A POTENTIALITY (2020, digital, 16mm film, 16 minutes)
Winner of the Alice Guy Prize Special Mention at FID Marseille 2020. Notes from the Jury: A film which meticulously reflects upon the materiality of time following specific histories. While focusing on details, the images prevent us from accessing the whole. This gesture reflects the subject where voice has been violently stripped from the people, left silenced. The Special Mention for Prix Alice Guy goes to “A POTENTIALITY” by Dana Berman Duff.
A POTENTIALITY is a continuation of my interest in using film to shoot printed material, as in the Catalogue series. I'm especially interested in the equivalence of the film grain to the halftone print dot at the base level of the construction of reproduced image and language.
This piece is built on a graphic project by Susan Silton in which she reprinted five pages of the New York Times from the 1930s. Her project has a disturbing resemblance to present day newspaper reports.
Opera "The Emperor of Atlantis" composed in 1944 by Viktor Ulmann, libretto by Peter Kien.
2-MINUTE TRAILER
Dreyer Flag 1985, silkscreen on nylon, 6' x 10'
Commissioned by LACE for the opening of Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. Three artists and three composers were commissioned to create flags and overtures to the raising of the flags in an opening ceremony. The Dreyer Flag takes a film still from the Danish filmmaker's 1932 film Vampyr wherein the "world dissolves." I was interested in the de-resolution and resolution of the half-toned silkscreen, which was indecipherable at close range, yet cohered into an intelligible image the farther away it moved from the viewer; i.e., as it was raised up the flagpole.
