Eric Theise

Movies

A Roll for Peter
Director
Twenty-plus former students, colleagues, and admirers of Peter Hutton answered an invitation to shoot A Roll For Peter. The parameters were simple: shoot a single 100 feet roll of black and white 16mm film. They were then strung together with black film separating the rolls, as Peter often separated the single shots in his films.It is a series of pieces that speak to Peter’s strong contemplative aesthetic ethos. Each filmmaker has 2 and half minutes of screen time to commune with Peter’s memory, and the collected rolls will become more than the sum of their parts.
Hojas de Maíz
Director
Hojas de Maíz was made at the request of Cincinnati composer and instrument-builder Anthony Luensman. The film was originally envisioned to be part of Tony's installation, Irato, in which each of his twenty-plus pieces, on exhibit in a civic art center, responded to viewers' pressing of a button. An exhibit of doorbells, imaginatively defined. One of Tony's stocks-in-trade is the use of discarded upright piano innards as electrified harps; my film contribution was to be projected amidst arrays of vibrating piano strings as art patrons took an elevator from the ground floor to a performing arts center. While this eventually proved infeasible due to ambient light conditions in the building, it did inspire the look and basic vocabulary of the film.
Renga
Director
“Renga is a linked-verse form of Japanese poetry that, though still practiced today, reached its peak between the 13th and 16th centuries. It is characterized by being a group composition, typically in the presence of judges and an audience, with poets rapidly contributing stanzas such that each new stanza addresses only the previous stanza; there is no overarching plot development, and the overall structure is a chain, not a conventional, linear narrative… In 1989, I had the great privilege to be involved in a film renga that was produced in the graduate film seminar led by Nathaniel Dorsky at the San Francisco Art Institute.” —Eric Theise