Experimental Film

8 stereoscopic slides taken to the jk-104 optical printer, shot frame by frame, by hand. This is the first hand processed color film I've made. The slides were found at a thrift store in Milwaukee, WI in 2009. They are of Cuba between 1948 and 1950 taken by an army officer while accompanied by his family. Their touristic gaze is reclaimed, by fragmenting their photographs into new possibilities of the frame, and reviving the bodies that may have perished by the revolution in 1952.

During my stint as an entry-level acquisitions scout at a now-defunct art house distribution company, I amassed a small collection of VHS tapes from a vast pool of unsolicited submissions. By the standards of the art house canon, these were very bad movies, but I adored them for the sincerity of their intention. Bits and pieces of these movies became source material for a number of the videos on this compilation (Teenagers, Hymn Of Reckoning, Fantasy Suite).

The Politics of Breathing: Tear Gas.

Planetary battle over the porous body of the earth. This is the battle of the Earth.

“Spellbeamed uses the acts of translation and transcription to amplify the questions: ”what is a score?” and “what kind of musicalities can be transmitted through extended ideas of scoring?” The inspiration for the piece was the archival collection of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. The Benjamin Archive is a collection of texts, lists, commentaries, scraps, markings, dreamy musings, constellations, word fragments, toys, postcards and books.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT/SUMMARY: This film centers around one performance, when Holland-based musicians, The Ex, visited New York to play a concert. This performance is intercut with city scenes, first from Amsterdam and then New York, of construction sites, street life, and protests against the Iraq war and the Bush administration. The construction site scenes relate to the band's dedication to music as a realm for collaborative building and creative destruction.

"We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are happy?"

-- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Pandora is one who communicates to the human world the powers of the night. These are glimpses of her visions.

The horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. A metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. A place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart.

An example of what Reeves terms “video poetics,” layered images of a deserted village in the Spanish countryside play counterpoint to poetry by Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda. Using slick production techniques, Reeves marks the passing of time and human presence with a video transparency effect. What we see is a ghost of what was. Reeves’s precise editing makes for an extraordinarily fluid tape, as images seem to fly through the landscape, through past, present and future.

Undefeated is about mobility and immobility, or just trying to stay warm. Featuring DeCarrio Couley shadowboxing to the rhythm of a hand–cranked Bolex.

Cast: DeCarrio Couley, James Everson.

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

This suite is a set of circular and fragmented compositions, in which a rhythmic and haunted dance hides an eroded lunar landscape. The microscopic rubble of our contemporary civilization. Part of the Lunar Films series.

Here, a double morphology of conversion forces us to think about the trance of non-reconciliation, outburst and trance that go through the centuries of colonial violence until reaching us in the tension of an audiovisual disjunction: visible and enunciable. On the one hand the museum, habitat of barbarism, on the other hand the voice, place and body of the furious testimonial. Religious conversion that conveys communal violence. Archaeological conversion that imposes object immobility.

This film was made from The New York Times newspaper articles. The semi-automated animation process resulted in sentence recombinations that sometimes made sense while randomly emphasizing certain words and images.

The computer animation was transferred to one 100ft roll of 16mm Tri-X reversal film and then hand-processed. The reversal negative is the original.

Producer/ Director: Sabine Gruffat
Hand Processing: Matthew Kelson

The Pyramid used to be a mountain.

"In the film, images of plants, rocks and occasional mountaintops flicker by so quickly they almost evade perception. Extreme colour-tinted close-ups and the use of a rhythmic, drum-forward jazz soundtrack create an effect of a syncopated collage of geometric forms. The collective seems to call into question the audience’s ability to ascertain the significance – whether historical or geographical – of the vaguely identified, eroded sites presented."

–Ela Bittencourt, Frieze

Madi plays an interactive on-line computer game in the privacy of her apartment. Wearing a computer corset that stores her programs in a "Garden Interface", she propels her go-go cowgirl construct WANDA through the game world, encountering an assortment of logged-on players and game identities who trick and confuse her. An aggressive male character WANG logs on, and inserts his cold architecture into her coordinates, draining the power in her corset. His expanding architecture threatens to overtake her Garden Reservoir.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

As regional character disappears and corporate culture homogenizes our surroundings, it's increasingly hard to tell where you are. In Chain, malls, theme parks, hotels and corporate centers worldwide are joined into one monolithic contemporary "superlandscape" that shapes the lives of two women caught within it. One is a corporate businesswoman set adrift by her corporation while she researches the international theme park industry. The other is a young drifter, living and working illegally on the fringes of a shopping mall.

This is the gaze that is reflected in the dark obsidian mirror.

The Diaspora Suite

Filmed on location in Harlem (NY) and Ethiopia, Forged Ways oscillates between the first person account of a filmmaker, a man navigating the streets of Harlem, and the day to day life in the cities and villages of Ethiopia.

This is the burial hymn for thousands of souls in anthropocentric times. The ghosts of the American way of life. Part of the Hauntology series.

Under the spell of the alphabet, the silent figures of a past that has not been forgotten persist, a pedagogical reconstruction of a contradictory nation in transit as well as the emergence of a background color that delimits the contour and the persistence of ancient figures that have not been forgotten. This is part of the educational film cycle.

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.