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
NEWS: Dana Berman Duff recognized as a Cultural Trailblazer by the L.A.Department of Cultural Affairs 2020-21
Catalogue Series
The Catalogue Series is a suite of 16mm black-and-white films and videos that each take one volume of a 13-volume mail order catalogue as its subject.
Link to catalogue of Catalogue.
Desire is learned. Desire is cultivated. It’s a habit formed through continuous repetition of a particular class of interactions. Desire is the most important of all industrial products.
— Gene Youngblood "Expanded Cinema" (1970)
Merchandise is always a pleasure.— Gertrude Stein