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
Super 8 2001, Storage Gallery Santa Monica
"Projector", Tent poles and coated fabric.
An exhibition in 2001 at Storage Gallery in Santa Monica, titled “Super 8.”
I’d been teaching Super 8 filmmaking as well as sculpture for several years and decided that I wanted to make a sculpture that was as portable as my films were, without the storage issues of sculpture.
The object is titled "Projector,”made of tent poles and coated fabric. It’s the approximate size and shape of a Super 8 projector including the cone of projection and the screen. I constructed it out of old tent parts I altered, and sewed the "projection" from reflective cloth. The whole construction breaks down and fits into a supermarket bag = a completely portable sculpture.
Drawings below appeared in the Super 8 show along with the “projector.”
A few months earlier I had been invited to a bullfight in Mexico and I brought my Super 8 and video cameras. I’d never seen a bullfight and found it unbearable, so I kept a camera between my face and the spectacle at all times. Once home, I couldn’t bring myself to project the film, so put the film on a light table and painted a few of the frames in which nothing is happening.
Also included in the show were three drawings of other films made of my iguana, Otto.
"S-8 Bullfight x 302" watercolor, 11" x 16"
"S-8 Bullfight x 666" watercolor, 20" x 30"
"S-8 Bullfight x 122" watercolor, 8" x 10"
"S-8-Otto x 53"pencil, 20" x 30"
"S-8 Otto" pencil, 20" x 30"
"S-8 Puppet Hand"pencil, 20" x 30"
Drawings of photographs of Michael Asher's Installation (1970) at Pomona College, 2001, 20" x 30" watercolor and charcoal on paper
