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
The fourth in the Catalogue series. Catalogue is a suite of 16mm black-and-white films and videos that consider the time it takes to look at desirable objects presented in a catalogue of knock-off home furnishings photographed in staged rooms imitating the style of film noir. Each film takes one volume of the 11-volume mail order catalogue as its subject.
Catalogue Vol. 4 (2016) takes the "Lighting" catalogue as its subject and uses a uniform pulse and the hum of electric light to accompany each fixture, which were shot in the order that they were found in the original catalogue. The intervals of black were determined subjectively: items that the filmmaker found less appealing were excised from the sequence, hence violating the rigorous Structuralist methodology and creating a random pattern.
Screenings:
Experiments in Cinema, Albuquerque
Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria, Canada
Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick, Scotland
Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles
2022: REDCAT, Los Angeles