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
What Is Power?
(In Progress—2023, 30 minutes, 4K digital video, color, sound)
Produced by the Fred Rogers Dewey Legacy Project. A film of the essay "What Is Power?" by Fred Dewey composed of 28 paragraphs read by 32 readers.
The late democracy activist, writer, organizer, teacher, book editor, publisher, and designer Fred Dewey (1957-2021) published essays and organized cultural events that urged readers to realize their own capacity for a different kind of politics, one in which people claim their own power. He organized many public "table readings" of Hannah Arendt's work all over the world—Los Angeles, Berlin, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Asheville, and Oslo. He seemed to believe in the transformative power of people reading out loud to each other. The aim of this film is to record the effect that reading Fred’s essay aloud has on the reader.
With:
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 A.K. Toney Shirley Tse Jack Skelley Will Alexander
