Myth in the Electrical Age

Alan Berliner uses the internet to track down 12 men who share his surname, and invites them over for dinner in New York.

Independent filmmaker Alan Berliner considers the power of photography and what may be lost as daily newspapers face extinction, in this documentary exploring his near-lifelong obsession with clipping and indexing photos.

A student film by a fledgling master––a single-shot "research report" on Berliner's experiences as the Harpur College Film Society projectionist.

"From there to here...from then to now. The soundtrack feature 33 frogs, 22 birds, lion growls, bomb whistles, a heartbeat and the chromatic scale."

Director Alan Berliner takes on his reclusive father as the reluctant subject of this affecting and graceful study of family history and memory. Ultimately this complex portrait is a meeting of the minds -- where the past meets the present, where generations collide and where the boundaries of family life are stretched, torn and surprisingly, at times, also healed. Berliner has transformed a story of a troubled man who has sealed himself off from life's pain into a work of universal resonance.

THE FAMILY ALBUM is a one-hour experimental documentary film utilizing a vast collection of rare 16mm home movies from the 1920s through the 1950s. These home movies are exciting authentic documents of American folk history and culture, taken from the personal vantage point of the amateur photographic eye. Subjects span the entire spectrum of the traditional home movie idiom, including mixed racial, ethnic, economic and geographic sources. Structured from birth to death, THE FAMILY ALBUM is a collage film that weaves its elements into a composite lifetime, passing through the celebrations and struggles from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience. It is a universal yet intimate portrait of the American family, not scripted, not rehearsed, not immune to the conflicts and contradictions underlying family life and its rituals.

Filmmaker Alan Berliner chronicles his lifelong battle with insomnia in this intimate documentary. The cameras roll as he tries to quiet his overly active mind so he can get a decent night's sleep, capturing the details of what it's like to suffer from a chronic sleep disorder. As he struggles to find balance, his friends and family -- who endure the worst of Berliner's bouts with insomnia -- question whether he really wants to find a cure.

Alan Berliner has been chronicling the final years of his friend, cousin, and former mentor, Edwin Honig - distinguished poet, translator, critic, and teacher - into the depths of Alzheimer's disease. Among many other honors, Honig received honorary "knighthoods" from Spain and Portugal for his seminal translations of Lorca, Calderón, and Pessoa that awakened English-speaking readers to the work of these literary giants. This suite of six short films reveals a poet and wordsmith who may have lost his memory and his command of language, but still retains his sense of rhythm, rhyme and sublime musicality. And through it all, his dignity.