Dervish Machine

video loop, duration eternal. One single film dissolve extracted from the media haystack of the mid 20th century.

From the Sanskrit, ‘gentle gazing brings liberation’, the title is also the name of the particular body of water which is the image-subject of the film. Landscape as inscape, not inertly present but beckoning an active perception; a seeing and a seeing into.

"Nuyo-realism" from the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Crosswalk is a locative portrait in sound and image, shot at the intersection of home movie and cinema verite. Participation and observation take place on consecutive Good Fridays, highlighting the hybrid urban collage of peoples, cultures, and performances in daily life.

Hand-developed and unedited, this roll lived in my camera from March to May 1995: A trip to New Orleans, a train ride, the death of a dear friend and artist. This film is the author of itself; its trace function leaves me behind.

Departing from Les Baxter's score to the Mario Bava film Black Sunday, Maria Movie is an overwrought melodrama set in New York City among the grit and shards of cinemas past and present. Chemistry and horror, dirge and dream, with Catherine Deneuve as The Black Maria herself, leading the procession on the via negativa.

This lunar eclipse event of November 2003 is observed, documented, and translated by eye and hand via the light-sensitive medium of Kodachrome film. In the 4th c BCE Aristotle founded The Lyceum, a school for the study of all natural phenomena pursued without the aid of mathematics, which was considered too perfect for application on this imperfect terrestrial sphere. This film then, in the spirit of...

Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth.

A few simple techniques of the cinema--a direct quotation, a framed location, an actress in costume, a few cuts to the quick--conspire in a compact couple of minutes to produce an image replete with historical and geographic visibility, to wit: an implied and uncontainable expanse of a landscape bought, sold and inhabited. An anti-landscape film and a one-two punch.

This 1940’s artifact is coupled with music by Nino Rota to expose the existential skeleton in the closet: our perilous journey on the planet Earth. A readymade film with the barest of interventions.

A guerilla action performed on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum by Italo Zamboni, the last painter of the 20th century. Edited in residence at the late lamented Experimental Televison Center in Owego NY.

A radical remix of the recent Transformers film, via synthetic collapse and critical revenge on its old & new fascist tropes > celebrating SPEED. NOISE. + DANGER. The fervent declarations & violent poetry of the Futurists are superimposed on the mythic morphology of the Autobot blockbuster’s machine mayhem. Images of death & destruction reign in a delirium of transformations as, to quote Marinetti: “We Decompose the Universe!”

“Without giving away too much, I’ll just say that the ‘soundtrack’ is inside the mind of the viewer, as they experience the ‘film’. An experiment & a provocation.” –Bradley Eros

The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.

“A site-specific cinema performance employing the myriad parameters of the technical apparatuses of analog film projection and light, using Anthology’s Maya Deren Theater projection booth & projectors and operated by our skilled projectionists. The work will include all of the variations of lenses, aperture plates, bulbs, lamps, gates, screen masking, shutter speeds, frame rates, change-over, focusing & framing, etc., in a composition for illuminated flicker and filmless geometries of light, for all types of projectors: 8mm, Super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm, and slide, from an instructional score for the performers. It is a work of contracted cinema, or cinéma concret, focused on the cinematographic machine and filmic light: an exercise in analog fetish, pushed towards the revelation of the invisible mechanisms, foregrounding & celebrating that which is usually hidden from sight.” –Bradley Eros

“In the context of an ‘Imageless Films’ series, it’s significant that ‘mercury’ is radio as cinema, ~ a looped excerpt from Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre radio play of DRACULA, a performance of sound creating sight, but especially, the utterances and hallucinated descriptions of Mina (from Bram Stoker’s novel) in a trance, picturing what she visualizes in a hypnotized state: the narcoleptic sibilances of a somnambulistic cinema, manifesting what is not present to others ~ & the experience ends (for the live audience) with a shock of mirrored reflection ~ something real in the room!” – Bradley Eros

COLOUR THEORY uses a multitude of white projector light [all possible variations: 35mm, 16mm, R8 & S8mm, 35mm slide] with a spectrum [RYB/OGV] of hand-manipulated coloured gels, moving apart & over-lapping in layers, to create a blended mixture of myriad shades, performed live from the booth as a sequence of variations from a colour-coded score.