorrow’s newspaper – delivered today! In this, the third and final act of the “Shadows and Caves” triptych, the social and scientific dialectic between form, texture, and abstract and representational images puts forward the question: does one plus one equal three?

  • Son of Dada

    A subtle little narrative; an abstracted interlude between sound and silence, motion and stability, and light and darkness. “Son of Dada” is the first act of the 16mm “Shadows and Caves” triptych that were produced between 1982-1984. In the first act, letters become forms, having been stripped from the context of words and language, and ultimately, from the logic of sentences. What remains? Pure cinema, perhaps … language-written … on the threshold of liberty and silence within the grips of suspense.

  • What These Ashes Wanted

    “What These Ashes Wanted” is one of those films that forces you to rethink the medium. There are pictures, yes, and movement, light and sound. There is however, no narrative, and yet there is emotion. “What These Ashes Wanted” is the result of several years of hard work coming to terms with the traces and fragments of a life that has ended but whose presence persists. The film draws on images and sounds gathered over the course of Hoffman’s relationship with Marian McMahon, from their early meetings in the mid-eighties to her unexpected death from cancer and beyond. The three…

  • Dance

    This film begins with points of light defining a dark space out of which a female dancer (Vivienne Palmer) emerges dressed in a semi-transparent green dress. Her dance is visually “echoed” by close-up superimpositions of her arms, legs and feet, and then later by her distant figure seeming to mimic and/or perhaps to control her fore-grounded, sometimes black-lit, image. She often pauses thoughtfully in her dance, breaks step, walks away, etc. defining the perimeters of the dance. Finally she appears naked, midst dance, and takes heraldic stance at end.

  • Alpha Expedition, The

    A tale told with a profusion of animated cut-outs, and the occasional intrusion of an authorial hand or head. Entering Deep Space, a team of scientists has been given the mission of discovering the Alpha Point, that point where our universe began in the Big Bang. Depression and elation flow through them, childhood memories haunt them, boredom drags at their extended lives.

  • Persian Series 1 – 5

    In the spirit of the Roman, Arabic, Egyptian and Babylonian Series, these hand-painted films attempt to imagine the kind of Persian visual thinking which created their calligraphy, miniatures and aesthetic designs in general. 1) This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes interspersed with darkness, then becomes lit, lightning-like, by sharp multi-colored twigs of shape, all resolving into shapes of decay. 2) Multiple thrusts and then retractions of oranges, reds, blues, and the flickering, black, textural dissolves suggesting an amalgam approaching script. 3) Dark, fast-paced symmetry in mixed…

  • Preludes 1 – 6

    “Preludes 1 – 6” is comprised of six hand-painted and double-frame printed sections of 16mm film: 1) Turquoise and maroon-toned thin lines of paint are interspersed with variously toned circular “water-marks” of blotched paint giving way to multi-colored brush strokes which then thin to something akin to the beginning. 2) Interplay of toned rectangular shapes, vertical and horizontal and diagonal lines in juxtaposition with hardened darker shapes, which, gradually shift tone and lighten until ending on thin blues. 3) Many white interruptive frames and absolutely straight-edged multi-colored lines amidst “clouds” of color finally thickened into blobs with lengthy white (clear…

  • Jesus Trilogy and Coda

    “The Jesus Trilogy and Coda” is composed of the following four parts: 1) “In Jesus’ Name” presents an almost continuous fluttering movement midst the complexity of multiple small shapes in mostly autumnal colors, like unto a wind moving through fall leaves. Embedded in this skein (almost as if branches of this scene) are the dark lines ephemerally (almost invisibly) composing the conventional face of Christ. 2) The second film, entitled “The Baby Jesus” begins with pearl-pinks and gold-flecked shapes midst “garden greens.” It proceeds to contrasting desert scenery slashes of sand-yellow under black “sky,” with ephemeral suggestions of animal locomotion.…

  • Boys Next Door, The

    As these local boys remind you in this three-part work, you can never be sure what really goes on next door.