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.
Director's notes:
The video is an unedited (text-wise) reading of Dewey's essay "What Is Power?" which is printed in the book the people are reading from, The School of Public Life. The piece is 40 minutes long because that's how long it took to read the entire essay out loud. The camera was positioned as if sitting across the table from the reader, face-to-face, in an attempt to invoke Fred's table-readings, which he so believed in and conducted frequently. I wanted the viewer to take a position across a hypothetical table from the reader, as they would if attending one of Fred's readings. I considered the readers to be the primary audience and wanted to capture their reaction to the text on film.
All of the readers were paid the same fee and given a copy of the book. There were no random readers; everyone either had a relationship with Fred (several are famous poets and writers) or were invited because of their different spheres of influence. My goal was to get the book, the information about POWER, into as many different "neighborhoods" as I could. For example, I asked Stephanie Bell to share the book with folks living on the street in LA.
Many things are Godard-inspired since his films were favorites to Fred, but mostly because when I was asked to make a film of this text, I had visions of scenes from Weekend and La Chinoise in which actors read from books straight into the camera. It was the first time I had encountered such a thing in cinema and it had a major effect, on all of us I think. Coincidentally (perhaps), I later discovered that Godard had died on the day I was invited to make the film and had envisioned the scenes from Weekend.
The use of primary and secondary colors in the titles, mise en scene, compositions, and costumes echo those particular Godard films, and in a couple of the shots I used setups straight out of Weekend, such as a character dressed up as Benjamin Franklin marching around lecturing. I stopped short of shooting someone in a bathtub! And, of course, the title typeface is "Jean Luc"— and the erupting blurts of music were designed to interrupt just as Godard employs the music in Weekend, like a slap on the cheek.