Joel Singer

Movies

Liberty
Director
“I left the city in 2009. A year later, I returned for a few months and took the ferry out to see Ms. Liberty close up for the first time. On the ferry I recorded the voices of some of my fellow passengers saying ‘Statue of Liberty.’ I spent the next month recording many more people saying the words in a wondrous variety of accents and languages. I was moved by the delight and pleasure that people took in uttering these magical words: words suggesting freedom and hope for millions of immigrants” (Joel Singer).
Scattered Remains
Director
Broughton reads his poetry over various images.
Devotions
Men in pairs, mostly naked, perform various sensual tasks together.
Devotions
Director
Men in pairs, mostly naked, perform various sensual tasks together.
The Gardener of Eden
Director of Photography
An old man (artist and landscape architect Bevis Bawa) contemplates the Garden of Eden.
Fractive Clusters
Director
Contemplative images of rivers, snow, waterfall, mountain and bodies.
Windowmobile
Director
Images, Joel Singer; Sounds, James Broughton. "The film is shot both through and at a window, superimposing and conjoining, thereby elaborating events on both sides of the glass. Broughton's accompanying poem sings the same song as the images, sounding from an Eden of the golden passing of days: "They were seeing the light every day then ... / They were looking and they were seeing / They were living there in the light at that time." - Robert Lipman, On the Films of Joel Singer
Glyphs II
Director
17 minutes, silent, colour. 1977
Sliced Light
Director
Buena Vista Park in San Francisco like you've never seen it. "Playing" my 16mm Beaulieu camera like a musical instrument with extremely rapid zooming and inverted images. The virtuoso musician Peter Plonsky plays his Chromatic Khaen, an ancient Laotian instrument. He had never seen the film. One fourteen minute take, responding directly to the images in the studio.
Song of the Godbody
Director
Close-up shots of Broughton's body.
Glyphs I
Director
My 10 minute silent b/w film made in 1975/76. Includes the first footage I ever shot of James Broughton (before he grew a beard).
Perisphere
Director
A traffic circle (in North Berkeley). The forcefield around the centre. Single-framed over the course of about 9 months.
Breakdown
Director
A 360 degree pan breaks down as the narrator's memories of the house in which she sits by the fireplace breaks down.