Bill Brown

An essay film about a river and the limits of knowing it. Using Mark Twain’s "Life On The Mississippi" as a road map, Brown travels along the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans and considers ways that river pilots, paddlers, historical re-enactors, and civil engineers attempt to know the river through modeling, measurement, and simulation. Along the way, Brown attempts to survey the river and the landscapes and land uses along its banks as a visible expression of economic transition, political polarization, and environmental change.

A pocket-sized travelogue about leaving one hometown and looking for the next one. In this film, Brown re-works 16mm footage that he shot years ago during a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Las Vegas. The spatial discontinuities of the road trip are rendered as visual continuities across three frames as Brown goes in search of the next town to fall in and out of love with.

Perhaps best known for his Spiral Jetty, sculptor Robert Smithson’s interest in landscape and land use was prophetic. In 1973, Texas oil millionaire Stanley Marsh 3 commissioned Smithson to create an earthwork on Marsh’s cattle ranch north of Amarillo, called ‘Amarillo Ramp’.

Commissioned by Ben Russell for 2016 Moogfest screening series, "Future Projections: Memories of the Space Age." Video is eponymously titled for the J.G. Ballard short story.

In this impressionistic documentary film, Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown travel across Spain to explore responses to the housing crisis of the early 2000s. The filmmakers visit families squatting in failed condo developments; intentional communities of mountain cave dwellers; protest campsites in front of bank branches; and empty apartment buildings transformed into experiments in 'utopian' living.

A Return to The Return to Reason is a tribute to Man Ray's 1923 film "Le Retour à La Raison" (A return to Reason), the first film to use his 'Rayograph' technique in which Man Ray exposed found objects onto film negative. In this film the found object is Man Ray’s digitized film, the first Dada film. The “original” film was digitized with all its aged emulsions, scratches, and splices, then compiled into digital filmstrips. These filmstrips are used to output a dithered and inverted image that the laser engraver may etch onto black 35mm film leader. The film images are created as the laser engraver scratches away the emulsion on the black leader.

In the decade since the events of 9/11/2001, the United States has been engaged in a national act of memorial making. Some of these 9/11 memorials are contested sites, where conflicting visions and voices clash. But most are quiet and deeply personal. This short non-fiction film examines some of these memorials, and the reasons why seven people made the unlikely decision to build them. A woman in Wisconsin hopes to franchise her homemade memorial in all 50 states. A gay priest in Kentucky dedicates a storefront church to a victim of 9/11. A man in New Jersey builds a scale model of the Twin Towers on his front lawn and decorates them with Christmas lights. None of these monument makers had lost any friends or relatives that day. All of them watched the tragedy unfold at a distance, and it is this distance that they hope to cross.

A spaceman escapes his home world because it'd become a big drag. On Uranus, he finds that life is strange and wonderful.

I lived around the corner from the Henry Horner Homes. I once read an article about the place in the New York Times. The title of the article was "What It's Like To Live In Hell." By the time I moved to Chicago, the projects were empty. The city began to knock down the buildings, one by one, till there was only one building left. It stood there for years. Then the city knocked it down, too.

Rooted in the true sense of "independent" in voice and image, The Other Side is a personal essay documentary imbued with magical landscapes and searing observations softly spoken during the director's cinematic trek along the United States-Mexican border. Throughout the 2,000-mile journey, Texas-based filmmaker Bill Brown considers the border as an historical and political geography of aspiration, insecurity, and transition. He talks to undocumented immigrants who have risked their lives to cross the border and to border activists whose politics have put them at odds with the guardians of homeland security. -Film Society of Lincoln Center

KUSTOM KAMERA KOMMANDOS (with an obvious nod to Kenneth Anger) is a short about the joy of filmmaking produced for the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

A short historical-landscape film, directed by Bill Brown.

As its nuclear missile silos get blown-up, North Dakota scratches its head and wonders what’s next.

As its nuclear missile silos get blown-up, North Dakota scratches its head and wonders what’s next.

A landscape film concerning location (Montréal, St. John's, Regina, and Vancouver), narration, history, and the personal role of the director in the formation of audiovisual art.

HUB CITY is a short about Lubbock, Texas, the home of Buddy Holly. It is also about trajectories of death and small towns in general.

"Bill Brown's Roswell [...] takes a fanciful look at the supposed crash of a flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. [...] Brown...seems to take the event seriously. He wonders what the craft was doing in Roswell of all places, speculating that it was piloted by a 'star boy...joyriding through the cosmos' who 'got lost and lost control.' But Brown also sees his subject playfully, as if through a child's eyes, [...] The fish-eye lens used for some landscape shots curves the horizon line, making the sky seem enclosed-- navigable, traversable. In the film's strongest image, Brown stands facing the camera with a sheaf of papers in hand, as an animated drawing of a spaceship scoots across the paper, suggesting a connection between UFO fantasies and the magical possibilities of cinema." -Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

"Bill Brown's Roswell [...] takes a fanciful look at the supposed crash of a flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. [...] Brown...seems to take the event seriously. He wonders what the craft was doing in Roswell of all places, speculating that it was piloted by a 'star boy...joyriding through the cosmos' who 'got lost and lost control.' But Brown also sees his subject playfully, as if through a child's eyes, [...] The fish-eye lens used for some landscape shots curves the horizon line, making the sky seem enclosed-- navigable, traversable. In the film's strongest image, Brown stands facing the camera with a sheaf of papers in hand, as an animated drawing of a spaceship scoots across the paper, suggesting a connection between UFO fantasies and the magical possibilities of cinema." -Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

A week or so after 9/11, Caveh Zahedi and I began to exchange video letters. It was Caveh's idea. We mailed a miniDV tape back and forth to each other. Months would pass between replies. We kept at it for several years. I can't remember why we stopped.