scores and sequences at filmforum

i am super excited that in conjunction with my current exhibition at LACE,  Filmforum and LACE are collaborating on an evening of my film works on sunday august 5th, 7:30 pm, at the spielberg theater at the egyptian theater in hollywood.

i will be showing the first film i ever made, the dreams of ophelia from 1989 - shot on super 8, with a soundtrack recorded live to video tape using a yamaha synthesizer!

many of the works to be screened have never been shown in public, and the evening will also include a few recent 16mm works that include hand drawn elements. i will also improvise soundtracks to a few of the silent films.

it is a pretty small theater, so i would suggest getting tickets sooner than later...

for more info click here

here's some info on the dreams of ophelia:

the dreams of ophelia was shot in my grandparents backyard, mostly around the area of their swimming pool. it was deeply inspired by maya deren’s meshes in the afternoon - and in many ways the film is an unabashed love letter to deren’s film. in the mid-1980’s i had managed to see festivals at lacma of surrealist films and silent german expressionist films - and i responded deeply to the genres - but i was also very invested in abstraction. somehow deren’s films didn’t have the same kind of distance as films like sunrise or andalusian dog. what i mean by distance, is that meshes in the afternoon looks like a film that was shot in an afternoon by one or two people, which suggested it might be possible to  approach making a film.

i, of course, ended up shooting this film over an afternoon by myself, and i am certain that without a crappy super 8 camera (the equivalent of a polaroid), i probably never would’ve tried to make a film, as i still have little patience when working with moving image or sound for the inordinate amount of time it takes to set up high-end gear. i’m clearly a point and shoot (slow pointing, fast shooting) filmmaker.

an important facet of my film is the inserted scenes of white leader with black sharpie lines (drawings?). looking at the film for the first time in over 20 years, i was stunned that i had forgotten these moving drawn lines - which ended up being my primary mode of filmmaking once that super 8 camera died in 2003 (and in fact, i never made a super 8 film again).

the soundtrack was built from a yamaha synthesizer called a tx 81z, which was a box with preprogrammed sounds that could be triggered with a midi-keyboard, and i ran the sounds through a few guitar pedals to make sound a bit more skronky.

in looking for the master of the soundtrack, i realized that either through laziness or some idea that video tape was safer than audio tape, i performed the soundtrack live to video while watching the film... so that the “master recording” of the sound exists only on a vhs tape. the soundtrack, a document of a live performance (to an audience of one), created while watching the film.