Jeanne Liotta

Movies

Property
Director
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.
Crosswalk
Director
"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.
Sweet Dreams
Director
Shot on location in Second Life, at "Beneath the Tree That Died" by AM Radio. Featuring Sunshine Hernandoz, BillyBob Mahoney, and Astra Thorne as themselves. Commisioned for the Artists Karaoke Throwdown at PDX Festival May 2009, Portland OR. "it is the possible we place before us" Gilles Deleuze, on the virtual
Sutro
Director
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
Water Spell
Thanks
"Sandy Ding's WATER SPELL is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure... and back. For me, this film is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This is not an easy film, but it is a powerful one."

--Nina Menkes
Haiku (for Onizuka)
Director
"On January 28, 1986 the Challenger Mission 51-dash- L set out to observe Halley's Comet from space but exploded a minute into the launch killing everyone on board. A monument to Challenger astronaut Ellison J Onizuka stands in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, from which I made a graphite rubbing of the text onto a sheet of plain paper, and noticed it was nearly a perfect haiku. Then re filmed to emphasize poetic structure / disaster duration."
Observando el cielo
Director
Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth.
What We as Humans Trying Fallibly Forever
Director
video loop, duration eternal. One single film dissolve extracted from the media haystack of the mid 20th century.
Eclipse
Cinematography
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...
Eclipse
Editor
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...
Eclipse
Director
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...
Hephaestus of the Airshaft
Director
The god of metallurgy manifests in Manhattan, with the radio on.
Loretta
Director
An abstract moving rayogram in the form of a woman or an aria. Living in time experienced as high drama, dissolving into the infinite. A dialectical manifestation of phenomena in flux, like any other movie.
Maria Movie
Director
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.
Window
Director
'Window' is a lo-fi, trance-inducing trigger into other realms. A static, formal elegance masks the teeming energy coursing through its electronic heart.
Muktikara
Director
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.
What Makes Day and Night
Director
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.
Ceci N'est Pas
Director
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.
Land of Enchantment
Director
New Mexico camera roll, a Kodachrome home movie, with compass.
Dervish Machine
Director
Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin's Dreammachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenuousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.
Blue Moon
Director
Erratic, erotic, arrhythmic lunar trauma. Strong poetic textures of female psycho-sexual experience, altering the film’s surface through selective bleaching and scratching, and uncanny percussive editing.
Manifesto aka Struck by the Hand
Director
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.