Morgan Fisher
Documentary on the making of "Messiah of Evil," the surreal horror cult classic written by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, directed by Willard Huyck. Includes interviews with Huyck and Katz as well as cinematographer Stephen M. Katz, editor Billy Weber, co-editor and actor Morgan Fisher.
Standard Gauge is an autobiographical film that examines Morgan Fisher’s work as an editor in the film industry. The film goes through scraps of rejected material along with commentary on the meaning of all the scrapped images. This film is an account and critique of the processes of meaning within film production through an examination of both materialism and the institution of film itself.
In 1963, living a routine life on Norma Place in Los Angeles, recluse writer Dorothy Parker and bisexual husband Alan Campbell recall their often-rocky relationship, started thirty years earlier.
A 1980 video art piece by American artist Morgan Fisher, a multi-projection work featuring floating spheres of different colors (green, red, blue) projected simultaneously.
Red Boxing Gloves / Orange Kitchen Gloves was shot in 1980 in Polavision, an instant movie format that the videocassette made obsolete. The work is in the form of a pendant pair, a convention that arose in seventeenth-century Holland. The pendant pair consists of two paintings with subjects that are complements of each other. In the classic case one painting shows a husband and the other his wife. Together the two figures make a larger whole. The two pairs of gloves express this same relation in figurative if conventional terms. A few years ago I transferred the films to DVDs; far simpler to show them in that form than as films.
Protective Coloration shows Fisher seated at a mottled table. He wears short-sleeved hospital garb, surgical green ‘scrubs’. Nose-clips block his nostrils while a mouth-guard that looks like fake lips covers his mouth. Over the course of 11 minutes he masks his face and covers his hands with bright gear in colours that accumulate to resemble those of the standard reference chart: he puts on orange eye-caps, then a yellow bathing cap; covering his nose and mouth and the gear already there, he dons a black gas mask; a silky black sleeping mask voids his already covered eyes, a cyan blue bathing cap caps the yellow; yellow rubber gloves snap on his hands and forearms; puts on cyan eye goggles, then struggles with yet another bathing cap, hazmat orange, over the other two. A silvery transparent shower cap tops the caps, itself topped by a plastic green helmet. Finally heavy-duty magenta gloves hide most of the yellow rubber.
Regrettably, the labour of projectionists is usually only considered by the audience when they ‘screw up’. This film offers an alternative opportunity.
Thom Andersen's remarkable and sadly neglected hour-long documentary adroitly combines biography, history, film theory, and philosophical reflection. Muybridge's photographic studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s were a major forerunner of movies; even more interesting are his subsequent studies of diverse people, photographed against neutral backgrounds.
A young woman goes searching for her missing artist father. Her journey takes her to a strange Californian seaside town governed by a mysterious undead cult.
In a static medium shot a narrator seated at a table delivers an explanation of the combinations and permutations which the sound and picture elements of the conventional monochromatic sound motion picture afford, as the film itself undergoes them.
Morgan Fisher has long explored the space that segregates art cinema from industrial movie making. The one-minute-thirty-second-long Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm, an eye-blink homage to Marcel Duchamp, is more obviously engaged with conceptualism than with studio manufacturing. What you see is what you hear.
"The cinematic mechanism cannot be completely deconstructed without resort to other means of mechanical image reproduction; a double system of representation is required; the apparent naturalness of the cinematic sign must be put into question by other indexical signs." —Thom Andersen
As its title indicates, the subject in Production Stills is a series of production stills of a film that was never made, and that at the same time is the film we are watching. A perfectly enclosed narrative of its own production: the image is one long take (11 minutes) of a wall on which a hand sequentially pins a number of Polaroids, one after the other. The Polaroids depict the crew making the film; the synchronous sound allows us to hear in ‘real time’, their chatter and the hum of the still camera, so that we can anticipate the photos and assign faces to the voices we hear. - Artefact Festival
Morgan Fisher’s Screening Room (1968–) is a tracking shot of the movie theatre in which the film is exhibited, and thus must be remade each time it is shown in a new location. —Erika Balsom
An actor and director screen a film and comment on it.
Naturalness willfully corrupted by inevitable self-consciousness, unwittingly corrupted by unavoidable naturalness, a role played with incredible nuance and complexity by Maurine Connor.
