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
WORK SAMPLES
This is a 3-minute pastiche of the 16-minute film, A POTENTIALITY (2020, digital, 16mm film, silent and sound, 16 minutes), edited to represent both sections of the work. Winner of the Alice Guy Prize Special Mention at FIDMarseille 2020.
This film begins with 7 1/2 minutes of silent images, followed by 7 1/2 minutes of sound with no accompanying image, except for film grain. It is based on a graphic project by Susan Silton, in which she reprinted five front pages of The New York Times from the 1930s. Her project highlights the disturbing resemblance to the front pages of the New York Times and other newspapers of the present day. The title of Silton’s work is "A potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past" is from a quote from Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil from 1963, in which she warns that once any event has happened in history, it can happen again. It is a potentiality.
2-minute collage of clips from The House Is Empty (2020, 09:56, iPhone, Super 8mm and 16mm film)
An environmental disaster film that portrays, to the ovations of a billion cicadas, a cockroach, a woman, and a dramatic encounter in a closet—from the roach's point of view. Inspired by The Passion According to G.H. (1964) by Clarice Lispector. The house is “played” like an instrument by A.J. McClenon. This is the finale of the Catalogue series. A waltz drives the edit of the first part, the “Roach-eye view.” This section isn't cut, it's "scratched." That is, I shot a long pan around the room, a circle with the camera. I’m not sure how a cockroach would look around a room, and I imagined it would be frenetic, but contained, very like the form of Lispector's novel. In the story, time is gradually destabilized and even becomes irrelevant. Once I had the clip in the editor, I screen-recorded the monitor while I scrubbed back and forth on the timeline to the beat of the waltz.
5-minute sampling of clips and credits from Reading Aloud: What Is Power? by Fred Dewey. A film of the essay "What Is Power?" by Fred Dewey (2023, full version 38 minutes & abridged version 20 minutes; 4K digital video). Produced by the Fred Rogers Dewey Legacy Project (Jeremiah Day, Renée Peteropoulos, Lucas Reiner, Brooks Roddan, Sue Spaid).
Fred Dewey (1957-2021) was a democracy activist, writer, organizer, teacher, book editor, publisher, and designer. He organized public “table readings” around the world of Hannah Arendt’s writings on democracy and authoritarianism. Dewey wanted readers to realize their capacity for a different kind of politics, one in which people claim their power. This project draws on one of Dewey’s most penetrating texts and his belief in the transformative experience of people reading aloud to each other. It aims to capture those transformations on film.
Reading Aloud: What Is Power? by Fred Dewey Installation at Mimesis Film Festival 2024
A three-channel installation of the video of the essay "What Is Power?" by Fred Dewey (2024, 20 minutes; 4K digital video)
Produced by the Fred Rogers Dewey Legacy Project (Jeremiah Day, Renée Peteropoulos, Lucas Reiner, Brooks Roddan, Sue Spaid)
Still from a 3-minute video, "Lament for a Lost Bird," part of "Birdsong" (2022), a two-part installation proposed for a gallery and its adjoining park. Outside, visitors will hear the call of the extinct Santa Barbara Island Song Sparrow, which I re-created in collaboration with Cornell ornithologist Zena Casteel using 1925 beak morphology data. This simulated birdsong, played through speakers in the trees, teaches local mockingbirds to mimic the extinct bird’s call, bringing the bird back to life through the voices of living birds.
Inside the gallery, a video projection features a hyper-realistic, computer-generated mouse standing near the sea, singing a lament for the lost bird composed by Garry Eister and performed by soprano Risa Larson. The three-minute CGI piece, created by CGI engineer Sonya Sofiya Fayzieva under my direction, is a fabrication—fittingly artificial, as no recordings or photographs of the bird are known to survive.
Installation shot from 2019 What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes, Apect/Ratio Chicago. 2-channel video with sound, plus sculptures; sound design by A.J. McClenon, texts by Stephanie Barber. Collaboration with Sabina Ott (1955-2018), who died during the planning of the exhibition.
Installation shot from 2019 What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes, Apect/Ratio Chicago. 2-channel video with sound plus sculptures.
Ice wall made of styrofoam recycled from Ott's installation at Hyde Park Art Center with ceramic Lava Balls on the floor.
Collaboration with Sabina Ott (1955-2018).
Installation shot from 2019 What Does She See When She Shuts Her Eyes, Apect/Ratio Chicago. 2-channel video with sound plus sculptures. Collaboration with Sabina Ott (1955-2018). Image shows Ice Wall with Lava Balls, Snow Mound Seat, and one of two walls of video projection.
The World Is Round: Sabina Goes (2021, digital video, video monitors, goose-neck stands, electrical cords )
This sculpture contemplates dying, not death, but the passage from life into death.
The video players are like lily pads on a lake or like pools that we gaze into. All of the videos are shot either looking down or looking up. The heavy cords emphasize the sculptural status of the machines, rather than as picture containers. The videos have been edited so that they all spin in the frame, an attempt to overcome the “cinema rectangle”—an inherited limitation from the Western European picture format that has long tyrannized moving image makers. This whirling motion is further echoed by the spiral staircase within the architecture.
Video still: Catalogue Vol 3, (2017, Digital, CGI, sound, 02:43). A chair tumbles out of the sky and lands in the sea.
Catalogue Vol. 3 was created using the RH "Small Spaces" volume from the 2014 catalogue, with an Arne Jacobsen Series 7 chair from 1955 as the protagonist. This is a computer-generated rendering of the original chair, which served as the inspiration for the knock-off version featured 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.
Film still from Catalogue Volume 10, (2017, Digital video and 16mm film, color and B&W, sound, 05:40). Text from George Perec's "Things: a Novel of the Sixties"
Film still from "Catalogue Vol.6" (2016, 11:30, B&W, sound, 16mm film on digital scan)
Catalogue Vol.6 was shot with audio clips from a horror movie that mention the words "house" or particular rooms, or "upstairs" etc. playing in the studio so that each shot acquired a random diegetic "soundtrack". Then the film clips were organized as a "tour" through the rooms of a house: foyer, living room, dining room, kitchen, study, bathroom, and ending with the bedroom. 16mm film on digital scan.
Film still from "Catalogue" (2014, 07:03, b&w, silent, 16mm scanned to digital). The film is a documentary of the filmmaker’s looking at the objects for sale in a mainstream furniture catalogue of designer knock-offs; each cut was determined by the rise and decay of her interest in the objects.