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
Reading Aloud: What Is Power? by Fred Dewey
A film of the essay "What Is Power?" by Fred Dewey (2023, 38-minutes, 4K digital video, color, sound)
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 own power. This project employs one of Dewey’s most penetrating texts and his belief in the transformative experience of people reading out loud to each other. It aims to capture those transformations on film.
With Will Alexander, Stephanie Bell, Dennis Cooper, Sandra Cruze, Dorit Cypis, Alexandra Epps, Laura Flanders, Simone Forti, Todd Gray, Dakota Higgins, Hedi El Kholti, Peter Kalisch, Chris Kraus, Suzanne Lacy, John Malpede, Eileen Myles, Russell Marling, Meena Nanji, Jeffrey Owens, Renée Petropoulos, Pilar Petropoulos-White, Linda Pollack, Rachel Grace Potts, Pamela Ramos, Manuel Ramos Ruiz, Trinidad Ruiz, Guy Santiago, Catherine Scott, Kyungmi Shin, Jack Skelley, A.K. Toney, Shirley Tse, Jody Zellen.
