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 World Is Round: Sabina Goes
(2021)
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 object status of the machines as sculpture, rather than as picture containers. The videos have been edited so that they all spin in the frame in an attempt to overcome the “cinema rectangle”—an inherited limitation from the Western-European picture format that tyrannizes moving image makers. This whirling motion is further echoed by the spiral staircase of the architecture that contains it.
Credits: Haiku by Stephanie Barber, animation by Jon Lee. Audio compositions by A.J. McClenon; John Cage (Living Room Music 1940: words from Gertrude Stein’s The World Is Round, performed by Gert Sorensen and Ars Nova Copenhagen, directed by Tamás Vetö); Badmarsh and Shri. Including a video work by Sabina Ott from 2011, Hope Is a Thing with Feathers. All other footage by Dana Berman Duff, except the whirlpool: shot by whirlpoolhitman.
