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
Some things about water: 2004, 20:00, digital video
Excerpt from 20 minute video, 2004, SD video
In this personal essay film the narrator reflects on the damage in her loved ones' lives resulting from "bad ideas" and on the dissatisfaction experienced by the people around her with life, with each other, and with themselves.
In editing the video I experimented with different degrees of representation, mostly using street-verité imagery edited with no particular or even referential relationship to the imagery evoked by the voice-over narrative. In a certain section of the film, I used appropriated and recut movie scenes as a dual-narrative with the voice-over. In another section, an appropriated movie scene was edited with a direct intention to illustrate the audio narrative.
Official Selection of the 2005 International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement International, Geneva 2005