You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born is a visually stunning work that follows a woman through a life characterized by damage and loss, but in which she finds humor, love, and joy. With a score that follows the span of Lenore’s life, from her birth in the early 70s to her death in the 2040s, the film takes us from moments of harrowing loss to those of poignancy and dark humor.
A documentary fiction inspired on the first accounts of the natural and ethnographic explorations in America by colonizers, missionaries, and scientists. Shot in the Tropical Greenhouse of Lille, France, the film uses both the architecture and the plants of this enclosed botanic garden as narrative supports for an exploratory journey. Led by the voice-over of an explorer, the film explores the notion of exoticism, evokes the violent origins of the so-called "New World" and the endurance of the imagery they engendered.
At the computer, I cut video threads of wind storms and quaking trees. I create a companion piece for Florence called Etty using the words of a young woman from completely different circumstances who transcends fear and resists terror in the midst of extreme circumstances. Etty Hillesum was a 29 year old Dutch writer we know only from her diaries first published in the early 1980s.
Shot in Naples, Vienna, and New York, Some Chance Operations explores the notion of an archival form, in this instance film, as an unstable memory receptacle that can vanish. History and how it is made is meditated upon as one of many chance operations. The filmmaker Elvira Notari, who had a film production company in Naples from 1906 to 1930, plays a significant role as an impetus for Some Chance Operations. Despite the fact that she was a prolific filmmaker, producing over sixty feature films, only three remain intact.
Pandora is one who communicates to the human world the powers of the night. These are glimpses of her visions.
Here You Are Before the Trees is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
Here You Are Before the Trees traverses Indigenous presence in the Hudson River Valley, Wisconsin, and the areas in-between. Each screen focuses on different homelands and their complex relationships with history, landscape, power and institutional means of oppression.
Memory Palace is a short video grounded in the personal history of the artist. A discovery of a photo album activates memories of physical spaces, which in turn open doors to reminiscences of past family life. Inspired by the classical method of loci, the film presents a woman — singer/songwriter Alice Smith — at work in Los Angeles.
Five prayers are sent skyward, and five curses get directed inward by those living in the purgatory of "modern life"... Attend this moody Mass in the church of "thoughts and feelings"... It will uplift you.
This title comprises Wrestling with Angels (2015), Hiding Places (2016), Unfinished Paradise (2018), Late Night Blues (2016) and Nightscape (2017) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
The Fool melds varied footage while a narrator describes a brief encounter with a former love interest. A performance of a gymnastics routine merges with iconic Baroque paintings; club scenes mix with a day at the beach. Taking the viewer on a hazy, dream-like journey, the images at times seem to illustrate the story being recounted but elsewhere fail the narrator entirely: in one surreal moment, a large fig tree rolls across a hallway on a skateboard.
“When I moved to Hudson Valley, NY state in 1984 after being tied to Tehching Hsieh in his ART/Life: One Year Performance, I began meeting remarkable elders over 80, and sometimes 90, years old. They became my mentors, guides, friends, helpers and spiritual directors. I took hours and hours of my footage to video artist Tobe Carey and he and I collaged it together collaboratively to make this document of these helpers along the way.”
--Linda Montano
Voice: off is the autobiography of a forgotten man. Brain damaged, body violated, emotions crushed, Gerry who rarely spoke has now lost the power of speech. The video camera is his prosthesis and he borrows the memories of people who no longer need them. How can this be a comedy? It is. "Donigan Cumming looks at the violence of time that damages the body and exhausts memories. For the main character in Voice: off, Gerald, the illness is incurable. Two cancers are at work, one of which is attacking his throat.
Filmed entirely in Sweden, VIEWFINDER is a surreal sound-film that entangles gestures of place, belonging, and monument. Informed by archival research, oral history, and folk stories, the film focuses on Black immigrants who have recently migrated to Sweden. These performers enact dance-like choreographies in critical sites across the coastal town of Varberg, generated in response to an absence of Black life found in the municipal archives.
"A cup and saucer, pouring and drinking coffee, a duration ritual of contemplation and invigoration, doubled (tape copied), mixed, keyed + synthetic color, normal play and rewinding, sync events, the opening of a space to put the self in. 1/2 inch b+w Portapack, 2 reel to reel video tape decks, David Jones keyer and colorizer."
– Peer Bode
A Prayer For Nettie dramatizes the death of an elderly woman who was Cumming’s photographic model from 1982 to 1993, presenting an improvised series of prayers and memorials for Nettie Harris by people who knew her, and some who did not. In its ambiguous mix of tenderness and aggression, A Prayer For Nettie extends the traditions of the grotesque and the absurd. The fervent prayers of the actors are undermined by indifference, forgetfulness, and the presence of the camera. In the end, comedy turns the tables on piety and remembrance as Nettie looks up from the grave.
In Dreams and Autumn is a three-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the three channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.
This is the last piece in the constellation of works including Kicking the Clouds, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, and the text Hello Trouble as well as a series of etched photographs.
Locke’s Way is the photographic path to knowledge, full of twists and turns, treacherously steep. What has happened down here? A family’s photographs tell us everything and nothing about the subterranean past. "One of the central questions of philosophy has always been: what can be known? Locke’s Way provides a vivid illustration of this perennial philosophical dilemma. In this short video, Donigan Cumming is preoccupied with the story of his older brother, who seems to have been brain-damaged and spent much of his life in institutions.
The Story of Milk and Honey is a short experimental video belonging to a larger project, which includes photographs, drawings and text, detailing an un-named individual’s failure to write a love story. Through voiceover narration that weaves together images, letters, and songs, a story of defeat transpires into a journey that explores how we collect and perceive information, understand facts, history, images, and sound and where the individual is to be found in the midst of the material.
Produced with the Fundación Marcelino Botín Grant for Visual Arts Fund.
"I asked the inmates in my Art Group on the HIV/AIDS unit - Del Norte to talk about their experiences from the womb to the present moment. Here are their stories."
–Wendy Clarke
This is a re-destroyed film that I was unable to finish in 2013. Filmed both in ruins: at the Sutro Baths in San Francisco and in final domestic spaces occupied with a former partner. Film was destroyed in ocean water.
Based on the filmmaker's autobiography, You Are Here examines the search for home within our era of transnational displacement. As the son of Italian immigrants, the filmmaker examines notions of home and belonging within the context of his ethnic origins, but also extends this in relation to his identity as a gay man. The film chronicles his trajectory from his familial home in Italy, to his native Canada and beyond, and weaves a compelling portrait shaped by memory and the realities of the present.
"The title (Black Sun) is as evocative of solar eclipse as it is of the 'dark spleen' which doctors, all through Antiquity, used to attribute to melancholic and suicidal drives, especially as they affected artists. Here such drives end up striking the existence of Antonia, an opera singer whose dark beauty brings light to the film. Through discreet and elliptical staging, Laura Huertas Millán presents Antonia’s multi-faceted character.
Made collaboratively with the filmmaker's mom Deborah, I Can Hear My Mother’s Voice documents her process of learning how to use the filmmaker's video camera. As Deborah watches the footage she has recorded, she reacts to and describes the footage she sees––showing what and how she sees––while opening up a space between sense, memory, speculation, and grief.
The film is open captioned and audio described in English. Still image description: Light sparkles on blue water. A caption at the bottom of the image reads: "that's beautiful."
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.
A series of numbers that form infamous years that are uttered in a repetitive pedagogical litany. Ominous dates as a correlate of forgotten apolitical portraits. Portraits of a remembered royalty whose wealth was made possible by infamous times. Political faces accompanied by their corresponding dates. Peaceful figures whose placid portrait rests on the automated civilizational barbarism. This is part of the educational film cycle.
Kent Merritt waxing poetically about being one of the first four Black scholarship athletes at the University of Virginia.
This title is only available on Can You Move Like This: Black Fire.
