Observando el cielo

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...

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.

Animated glitch portrait of the eponymous television tower on the hill, guardian of fog and electronic signals in that earthshaking city by the Bay... sounds by Scanner, from Lauwarm Instrumentals