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 Vol.3 (2017, 02:47, color, sound, digital) was made using the RH "Small Spaces" volume of the 2014 catalogue with an Arne Jacobsen 1955 Series 7 chair as protagonist. This is a a computer-generated rendering of the original chair, which was the inspiration for the knock-off version in the catalogue.
Since this chair design is ubiquitous in the realm of knock-off furniture, one imagines that these offspring will be among the last remaining objects at the end of the world, popping up everywhere—perhaps the most successful object in history.
The sound has two recordings: a slab of beech tree played on a turntable by Bartholomaus Traubeck and a rendition of Henry Cowell’s “Quartet Romantique” played by Bill Gable.
Screenings:
Crossroads Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque
Alchemy Film Festival, Harwick, Scotland
aDifferent Festival, Milwaukee
Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles
2021: REDCAT, Los Angeles