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
English version of Catalogue Volume 10 (2017, Digital video and 16mm film, color and B&W, sound, 06:00)
Tenth entry in the Catalogue series. A dystopia of moving text and moving image; Modernist chairs, Georges Perec’s Things: A Novel of the Sixties and underwater photography using 16mm, GoPro, and DSLR.
Link to French version: https://vimeo.com/246380074
Screenings:
Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles
Bideodromo Festival 2018, BilbaoArte Art Production Center, Bilbao, Spain
"School of Chairs" 500 Capp Street/David Ireland House, San Francisco (curated by Steve Polta for SF Cinematheque)
Traverse Vidéo, Toulouse, France (version français)
Experiments in Cinema Film Festival vol.13, Albuquerque
What Have We Here? Design Within Reach, San Francisco, curated by Gina Basso
2021 REDCAT, Los Angeles