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
Narcissus…your eyes…like twin pools… 1991
This project was constructed for an invitation by Cranbrook Museum to make an installation. I was a bit annoyed with the museum by our negotiations and it occurred to me that the enemy of the museum would be moisture, so I decided to work with something wet. The ceiling contained two round parabolic light wells, which would resemble pools if the world were upside down, though it might be said that, like Narcissus, the museum is the pool in which culture admires itself. I added color to the "pools" and created fake "water damage" with special effects.
