Experimental Film

Documentation of performance. Slow-motion dance move.

A portrait of an unnamed city in Italy. Sidestepping the tourist attractions that make the city famous, the film/video posits an almost-imaginary place that draws closer to the reality of its inhabitants. Using a voiceover narration that collages direct observation, literary texts, historical fact, local folklore, and a bit of sheer fabrication, the film/video melds documentary and narrative, past and present.

A barricade is built inside the Main Temple of the Aztecs. Testimony of the contemporary battles against the governmental aggressions.

The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past. Evoking the ritualism of Aztec cosmology, this experience recalls lumbreras – circular excavation holes in archeological sites, such as the recently found Tzompantli (skulls ceremonial rack) at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The use of obsidian crystal as a nuclear filter in the chamber is also essential.

Experimental but heartfelt, all fiction + mostly video.

Featuring: phantoms, parakeets, some animation, much smoke, Super 8 hi-jinks, several actors.

Wittnerchrome, Exacto Knife, Fishing Line, Sewing Machine

The secret history of hobo and railworker graffiti. Shot on freight trips across the western US over a period of 16 years, Who is Bozo Texino? chronicles the search for the source of a ubiquitous rail graffiti--a simple sketch of a character with an infinity-shaped hat and the scrawled moniker, "Bozo Texino"--a drawing seen on railcars for over 80 years.

We came into the world under the sign of Saturn, the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. Saturn pulls the word down into its vortex and turns the flow of events into rings, lines and particles. There we are all invisible. There we have no face. There we have no name. There our present seems suspended. There we are all limbo.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Transmission from the Liberated Zones is an experiment which brings together Swedish statements and documents, accessed and presented by a boy through a low-fidelity feedback channel — an optical dimension created to move through time, and between tepid and tropic encounters.

A history of New York City from Prehistoric times through the Space Age, composed entirely from documentary street footage.

"The richness of Cohen's vision is found in his haunting imagery and the perception that the thriving city of New York is really the accumulation of humanity's failures, as well as its triumphs."

-- Steve Seid, Seduced and Abandoned: The Homeless Video by Sachiko Hamada & Scott Sinkler and Jem Cohen (Berkeley: Pacific Film Archive, 1989)

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

An independent film portrait of singer/songwriter Elliott Smith in Portland, Oregon in 1996, wherein he plays three songs. The songs were done live acoustic--in his old studio, a living room, and a bathroom (it was quiet in there). It's also a small portrait of Portland, Oregon.

The songs are "Between the Bars", "Angeles", and a cover of "Thirteen" by Big Star.

This is Elliott as I remember him, at his simple finest as musician. 

Shot in black and white Super 8, this lyrical short follows a wandering, disengaged youth through grey afternoons. German Song features the hard-edged music of Come, an alternative band from Boston.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

Nobody counts the hours and nobody cares how the years are piling up. Souls begin and end. Then comes the night. A snow landscape of souls.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

The scales of the snake refract a trance and invocation. In the epicenter, the pyramids join Izcóatl's battle, the Obsidian Serpent propagates an exhortation: all the dances against the war.

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.

Pictures from Dorothy is a current day consideration of the symbolism of Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz.

Cast: Matilda Washington. Music: David Reid.

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

"Exhibitons, whether of objects or people, are displays of the artifacts of our disciplines. They are for this reason also exhibits for those who make them, no matter what their ostensible subject. The first order of business is therefore to examine critically the conventions guiding ethnographic display..."

 - Destination Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998

Through a catalogue of looks, movements, and gestures, Mayhem presents a social order run amok in a libidinous retracing of film noir conventions. Sexuality flows in an atmosphere of sexual tension, danger, violence, and glamour; antagonism between the sexes is symbolized in the costuming of women in polka dots and men in stripes. Censored in Tokyo for its use of Japanese lesbian erotica, this tape creates an image bank of what signifies the sexual and the seductive in the history of imagemaking, pointing to the way we learn about our bodies, and how to use them from images.

"In the guise of chronicling the final moments of three polar explorers marooned on an ice floe a century ago, Baron's film investigates the limitations of images and other forms of record as a means of knowing the past and the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph. Marrying matter-of-fact voiceover and allusive sound fragments, evidence and illustration, in Baron’s words, "meaning is set adrift"."

--New York Film Festival, 1997, Views from the Avant-Garde program notes

Scratch of image. As a consequence of a global quarantine, an entire device emerged. With much of humanity locked up and eager for communication, a pandemic exhibitionism went viral. Covid-19 mobilizes an audiovisual pandemic. The result: a plague of viralized images.