EEK ORK ORK VOL. II: A SHOWCASE OF COSMIC ANIMATION

This Fall, Spectacle Theater is proud to present two films by Beny Tchaicovsky. Experience a groundbreaking visual journey into the origins of 3D animation. Rather than traditional narratives, Tchaicovsky’s feature animations build immersive, breathing worlds where archaic symbols meet digital technology. His pioneering works explore the intersections of technology, consciousness, and art. “Cyberscape” and “Caught Between Worlds” merge futuristic digital architecture, surreal non-linear landscapes, and deeply atmospheric soundscapes.

CYBERSCAPE: A COMPUTER ANIMATION VISION
Dir. Beny Tchaicovsky, 1997.
United States. 60 min.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – 10PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 7:30PM

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A surreal historical chronicle of human evolution, moving from the primordial “Garden of Eden” to quantum mechanics.

CAUGHT BETWEEN WORLDS
Dir. Beny Tchaicovsky, 2001.
United States. 50 min.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 10PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – MIDNIGHT

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A visual and sonic meditation on navigating the spaces between ordinary reality and metaphysical realms.

Rehearsal Behavior is a screening series tracing a capacious lineage of choreographic moving-image works: From the dance-for-film pioneers of the 1940s–60s, to experimental video of the late 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, to contemporary acts of self-expression through direct camera performance.

This screening presents an interrelated grouping of foundational 16mm Cinedance experiments spanning from 1941 to 1973. Featured artists inspire, reference, and collaborate with one another, evidencing the accumulative effect of intergenerational exchange on the lineage of this hybrid form.

Rehearsal Behavior takes its title from a phrase of Rainer’s own coining as a choreographer in the early ‘70s. The phrase juxtaposed the generative looseness of the rehearsal space with the staunch hierarchy of directed live performance, as dancers’ spontaneous responses deliberately reshaped the work and, in the process, pushed toward a more democratic social structure.

Rehearsal Behavior runs from September 18-21. This screening at Spectacle, guest programmed by Charlotte Strange and Andrea Torres, is complemented by two screenings at e-flux (9/17, 7:00pm and 9/19, 3:00pm), and other venues to be announced.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM

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INTROSPECTION
Dir. Sara Kathryn Arledge, 1941-46
United States. 6 min.
16mm

Commonly described as the first abstract dance film made in the United States, Introspection depicts layered fragments of dancers’ bodies as they move in a void-like, black performance space. Arledge was a talented abstract painter and illustrator as well as filmmaker; the artist uses her camera, production techniques including color gels, and editing to abstract the dancers’ figures, treating them as compositional elements within the moving frame. Of her approach to filmmaking, Arledge said: “My plan was to extend the nature of painting to include time.” Production on Introspection paused while most of the crew was drafted during World War II, finally completed after the war’s formal conclusion. 

NINE VARIATIONS ON A DANCE THEME
Dir. Hilary Harris, 1967
United States. 13 min.
16mm

Harris deftly wields his camera to depict dancer Bettie de Jong, a longtime member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, repeatedly performing a single dance movement. Slow pan shots encircle de Jong’s body as she spins from a standing position to the floor and back, generating an intimate view of her performance accessible by camera alone. Harris and de Jong shot the piece across twenty-five filming sessions over the course of one year, reflective of Harris’s expertise as an early innovator of time-lapse photography. A documentary filmmaker by trade, Harris collaborated with Amy Greenfield as a cinematographer on numerous pieces including Element (1973) and Tides (1982). 

ELEMENT
Dir. Amy Greenfield, 1973
United States. 12 min.
16mm

In Element, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Amy Greenfield performs undulating movements in a bed of clay-like mud. The piece represents an early iteration of Greenfield’s filmic and choreographic investigations into the entanglements between womanhood, the human form, and nature, which would develop throughout her career. The mud at once highlights the contours of Greenfield’s figure as protruding areas glisten in the sun, and at other points makes her body indistinguishable from its surroundings. Greenfield’s choreography accentuates the physicality of the mud, displaying a powerful sensuality while treating the landscape as an animate dance partner. Avoiding purely romantic notions of the power of nature, Element hints at the capacity of ecological forces to enact violence while taking up the mantle of representing a woman’s body in pleasure and struggle. Element is the cinematic counterpart of Greenfield’s later work Tides (1982), also filmed by Hilary Harris, which draws from Maya Deren’s script for the unfilmed passages of Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946). 

RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME
Dir. Maya Deren, 1946
United States. 15 min.
16mm

Like much of Deren’s work, Ritual in Transfigured Time meditates on the temporality of movement. Dancer Rita Christiani drifts into an apartment where Maya Deren winds wool around her hands as the film’s innovative editing slows the gesture into something incantatory. While Anaïs Nin looks on from the doorway, Christiani gathers the yarn into a ball, until, with a gust of wind, Deren vanishes. At a crowded party, frames freeze and shots recur in hypnotic repetition as Christiani, veiled in black, threads her way past a beckoning crowd until she embraces Frank Westbrook. Outdoors, amongst a garden’s Greco-Roman ruins and statues and blue skies, they dance. He begins chasing her in leaping strides, then her as Deren, until he catches her. Deren wades into the sea as the film dissolves into negative, transfiguring the black mourning veil into bridal white.

For Deren, ritual and dance were one and the same, each seeking the realization of its purpose through the exercise of form. Dreamlike and foreboding, Deren stages a meditation on control and surrender, on what she called the “deference of personality in possessed states of being.”

    One couldn’t be blamed for mistaking artist and filmmaker Frank Heath for a time traveler sent back with the impossible task of figuring out where it all went wrong. Government surveillance? Technological arms races? Nuclear fallout or an act of God? Each as plausible as the last if you’re inclined to believe what Heath uncovers across an array of conspiratorial prank phone calls, metadocumentaries, and room-shaking music videos.

    Heath’s work can be seen as a part of a post-9/11 aesthetic shift in art away from subjectivity that curator Paolo Cirio refers to as evidentiary realism, which aims to make visible the complex networks of capital and bureaucracy that construct our reality. Grounded in rigorous journalistic research, Heath uses historical events, declassified materials, and government facilities as the backdrop for a cast of real-life characters who are more often than not in the middle of doing their job. The videos often resemble portraiture, catalyzed by conversations with customer service and caretakers of hidden spaces. We learn intimate details about attitudes and interiorities of Heath’s subjects. All the while, it’s unclear if they’re coconspirators in Heath’s agenda or simply playing along because of their obligations to their employers.

    In Heath’s phone call videos, an actor speaks with real people to file fake complaints or order bizarre custom products. Elsewhere, a “documentary” crew searches through a KMart while working on a project about the Large Hadron Collider. This playful mix of documentary, fiction, and improvisation infuses Heath’s work with its signature uncanny and comedic tone. Heath deploys this humor to push bureaucratic capitalism past its ability to anticipate the needs of consumers, forcing its functionaries to answer questions beyond the scope of their duties into the realm of the implausible where phone booths spout molten metal.

    We first highlighted Heath’s films in 2013 in our “& Other Works” series organized by C. Spencer Yeh. In the thirteen years since, Heath has continued tirelessly producing films that reflect back to us the absurdity, doom, and humor of our time. Wrong Number offers a comprehensive four part series showcasing an almost complete retrospective of Heath’s diverse oeuvre. Spectacle is thrilled to host the world premiere of Heath’s latest work, A REAL GREY AREA, as well as the second ever screening of Heath’s critically under-seen, landscape horror film, CENTRALIA.

    From burial rites, to spy networks, to numerology and gene banks, Heath probes at what lies below the surface of our world and of ourselves. His films are at times portentous, at others hilarious and often a mix of both. A sense of synchronicity suffuses his work — a feeling that there’s no such thing as a wrong number.

PROGRAM 1

THURSDAY, MARCH 5 – 10PM 
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25 – 7:30PM + Q&A with Heath moderated by Jon Dieringer (This event is $10)

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THE HOLLOW COIN
Dir. Frank Heath, 2016
English, 12min

A caller reaches 311 attempting to leak information regarding the combustion of a phone booth and its possible significance as it relates to the AT&T Long Lines Building, a windowless skyscraper in downtown Manhattan. Depositing a hollow nickel containing a microSD card, the individual speaks with a telephone operator who assists in discerning the essence of this ominous image. Shortly after the film was made, the building was reported to be a major communication node in a covert NSA surveillance network.

THERE IS NOTHING UNDERNEATH THE WEST VIRGINIA WING
Dir. Frank Heath, 2018
English, 16min

Deep below the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, is a vast and elaborate underground bomb shelter. Established as part of the secret Continuity of Government program, to house members of Congress in the event of a nuclear attack, the bunker is now declassified and open for public tours. This film documents the eerie spaces of the vacant shelter, its remarkable blast doors which were engineered by the Mosler Vault Company, and the dedicated staff who continue to care for it.

PROTECT YOUR HOME
Dir. Frank Heath, 2021
13min

Spanning the 1950s to the present, this montage of archival commercials and DIY footage explores the many permutations of ‘home security,’ from alarm systems and end-times bunkers to gun ownership and sage-burning rituals—revealing a persistent undercurrent at the intersection of personal, social, and environmental anxieties. Music: Ches Smith, ‘Interpret It Well.’

WAR PIGEON
Dir. Frank Heath, 2017
English, 13min

Recounting an unnerving encounter involving a building from the Manhattan Project, a suspicious bird, and a Shamrock Shake, a caller consults with a customer service representative from a bank regarding his apparently corrupted memory and the ethical imperatives of one’s vocation.

PROGRAM 2

MONDAY, MARCH 9 – 7:30PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25 – 10PM + Q&A with Heath and actor/collaborator Jesse Wakeman moderated by Jon Dieringer (This event is $10)

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INVASIVE SPECIES
Dir. Frank Heath, 2012
English 11min
Haunted by a cipher transmitted from invasive wildlife in Greenwood Cemetery, a caller hires a local advertising firm to address the situation and assess the link between organic systems and encrypted data.

MINIMALISM
Dir. Frank Heath, 2024
2min
A chronicle of shrinking technology that follows the drive towards miniaturization, from early cell phone ads and pocket-sized gadgets to neural implants and simulated realities. Music: Laugh Ash (Ches Smith), ‘Minimalism.’

ON THE BEACH

Taking its name from a Cold War novel by Nevil Shute, which follows the sole survivors of a global nuclear fallout as they wait for the radiation to drift overseas, On the Beach traces the urgent and miscalculated efforts of a two-person film crew as they attempt to document and preserve key facets of modern civilization before it’s too late. Interviews with figures working at crucial sites related to the future of humanity—the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, an underground vault for the storage of films, and a gene bank carved into the side of an Arctic mountain—send the protagonists searching department stores, subway video retailers, and supermarkets for commercial solutions to their existential problem. Originally produced as a web series for the online magazine Triple Canopy, this is the first time the work has been screened in its entirety.

ON THE BEACH 01: MADE TO BE FOUND
Dir. Frank Heath, 2014
English, 21min

Peter and Dwight struggle with their assignment as they survey a department store in search of props for a film shoot inspired by the wisdom of CERN physicists.

ON THE BEACH 02: A PRIME CONDITION
Dir. Frank Heath, 2017
English, 19min

Peter and Dwight study the contents of a massive underground storage facility for Hollywood films, located in a salt mine in Kansas, to ascertain the crucial monuments of cinema history with the guidance of a local video retail expert.

ON THE BEACH 03: MIDNIGHT SUN
Dir. Frank Heath, 2018
English, 15min

Peter reports a supernatural occurrence he experienced at a local supermarket while contemplating footage sent from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

PROGRAM 3

SUNDAY, MARCH 15 – 5PM + Q&A with Heath and composer Nate Wooley moderated by Isaac Hoff (THIS EVENT IS $10)
FRIDAY, MARCH 27 – 7:30PM 

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SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
Dir. Frank Heath, 2022
5min.

Despite an encroaching inferno, the party rages on in this video, compiled entirely from film and television programs that include the eponymous 1933 song by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach. Music: ‘Combustion 2’ by Cory Smythe from the album Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (2022).

ASYMPTOMATIC CARRIER
Dir. Frank Heath, 2013
English, 14min

The lone resident of North Brother Island in the East River attempts to procure a new flag and finds out just how long he’s been away during his self-imposed isolation, which has surprising correspondence with the infamous quarantine of Mary Mallon (aka “Typhoid Mary”) on the same island nearly a century before.

CENTRALIA
Dir. Frank Heath, 2022
English, 57min

This portrait of Centralia, Pennsylvania—a near ghost town slowly consumed by what lies beneath—captures the blighted and largely depopulated landscape, widely known as the inspiration for the horror franchise Silent Hill, as well as the futile efforts of government agencies to contain the catastrophe and control the local population. Devoid of dialogue or diegetic sound, the film is set to the entirety of Ancient Songs of Burlap Heroes, the LP by Columbia Icefield (Nate Wooley), excavating a sense of synchronicity between the unaltered soundtrack, particularly its use of field recordings, and the uncanny ruins of a once-thriving community of coal miners.

PROGRAM 4

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 27 – 10PM + Q&A with Heath moderated by Manny Unger (THIS EVENT IS $10)

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A REAL GREY AREA
Dir. Frank Heath, 2026
English, 11min

Attempting to stage an historical reenactment on Coney Island, a contractor working for a powerful client speaks with a representative from a rental company regarding the unconventional use of an electric generator.

PATH OF TOTALITY
Dir. Frank Heath, 2018
English, 13min

Against the backdrop of a total solar eclipse, this film follows a motley crew of spectators, entertainers, and vendors gathered in St. Joseph, MO—the artist’s hometown—capturing the anxiety, cosmic wonder, and commercial opportunities inspired by the brief moment of darkness at one of the prime locations within the so-called “path of totality.”

CRYPTS OF CIVILIZATION
Dir. Frank Heath, 2021
English, 23min

History professor Paul Hudson discusses The Crypt of Civilization, a time capsule at Oglethorpe University in Georgia, sealed in 1940 and slated to be opened in the year 8113 AD. Hudson comments on the particular material and ethical problems involved in the construction of time capsules and recounts his personal journey from discovering the Crypt as a student to becoming a founding member of the International Time Capsule Society, a group dedicated to the registry and study of all known examples of the form.

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
Dir. Frank Heath, 2021
English, 15min

Recent journeys through the Suez Canal and to Onkalo, Finland (home of the world’s first long-term disposal facility for spent nuclear fuel), prompt a man to consult an estate lawyer about an eccentric plan for his mortal remains, drawing a fine line between precious cargo and hazardous waste.

EARENDEL
Dir. Frank Heath, 2024
7min

A surreal travelogue from the molten interior of the Earth to the limits of the known universe, this film, assembled primarily from footage made by government agencies including US Geological Survey, NASA, and Space Force, investigates the paradoxical relationship between militarized technologies of visualization and sublime cosmic phenomenon. Music: ‘Earendel,’ by Patricia Brennan.

    In the early 60s, after Tito’s split with Stalin, a loose trend emerged in Socialist Yugoslav cinema. Disaffected filmmakers, living in the unrealized promise of a post-war utopia, equipped themselves with the tools of their contemporaries on the vanguard across Europe. The humanistic pessimism of the Italian Neorealists, the rebelliousness of the French New Wave, and the absurdity (and not to mention state funding) of the Czechoslovak New Wave found fertile ground in the rapidly urbanizing Yugoslavian landscape. Elements of satire, violence, polemics, sex, liberation, disillusionment, dark humor, and experimental techniques held together this burgeoning movement across genres.

    It wasn’t until 1969, in the official newspaper of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, Borba, that journalist Vladimir Jovičić derisively coined the term “Black Wave.” Jovičić called out “the systematic distortion of the present, in which everything is viewed through a monochromatic lens. Its themes are obscure and present improper visions and images of violence, moral degeneracy, misery, lasciviousness and triviality.” Two months later, a meeting was held among Yugoslav officials to discuss the present, film-induced demoralization, and the censorship began in earnest. Films like W.R.: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM (1971), inarguably the most famous contribution to the Black Wave, and BREAKFAST WITH THE DEVIL (1971), which we’re screening in this series, were banned and sealed for decades. PLASTIC JESUS (1971), even led to the filmmaker’s imprisonment for “spreading enemy propaganda.”

    Despite the supposedly “monochromatic lens,” we at Spectacle are pleased to share a selection of Black Wave films entirely in color. The early 70s marked both the end of the movement formally and one of its most productive periods. Shedding some of the severity from the war dramas of the 60’s, the Black Wave films of this era lean into style and cinematic ambition without dulling their political edge.

YOUNG AND HEALTHY AS A ROSE
Mlad i zdrav kao ruža
Dir. Jovan Jovanović, 1971
Yugoslavian. 74 min.
In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 10 PM 
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 10 PM 
MONDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 7:30 PM

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A young man who bears an uncanny resemblance to Vincent Gallow brazenly steals, kills, and fucks his way across Belgrade as he makes a name for himself in the criminal underground. Before long, he catches the attention of both competitors and the authorities. Stiv, the rebellious youth of titular vigor, finds himself the unlikely spokesperson of a disaffected generation and an outspoken critic of Tito.

One of the clearest examples of the French New Wave’s influence on Yugoslav Black Wave, viewers will notice more than a touch of Godard, especially BREATHLESS (1960) and WEEKEND (1967). Although not officially banned, it was not shown for 35 years after its initial release due to its anti-establishment content.

LIFE OF A SHOCK FORCE WORKER
Slike iz života udarnika
Dir. Bahrudin ‘Bata’ Čengić, 1972
Yugoslavian. 75 min.
In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5 – 7:30 PM 
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 10 PM 
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 18 – 7:30 PM 

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Adem, a Bosniak miner, is the exemplar of labor in his small town before the split between Tito and Stalin. Always going above and beyond the call of duty, Adem earns the title of udarnik (shock force worker) – a worker who has been elevated to the status of national hero. With his new status, his identity is bisected. At the same time a small town worker and national icon, family man and appendage of the state. His loyalties are tested while the countryside struggles to urbanize in accordance with Tito’s agenda, and never without a healthy dose of humor.

Beautifully shot by Karpo Aćimović Godina and restored under his direct supervision, LIFE OF A SHOCK FORCE WORKER is singular among its contemporaries in its beauty. Every composition is spellbinding from the mountains to the mines.

BREAKFAST WITH THE DEVIL
Doručak sa ðavolom
Dir. Miroslav Antić, 1971
Yugoslavian. 84 min.
In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM 
MONDAY, DECEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM 
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 10 PM 
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20 – 10 PM 

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In the shadow of wartime, a flood threatens a small Serbian village while Communist authorities sent from the city make impossible demands on the villagers. Parallel stories unfold across the village as families quarrel and comrades suffer, while under the muck and mire, love blooms.

With an incredible score and stand-out performance from Serbian icon, Velimir “Bata” Živojnović, BREAKFAST WITH THE DEVIL looks back at the early days of Socialist Yugoslavia and the people left to pick up the pieces after the war. The second and last film by poet turned filmmaker, Miroslac Antić, was banned by the state until 1990.

A series of inside out devices that function by turning back in on themselves, perpetually setting the score back to “0”, and eventually hitting the reset button. Scientific rationales, legal policies, national ideologies and landscape designs are all agents in the production of our shared reality. We have entered a perpetual state of re-invention, with a high speed and a seemingly unstoppable momentum. Re-invention also involves re-production, but as our accepted logical systems and infrastructures re-produce, they are reshaped and reformed. After reaching their functioning capacity, what is stable turns to liquid. All that is solid melts into air. This a film program full of illogical ends, nazi soil scientists and former air force pilots defying the limits of humanity. Films that bend and the history of scientific research, national identity formation, state policy and how they intertwine to hold our fragile world together.

Program 1: Reset

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14 – 7:30
Intro with Filmmaker Mary Helena Clark
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The Enlightenment
Dir. Stephanie Barber
2023 | 12 minutes | 16mm to HD | Color | sound

Yon and Payola find themselves in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states. Payola reads an excerpt of their considerable time on the age of enlightenment to Yon. Payola’s research, and presentation of this research, is a purposeful affront to empirical data, the scientific method and other enlightenment ideals, while reveling in the desire for the revolution and intellectual expansion those thinkers championed. The concepts are undermined by the form and register of their delivery OR the concepts are strengthened by the poetry through which they are presented.

A Common Sequence
Dir. Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser
2023 | 78 minutes | 2K | Color | 5.1

Within the human struggle to live and work on a changing planet, questions of value, extraction, and adaptation echo across seemingly disparate worlds. A Common Sequence examines shifts of life and labor through a critically-endangered salamander and plant patents in the apple industry. Weaving the stories of Dominican nuns running a conservation lab, a group of fisherman attempting to live off of a depleting lake, engineers developing AI-driven harvesting machines, and an indigenous biomedical researcher resisting the commodification of human DNA, the film becomes a meditation on the shifting border between the natural and unnatural world, and the dynamics of power at play.

Program 2: Eject

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20 – 7:30 PM 
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Sick Landscapes
Dir. Zach Hart
2025 | 24 minutes | Germany | English | B&W and Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm film and
HD Video

Sick Landscapes.2
Dir. Zach Hart
2025 | 17 minutes | Germany | English and German | English Subtitles |
Color | Stereo | 1.896:1 | 4K

Theatrical Premiere of two works developed as a multi-channel installation work. Alwin Seifert said it most directly, “in a sick landscape, there cannot be a healthy people.” He saw landscape design as a means to push forward the German folkish-nationalistic blood and soil agenda. Through his work, landscape became part of an overall concept of racial health and beauty. Reinhold Lingner, a prominent GDR landscape planner, would go on to describe the landscape in similar terms, but with an ecological instead of an ideological intention. He would anthropomorphize the landscape and describe it as an organism, as though the body of the landscape were part of the German people’s body. Lingner was also an advocate for landscape preservation after the second world war; a movement which had started many years earlier and was supported by Nazi soil scientists like Seifert. Lingner designed Berlin’s rubble mountains, hills made from rubble strewn about after WWII. The rubble was sorted by the Trümmerfrauen (rubble women), who were frequently photographed by Berliner Zeitung’s photographer, Eva Kemlein. She was a holocaust survivor who had gone underground during the second world war. Kemlein also photographed the demolition of the Berlin City Palace in 1951. The Palace’s demolition was hotly debated amongst architectural historians, landscape planners and ideologically driven conservationists that wanted to preserve German cultural heritage during the time of denazification. Communists ultimately thought the Palace stood for Prussian Imperialism, so it was destroyed as part of the GDR Ministry of Reconstruction’s effort to rebuild upon only the healthy aspects of German culture. Kemlein, who had trained as a forensic photographer, would survive the second world war and then go on to photograph the sick body of a building. Its spirit was strong enough to survive its initial demolition. Using Kemlein’s scientific documentation, the Palace was rebuilt. It now houses the highly controversial Humboldt Forum.

Unhealthy spirits infest the German landscape, through architecture, language and their accidental reproduction of Nazi ideology. Perhaps they would be most likely to haunt those who continue to work with the land itself. Still today, there are countless actors who unknowingly re-establish the language and behaviors of fascism, and the buildings which stand as monuments to imperialism. What a perfect moment to aestheticize ourselves to the materials which build our surrounding environment and those who oversee it. Whether it be the countless images that we ingest daily, the parks where we can sit on a bench and enjoy the sun, or the institutions we choose to cooperate with.

Germany is still the Israeli army’s second largest arms dealer. As we watch the Israeli government commit genocide in Palestine, it seems that the fascist architecture and the cultural landscape which the Nazi’s left behind was too deeply embedded into the Nation’s spirit to teach German politicians how to truly say “never again means now.”

Another Horizon
Dir. Stephanie Barber
2020 | 9 minutes | 16mm | Color | sound

the horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, is a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart.

here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is literally scratched between two voices, also cleaved apart or brought beside. jayne love reads a text i wrote for her — short sentences on the concept of the horizon and the briefest suggestion of narrative collide with pieces of richard (oswan) williams’ beautiful, rum-fueled living room sermons to me.

i lived, for a few months, in richard, and his wife mary’s, apartment, the site of their voodoo spiritual temple in new orleans. of course, as priests and priestesses Richard and Mary spoke often of death, transcendence, ethics and health. our days were slow and filled with philosophical rumination, richard, a brilliant old man schooling a young wandering wonderer. i recorded most everything on cassette tapes back then and some of those have made it here to the present. to this horizon we’re at now.

O’er the Land
Dir. Deborah Stratman
2009 | 51 minutes | United States | English | B&W and Color | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm film to
HD video

A meditation on the milieu of elevated threat addressing national identity, gun culture, wilderness, consumption, patriotism and the possibility of personal transcendence. Of particular interest are the ways Americans have come to understand freedom and the increasingly technological reiterations of manifest destiny.

While channeling our national psyche, the film is interrupted by the story of Col. William Rankin who in 1959, was forced to eject from his F8U fighter jet at 48,000 feet without a pressure suit, only to get trapped for 45 minutes in the up and down drafts of a massive thunderstorm. Remarkably, he survived. Rankin’s story represents a non-material, metaphysical kind of freedom. He was vomited up by his own jet, that American icon of progress and strength, but violent purging does not necessarily lead to reassessment or redirection.This film is concerned with the sudden, simple, thorough ways that events can separate us from the system of things, and place us in a kind of limbo. Like when we fall. Or cross a border. Or get shot. Or saved. The film forces together culturally acceptable icons of heroic national tradition with the suggestion of unacceptable historical consequences, so that seemingly benign locations become zones of moral angst.