Dominic Angerame

Short film by Dominic Angerame.

"In June 1999 dear friends Agnetta Falk and Jack Hirschman were married at Matt Gonzales' place in the Mission. I was there with my 16mm Bolex and filmed part of the ceremony and crowd. After almost 30 years I finally made this footage into a finished film. It features many of our dear friends both living and deceased. In honor of Jack and Aggie's wedding anniversary I finished the film over the weekend." – Dominic Angerame.

“I've never seen light that looks or feels so dark; forward moving possibility united with so much cosmic terror.”—Marilyn Brakhage

“I've never seen light that looks or feels so dark; forward moving possibility united with so much cosmic terror.”—Marilyn Brakhage

“I've never seen light that looks or feels so dark; forward moving possibility united with so much cosmic terror.”—Marilyn Brakhage

"At the beginning and end of each roll of 16mm I shot a small part of the film is exposed to light because of the insertion and removal of the spool of film. Oftentimes images are obscured by light flashes. I saved many of these short segments when filming and living in Chicago. All of these are spliced together creating a visual diary of my time spent there with my wife Susan. The time period was from 1971-1979. Most of the imagery is from our Chicago days with a couple of scenes from San Francisco. Since the images are flashes and this is a look backward, I titled this short Flashbacks." --DA.

REVELATIONS is a continuation of what I call my "City Symphony" series. This works includes footage that was shot from the late 90s to the present. My filmmaking is inspired by filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens, Walter Ruttman and Robert Fulton. (Dominic Angerame)

A poetic black and white celluloid film depicting the city landscape (San Francisco) in a state of constant change.

"Anaconda Targets , a documentation tape of aerial bombings by the American military in Afghanistan, depicts the devastating effect of smart bombs. Not often featured in media reports, the soldiers' voices form the soundtrack that accompanies these chilling images. The document has been appropriated by filmmaker Dominic Angerame as a critique of his government's military aggression." - Susan Oxtoby

A film that seems to be partially created by the magic that only pixies can create. I went out shooting with my Bolex with the intention of shooting a series of very short one second movies. When the film was returned to me by the lab I discovered that superimposes over the images I had shot were images that I did not shoot. There appeared superimposed images of various women flexing their muscles and posing for some unknown camera person besides myself. This film is a result and a sort of homage to pixies wherever they may be.

Starring Zhanna. Gamaya ("Lead Us") a Sanskrit mantra performed by Zhanna, recorded and mastered by Zak May. This is a haiku and offers a prelude to CONSUME

Inspired by the novel Flicker by Theodore Roszak, this film was intended to explore the images captured in the flickering light of multiple projector beams. By utilizing superimpositions within the camera, one could experience the pulsating light and explore hidden imagery through use of the "Sally Rand" that Roszak refers to.

Starring Bruce Conner, a belly dancer, a geiger counter, and a toxic waste dump.

By focusing on demolition precipitated by the Loma Prieta earthquake, Dominic Angerame suggests that the natural disaster simply highlights the intrinsically destructive aspects of urban development. This negative spectacle is all the more striking for taking place in San Francisco, the backdrop of innumerable Hollywood narratives and avant-garde films.

Angerame's film juxtaposes footage of the auteur's conflagrated material possessions after an apartment fire with an angiogram of his coronary arteries, exploring the temporal nature of both spaces.

The San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway comes to life in this elegy for modernity. The Freeway was deemed a triumph of engineering, a monument for human inventiveness. With the 1989 earthquake, however, the freeway was severely damaged and with it all the industrial-technological promises it held. Premonition shows the situation before the crisis, a deceptive moment of industrial harmony.

In CONTINUUM, the world, the workers within the world and the labor of making the film itself are equated through montage and a brilliantly concentrated filmic "painterliness." The result is an experimental film which is at the same time a document of propaganda in the sense that at its conclusion, one finds oneself closer to the science of the motion of society in its monumentality with streets, buildings, the building of them and the workers and their instruments, creating a constructivist poetry within the eyes.

This film utilizes a telephone answering machine as the basic structure. During the past year I kept all the messages recorded on this machine, and then asked many of my friends for permission to shoot a ten second filmic portrait of them, with the messages used as a soundtrack. The resulting work is this piece which becomes a statement of the modern society and our technology at work.

The ultimate rejection film. A compilation of many of the rejection notices and letters that I have received during my fifteen years of making films. "Films that offer an intelligent glimpse of the personal struggle and/or foibles of their creators seem destined for a warm reception in any festival. In the world of independents, a short like HIT THE TURNPIKE! is the finest way to end a lengthy screening. For those unfortunate enough to have suffered the agony of rejection or decision, HIT THE TURNPIKE! is the kind of film that encourages you to leave the disappointment behind.

Voyeuristic Tendencies is not so much a film about voyeurism as it is our tendency to be voyeuristic. That tendency, nurtured by the filmmakers carefully crafted succession of visual teases and exploited by the camera's ability to become our eyes, becomes in increasingly evident as the film progresses. The camera teases the viewer, in this case, co-voyeur, not with sexual or erotic innuendo, but rather with graphic and aesthetic challenges. The partially opened window of a woman's dressing room forces us to realize our urge to see more about these hidden worlds. This type of cinematically- induced self- realization makes Voyeuristic Tendencies a powerfully human film.

I was hoping to strike it rich on our honeymoon in Reno. In a way I did, seeing that the camera was filled with very rich imagery in recording this visual journal of our brief visit. The soundtrack is a creation of Katie Steinorth who translated the Buddhist chant of “Om Ma Ni Pad Me Hum” into the words “Oh, Money Bring Me A Home.” —Canyon Cinema

"If you have to beg, or steal, or borrow, Welcome to Los Angeles, City of Tomorrow." - Phil Ochs, to whose memory this film is dedicated. First impressions of LA, Forest Lawn Cemetery, the Tropicana Motel, and the sandy beaches of Venice and Long Beach.

Going home – from west to east; return. Part of a series of turning points. Recording a journal in color language; shadows of faces. Realities and memories come out frame by frame. The rhythm of a summer vacation. Rituals of light to dark – manifesting form. This is a translation of old friends and old places. A ticket home.

I'D RATHER BE IN PARIS depicts the filmmaker's visual concern with his physical environment by autobiographically exploring his alternatives: Chicago, San Francisco, and the editing room itself. These urban explorations tend to concentrate on high- speed assemblages of cityscape abstractions.

A humorous parody on the condition of creative film studies in art schools and colleges in general. The sound-track is a composition combining the musical score from the film Ballet Mechanique and the voices of film students testing various pieces of film recording equipment and complaining about grades and procedures. The visuals reveal a modern day mechanical ballet performed by the instructor (myself) on the dada chessboard of absolute reality to the automatic beat of an intervalometer clicking time away one frame per second, as he attempts to relay technical data to his students.

July 5, 1980. Summertime, San Francisco's Chinatown. A gang of Chinese firework dealers dispose of their unsold goods to the glory of emulsified film. Negative explosions give way to the gateway of reversal images. This film utilizes high speed negative film to enhance grain and image deterioration. Must be projected at silent speed.

Soundtrack: Subduing Demons in America, John Giorno; Actress: Lillian North. A film dealing with the alteration of human scaling within the 16mm frame. The "star" walks from one edge of the screen, passes the center, but never reaches the opposite edge. Shot in extreme slow motion, this film creates an unusual and bizarre sense of timelessness and distance. This allows the viewer to become involved with every subtle movement within the frame. The "center" of the frame is constantly emptying itself, creating a vacuum, and is left entirely open, only to be filled again, not with images, however, but with the mind's eye. The space created in the center of the frame allows one to pass through the film and enter an inner dimension of visual perception. A cycle is attained whereby the film, emptying itself, gives the viewer the space he needs so that he may feed energy back into the space. This film is a unique approach to dealing with space that surrounds filmic images.

Song of the El Train in Chicago. The lab did not sync this film correctly and makes this film what it is.

Soundtrack: Ed Sanders. Filmed in Buffalo, 1969, completed in Chicago, 1973. Acid in the park, broken images, danger symbols of the fleeting moments.

Anti-war demonstration, 1968, New York City march to Sheep's Meadow, shows Vets against the war, Yippies, arrests, and flags of a half-forgotten revolution.

Anti-war demonstration, 1968, New York City march to Sheep's Meadow, shows Vets against the war, Yippies, arrests, and flags of a half-forgotten revolution.