James Fotopoulos
Birth : 1976-01-01, Norridge - Illinois - USA
History
Born in Norridge, IL in 1976, James Fotopoulos is a filmmaker who began production on his first feature-length film, ZERO (1997), in 1995. In 1998, he founded Fantasma for the production of his second feature, Migrating Forms (1999), and would continue to create a number of critically acclaimed narrative feature films, such as Back Against the Wall (2000), Families (2002), The Nest (2003) and Dignity (2012). Along with his narrative productions, Fotopoulos has created a prolific body of over 200 non-narrative films, which include Christabel (2001), Esophagus (2004), The Mirror Mask (2005), The Sky Song (2007) and Alice in Wonderland (2010). These works range from feature length to a few seconds long and combine an exhaustive portfolio of visual art and performance techniques. Fotopoulos' work received a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives; premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, Festival del Film Locarno and the Museum of Art and Design; and was screened and exhibited widely at a number of film festivals, museums, and sites, such as Rotterdam International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, London Film Festival, Whitney Biennial, Walker Art Center, and the Andy Warhol Museum, among many others.
Himself
What makes a rebel? This 78 minute documentary probes the psyche of bad-boy publisher and free speech warrior Barney Rosset, whose mid-century legal and cultural battles smashed sexual and political taboos in the United States — unleashing the counter-culture of the 1960s and introducing millions of young intellectuals to the most radical currents in literature, film, theater and politics. In his late eighties, coming to terms with his life, Barney Rosset began to obsessively sculpt an autobiographical 15′ x 22′ surreal wall mural, embedded with jewel-like vignettes crafted out of found objects, each a clue to the conflicts and obsessions that drove Barney’s lifetime rebellion against authority. A cast of artists, a neurologist, and a shaman connect the clues and piece together Barney’s life.
Writer
The story of young sisters in the American Midwest left alone with their increasingly unstable mother while their father is fighting in the Civil War. The film traces the girls’ naturally fraught sibling dynamic and the ways that their father’s absence ignites their imagination. When they meet a stranger in the forest they become enchanted by a world of creative work and nature, a welcome distraction from their volatile mother. Play and the dreamlike space they inhabit provides an expansive and ultimately grounding setting for the girls’ response to war.
Director
The story of young sisters in the American Midwest left alone with their increasingly unstable mother while their father is fighting in the Civil War. The film traces the girls’ naturally fraught sibling dynamic and the ways that their father’s absence ignites their imagination. When they meet a stranger in the forest they become enchanted by a world of creative work and nature, a welcome distraction from their volatile mother. Play and the dreamlike space they inhabit provides an expansive and ultimately grounding setting for the girls’ response to war.
Editor
An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.
Writer
An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.
Director
An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.
Director
A disgruntled veteran unable to adjust back into society justifies domestic terrorism by interpreting his actions with alien invasion.
Editor
A disgruntled veteran unable to adjust back into society justifies domestic terrorism by interpreting his actions with alien invasion.
Writer
A disgruntled veteran unable to adjust back into society justifies domestic terrorism by interpreting his actions with alien invasion.
Writer
Agents Mr. Rainbow and Mr. Lamb are sent to an alien planet fighting a civil war. Their mission to destroy a perpetual motion machine is interrupted by their capture. While their interrogations proceed the two men struggle to come to terms with their suffering and pending death.
Director
Agents Mr. Rainbow and Mr. Lamb are sent to an alien planet fighting a civil war. Their mission to destroy a perpetual motion machine is interrupted by their capture. While their interrogations proceed the two men struggle to come to terms with their suffering and pending death.
Writer
Thousands of years into the future, through the eyes of an alien life form, we see the fossilized beings of Ronald Reagan and William Casey enact their relationship as if in a crude ancient play. Through an array of text, sculptures, drawings, animations and monologues, alternate interpretations of the character’s histories and myths unfold.
Director
Thousands of years into the future, through the eyes of an alien life form, we see the fossilized beings of Ronald Reagan and William Casey enact their relationship as if in a crude ancient play. Through an array of text, sculptures, drawings, animations and monologues, alternate interpretations of the character’s histories and myths unfold.
Writer
Written in 1993, Thick Comb was James Fotopoulos’ earliest unrealized script, about a criminal porn producer hunting down the world’s greatest lover for thieving an adult film’s production budget. A couple years ago the script was resurrected and rewrote with the protagonist confessing to his lover other incomplete Fotopoulos film scenarios from the 1990s.
Director
Written in 1993, Thick Comb was James Fotopoulos’ earliest unrealized script, about a criminal porn producer hunting down the world’s greatest lover for thieving an adult film’s production budget. A couple years ago the script was resurrected and rewrote with the protagonist confessing to his lover other incomplete Fotopoulos film scenarios from the 1990s.
Director
An adaptation of the 1886 musical “Alice in Wonderland: A Dream Play for Children” by Henry Saville Clark and Walter Slaughter, Fotopoulos’ feature length film propels the Clark/Slaughter score into the 21st century digital age. Sculptures, drawings, text, and original music are used to explore the late 19th century’s evolution of painting, literature, and theatre into early photography and moving pictures. The piece probes the interplay of art and science and in exploring these ideas certain lives and themes are touched upon – the relationship between John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll, Ruskin’s theories on drawing, Thomas Eakins’ painting and his use of photography, the burgeoning of early cinema with Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, notions of amateurism and professionalism in art and the archetype of the condemned artist. The work is presented in two acts, remaining faithful to the musical’s original construction based upon Carroll’s narratives.
Director
The story of an aspiring young Hollywood actor who, while hitchhiking to see his agent, is picked-up by a lecherous, cynical Cary Grant.
Director
Deep blues. 30.40 is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmaker James Fotopoulos).
Director
Collaboration with Grandpa’s Ghost.
Director
The origins of the universe told through the lens of an experimental film and video sci-fi horror-show fusion: Alien women trapped in a colorfully hand-scratched film-textured hotel room, genetically mutated men slowly driven mad in a white digital prison, the high contrast landscapes of Mars, and a futuristic tribe of a giant, an elf and a witch in their decaying suicide-home.
Director
A low-fi, grimy, VHS, edited in-camera, apocalyptic feature finalizes the cycle of videos that began with Jerusalem (2003). Two of the actresses from the first video remain but now joined with a supporting cast of public access outcasts. Using sculptures, drawings, paintings, crude animations, puppets and heavily self-conscious performance – the final piece attempts to string a through-line from the caves of Lascaux and the Gnosis to the DNA-mishap-mutants of the future.
Director
Collaboration with Grandpa’s Ghost.
Director
Video (color)
Director
Director
Short film from James Fotopoulos
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Short film from James Fotopoulos
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Short film from James Fotopoulos
Director
Short film from James Fotopoulos
Producer
Jerusalem is the first of four videos (followed by Sublimation [2003], Conjunction [2003] and The Pearl [2004]) exploring inter-dimensional travel. In this inaugural episode a group of young actors inhabit an empty apartment, their behavior taped and edited in-camera. An analog solarization technique captures their rituals of improvised dance, frozen poses and trimming of hair. Each cast member recounts painful personal life episodes that unfold like cheap sci-fi stories of otherworldly abductions, familial vanishings, strange dreams and reptilian passions.
Editor
Jerusalem is the first of four videos (followed by Sublimation [2003], Conjunction [2003] and The Pearl [2004]) exploring inter-dimensional travel. In this inaugural episode a group of young actors inhabit an empty apartment, their behavior taped and edited in-camera. An analog solarization technique captures their rituals of improvised dance, frozen poses and trimming of hair. Each cast member recounts painful personal life episodes that unfold like cheap sci-fi stories of otherworldly abductions, familial vanishings, strange dreams and reptilian passions.
Cinematography
Jerusalem is the first of four videos (followed by Sublimation [2003], Conjunction [2003] and The Pearl [2004]) exploring inter-dimensional travel. In this inaugural episode a group of young actors inhabit an empty apartment, their behavior taped and edited in-camera. An analog solarization technique captures their rituals of improvised dance, frozen poses and trimming of hair. Each cast member recounts painful personal life episodes that unfold like cheap sci-fi stories of otherworldly abductions, familial vanishings, strange dreams and reptilian passions.
Writer
Jerusalem is the first of four videos (followed by Sublimation [2003], Conjunction [2003] and The Pearl [2004]) exploring inter-dimensional travel. In this inaugural episode a group of young actors inhabit an empty apartment, their behavior taped and edited in-camera. An analog solarization technique captures their rituals of improvised dance, frozen poses and trimming of hair. Each cast member recounts painful personal life episodes that unfold like cheap sci-fi stories of otherworldly abductions, familial vanishings, strange dreams and reptilian passions.
Director
Video (color)
Director
Video (color)
Director
Two of the female characters from Jerusalem (2003) appear in a new location: a black and white minimalist apartment. With the aid of drawings to illustrate their psychological probing, the ladies perform basic physical repetitions and frozen poses while being captured on video and re-lensed through low-fi cyan solariziations. Layered stereo monologues speak of their continuing personal explorations into the science-fiction dream-symbol terrain of their private histories.
Director
Jerusalem is the first of four videos (followed by Sublimation [2003], Conjunction [2003] and The Pearl [2004]) exploring inter-dimensional travel. In this inaugural episode a group of young actors inhabit an empty apartment, their behavior taped and edited in-camera. An analog solarization technique captures their rituals of improvised dance, frozen poses and trimming of hair. Each cast member recounts painful personal life episodes that unfold like cheap sci-fi stories of otherworldly abductions, familial vanishings, strange dreams and reptilian passions.
Director
Filmed in saturated colors on out-of-date film stocks with an aggressive soundtrack, the story of The Nest is told – The marriage of two young professionals unravels after an unnamed accident physically and emotional traumatizes the wife. Government agents, shadowy investigators and transgender beings appear, trying to solve the nervous-breakdown-mystery of secret alien forces that chose the couple as their target. In-camera tricks, drawings, derelict optical printing, miniatures, puppets and prosthetic makeup effects convey the dual collapse of the protagonists’ lives and the film structure as one unified entity.
Writer
Low-budget film about a lingerie model who keeps getting hooked up with the wrong guy.
Director
Low-budget film about a lingerie model who keeps getting hooked up with the wrong guy.
Director
Video portrait by James Fotopoulos.
Director
"...the simplest and most beautiful of [Fotopoulos'] early video features, which simply follows the movements of a model whose body is (re)filmed so closely that she appears as abstract swirls of colour and video grain." —Maximilian Le Cain
Director
A digital poem of the flesh unfolding in near mathematical structural precision. The video’s first segment is a meditation upon the movements of a single female body. The second section focuses on the physical mechanics of a male and female couple. The human footage is augmented with superimposed abstractions, flickering lights, paintings, sound waves and sculptures.
Director
Life in a rural industrial town: a teenage boy, his family, friends and failed attempt at love are investigated through stark black-and-white photography and static long takes. Filmed in a fusion of authentic and staged documentation, with robotic performances by actors and non-actors, the piece meditates on the mundane existence of human and animal life.
Director
Christabel is an abstract interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Gothic poem about female possession. Adhering to the poem’s structure the film is presented in four parts – Two digital video half hour segments and then two short 16mm conclusions. The contemporary relevance of the poem’s symbols and themes is underlined using performance combined with heavy image and sound layering.
Director
Short film from James Fotopoulos, 16mm film (color), mono.
Director
Short film from James Fotopoulos, 16mm film (b&w), silent.
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Short film from James Fotopoulos
Director
5-parts, (Consumed 1-5), 16mm film (b&w & color)
Director
A man and woman embark on a sexual journey to detach mind from body. The relationship slowly grows into one of emotional domination, physical disease, abandonment and the creation of personal pornography.
Director
Short film from James Fotopoulos, 16mm film (b&w).
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Short film from James Fotopoulos
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16mm film (b&w)
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16mm film (color)
Director
Completed in 2000 (the same year as his third feature-length work, BACK AGAINST THE WALL), James Fotopoulos' THE SUN is a 16mm silent short that beguilingly cross-cuts between a lovely young woman, uncomfortably waiting, and the sun-drenched outdoors. Between these two seemingly unrelated sequences, a tension develops. Without the assistance of a soundtrack as a guide, anything imaginable could be possible. Or nothing at all. THE SUN is another remarkable selection from the Cinemad Almanac.
Director
Short film from James Fotopoulos
Director
Short film from James Fotopoulos
Director
16mm film (b&w/color)
Director
James Fotopoulos’ first feature film is a two and half hour endurance test about a lonely man’s decent into horror, mutilation and psychological collapse. The lines of reality and fantasy blur when the man’s hand-tinted primordial dreams of humanoid sex and violence manifest in his everyday reality as cancer, abuse and mannequin love.
