Jack Goldstein

Goldstein's landmark 1978 rotoscopic animation. Often played on a loop. 16mm, color, silent, 19s.

In the tautly poetic Bone China (1976) a colourfully plumed painted bird flaps frantically around a china plate to the sound of beating wings.

A short film by Jack Goldstein

In The Chair (1975) the glaring white highlights on a freshly painted black chair rhyme with multicoloured feathers that fall and stick to the paint, caught by both paint and camera, while the chair itself nearly disappears into the deep blue background. One take, a little over 7 minutes in length is a black wooden chair slowly being rained upon by large multi-colored feathers. There is no sound. The piece is Zen like and meditative transporting the viewer into contentment as feathers gather on and around the chair.

A short film by Jack Goldstein

16mm film close-up of a ballet shoe being untied.

Experimental short, a looping 16mm color film portrait of a German Shepherd dog, with sound.

Appropriates the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio’s familiar production logo, stripping away the company name, tinting the background a deep hue of red, and repeating the lion’s thundering roar on a continuous loop, thereby highlighting the artifice involved in commercial filmmaking.

In The Knife (1975) red light falls onto a knife against a dark background, coating the silvery blade inch by inch until it is fully illuminated. The experiment is then repeated in green, then in light red, next blue, and finally pale yellow. It’s a very Hitchcockian approach to creating meaning, as if all the elements - object, colour, space and time - had been isolated from the suspense, only to be reconstructed anew, creating silent, artificial drama. And, as with Hitchcock, the motifs are fetishistically charged: knife, dog, door, bird, lion: ‘...they are all Freudian in some sense’, observed Goldstein.

The trace is similar to the index, but there is a more complex relationship to the original referent because the trace is at once a repetition and an erasure. In his 1974 film The Portrait of Père Tanguy, Goldstein traced a reproduction of the famous Vincent van Gogh painting of the same name. While on the one hand Goldstein's presence is affirmed by the mark which he makes on the paper, on the other, his sense of selfhood or individual identity is called into question by the fact that he is merely tracing an image produced by another individual, an image originally intended to assert van Gogh's individuality and sense of selfhood. The repetition is compounded by the fact that the tracing is, in fact, a tracing of a reproduction so that we are faced with a seemingly endless trail of doubling and disappearance.

16mm film, black and white, sound.

16mm film, color, sound.

16mm film, black and white, silent.

Film, 16mm, black and white, mono sound.

16mm film, black and white, sound.

16mm film, color, sound.

Beginning production in 1983 and completed just prior to Goldstein’s suicide in 2003, Under Water Sea Fantasy reveals Goldstein’s acute understanding of the perception of spectacle and the power of image. Using production values influenced by Hollywood studio techniques, he exploits the spectacular effects of visual presence and the interplay of sound and image. Footage of natural phenomena such as underwater life, volcanic eruptions and celestial events is montaged into a flow of appearing and disappearing energies with no clear narrative structure.