Experimental Film

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.

A reflection on the phenomenon of the touring musician.

"I shot this film with a 16mm wind-up Bolex, and the 25th Anniversary tour of Dutch band The Ex, when they embarked on a 'convey tour' with about 25 performing comrades. If half the battle is getting there and half the battle is joy, then the other half is madness. I thank all of the musicians who float in and out — of the film, in particular, and my life, in general."

— Jem Cohen

Soundtrack music: Guitargument, an Andy Moor and Mia Clarke improvisation, arranged and edited by Jem Cohen.

"When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes. You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory. And then you'll close your eyes to the facts." These words are spoken at the beginning of this agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: "When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories."

An all-over textile constructed under the spell of Arachne, an audiovisual textile in five parts that exposes a web of raids in construction over the american houses, a landscape of protests under the webs of segmented time, the entrails of the american factory in movement through the endless american party.

In these lunar paths the moon is the celestial body of brilliant colors that crosses with its cyclical and mythical dance the dark space of our present time and in whose dance the moon enters, moves away, approaches and lies on itself in a cycle rhythmic of celestial agitation. These are the shamanic ways of the moon. Part of the Lunar Films series.

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.

In the center of the rising Temple, the history, myth, ancestral and infrareal combine their rhythms into the cycle life of ritual cinema. Trance and shamanic visions arise into the ancient Teocalli.  

A nostalgic glazier shows off his knowledge and expounds his theories. Taking glassmaking processes and history as its central theme, Slow Glass explores ideas about memory, perception and change.

A 3D video cover version of Michael Snow's seminal structural film Wavelength (1967). Reflecting on Snow's work from a digital vantage point, Wavelength 3D loosely adopts the story and basic formal structures of the original while forging an entirely new path across three-dimensional space and time.

This work should be presented through ANGLYPH 3D PROJECTION. No special 3D projector is needed, but Red-Cyan anaglyph 3D glasses are required for exhibition. May be projected, and can also be presented on a flat, 4:3 monitor in a dark space.

This is a gaze of the body and a notion of spectator that the 90´s decade constructed, this is the audiovisual legacy of the 90's for our actual audiovisual control world.

Part of the paraconsistent sequence series.

Part of the paraconsistent sequence series.

Lumbreras is the historical and archeological place of the bones, ruins and detritus. A window thought time, an ancestral rhythm of the audiovisual materials.

Provincetown, Cape Cod.

A reconstructed 'landscape' inspired by a drive down 6A. The norm when driving of watching the landscape approaching and receding, and the side-show of dioramas.

–– Ken Kobland

This work was restored in 2022. 

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

This is a kinetic tribute to Sylvia Plath at a time of the pandemic vortex, a dissemination of suspended bodies in the liminal space. Haunted figures in the Capitalocene era.

This is the crude and unnatural state of civilization, an image not yet processed or refined that hides and displays in its intermittence all the crude violence of the anthropocenic industry. The raw and fossil image of the Capitalocene. Part of the Hauntology series.

Aquarius is a film about horoscopes and hope, and coping with everyday life.

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

Part of the paraconsistent sequence series.

“Drawing on the ancient Nahuatl concept of the animating soul or life force, Tonalli engages the ritualistic powers of the cinema, summoning fire, flowers, and many moons into a frenetic and mesmerizing in-camera collage. Here, amid thickly swirling images and textured abstractions, the gods of creation and fertility manifest, dissolving into iridescent colors and dense, corporeal rhythms.” NYFF59

Stasi is an audiovisual recall of the political and social substrates that sustain an actual system of images. Stasi is a recall of a system of images that, even now, dominates the global gaze of the world.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

This portrait is not simply an account of Simone Weil’s life, but rather the skein of her ideas. The “unoccupied zone” is therefore only marginally meant to refer to the southern part of France under Vichy. It is more importantly an existential labyrinth imaged by the film itself; a psychic space through which Weil passed while in exile in her own country.