Bill Brand
Nacimiento : 1949-03-27, Rochester, New York, USA
Historia
Bill Brand is a multi-disciplinary artist whose films, public artwork, installations, paintings and works-on-paper have exhibited worldwide in museums, galleries microcinemas and on television. His 1980 Masstransiscope, an animated mural installed in the New York City subway, is in the MTA Arts and Design permanent collection. Bill Brand’s artwork has been featured at Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Anthology Film Archive and Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. He is represented by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris and Court Tree Gallery, Brooklyn.
His films have been presented at major film festivals including the Berlin Film Festival, New Directors/ New Films Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and Rotterdam Film Festival. His films are discussed in histories of cinema including the books Experimental Filmmaking: Break the Machine (2015) by Kathryn Ramey; Results You Can’t Refuse: Celebrating 30 Years of BB Optics, (2006) edited by Andrew Lampert, Documentary, A History of the Non-Fiction Film, (1992) by Erik Barnouw; and Allegories of Cinema, (1990) by David James. Brand’s work has also been written about in news and journal articles by Janet Maslin, Jonas Mekas, J. Hoberman, B. Ruby Rich, Ian Christie, Noel Carroll and Randy Kennedy among others.
Bill Brand is Professor Emeritus at Hampshire College and teaches Film Preservation at New York University's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation graduate program. He is co-owner of BB Optics, Inc., a company that specializes in archival film preservation and post-production services. Bill Brand founded the showcase and workshop Chicago Filmmakers in 1973, and served on the Board of Directors of the Collective for Living Cinema until 1991 in New York City. He co-founded Parabola Arts in 1981 and is currently an artistic director. He served on the board of trustees for The Flaherty (2008-15) and is an advisor to the Orphan Film Symposium and Mono No Aware.
Bill Brand lives in New York City with his wife, the artist Katy Martin.
Director
Scattered in seemingly random order, on the screen, we see the light that traverses the kinetic fields of Bill Brand’s latest film August Garden. Made for a group exhibition at Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre (Paris), the film accompanies a series of flower ink paintings, carefully made by the artist. Before, in the first seconds, we’re able to see an animation of August Garden 07 (ink and watercolor on xuan paper, 9″ x13″, 2019), which titillates lively for brief moments.
Director
Huevos a la mexicana es una película mexicana producida en 2000 dirigida por Jaime Fernández y protagonizada por Rosenda Bernal, Alfonso Brito, Mora Escudero, Raúl Padilla, Alfredo Solares
Director
Susie's Ghost is about the mystery of the marks we make and leave behind. The “Susie” in the title refers to a sibling but the "ghost" refers more generally to lingering feelings of loss. The cinematography and performance both express a tentative presence and diffuse sense of disappearance. Is she looking for something? Is she really there? We shot with aging 16mm film in my downtown Manhattan neighborhood, just before construction mania obliterated the last traces of the manufacturing district I’d moved into years earlier.
Director
Katy Martin paints directly on her skin, and uses her whole body to make marks with the paint. Bill Brand frames the action and its trace, in the process, linking painting and cinema. Swan's Island explores gesture in painting, and how it relates to the hand held camera. The film creates abstractions from the glistening blue paint that in turn evoke a seascape or a distant, yet intimate place. In its choreography, Swan's Island is a duet. The painted figure occupies space, and the camera describes that space. The person filming and the person filmed are moving as one, and yet they are separate, each an island. Seeing and being seen are inextricably bound with emotions of love and loss, longing and a sense of place.
Director
Here, my body is explicitly a screen on which I project my father’s photographs of the family to articulate my position of difference within the family experience of illness and death. —Bill Brand
Director
Skinside Out features paint on skin, carried out in an expressionist mode on both of the filmmakers' bodies. The emphasis is on the pleasure of looking -- at the edge of repulsion -- and the implications of making public an essentially private gesture. The film posits painting as a gendered, bodily act, whose location shifts continually within a context that's always changing. Images filmed in the studio are juxtaposed with footage of a construction barge along the Hudson. By examining both in relation to surface, the work paradoxically looks for what lies within, while questioning who and where we take ourselves to be.
Director
People who are homeless reveal homelessness from their own experiences dispelling common misconceptions and prejudices. Told as a personal journey, the film gives a broad analysis of the causes and conditions of homelessness while it analyzes news, TV reports and historical images of poverty. This film presents new ways to look at homelessness, displacing the debate from questions of charity to ones of social justice
Director
West Virginia industrial landscapes are collaged on an optical printer through a series of jagged shapes that transform the photographed scenes into a semi-abstract kinetic field. The technique developed by Brand in his earlier films, extends the already complex visual idiom by inlaying social, sexual, personal and political subject matter. Woven into the fabric of the film is the story of Fred Carter, a retired coal miner and black lung activist who was framed by the Federal Government in its effort to undercut the black lung movement and to stop his bid for president of the United Mine Workers Association. His story is told through fragments of documentary interviews and by a poet whose narrative forms a counter theme within the film. The film’s thematic content and formal visualizations sit in precarious balance.
Director
Chuck's Will's Widow is a eulogy for my father and mother whose ashes are spread in the Adirondack mountain woods where the film is shot. Visualized through a field of swirling shapes, the fragmented landscapes weave an emotional fabric containing inexplicable personifications and associations.
Director
Consisting of a 300-foot-long painting made on reflective material, Masstransiscope is a public artwork visible from the subway tunnels of the Manhattan-bound B and Q lines. It is in a special enclosure with 228 narrow slits and fluorescent lights. To someone passing by, it looks like an animated movie.
Director
This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life of artists in Lower Manhattan and at the same time dramatizes questions about the nature of filmic representation. Split decision is a boxing term used when the judges divide their votes in finding a winner. In this case the fight is between the two heroes of the film who are seen intermittently in a bar, negotiating a pick-up, and at home, breaking up in a domestic quarrel. The fight is also in the telling, between modes of conventional representation and modes of radical representation - between conventional continuity editing, and abstraction created through computer generated grids. The film features an appearance by Carolee Schneemann and digital imaging from before the era of personal computers.
Bar Crowd
This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life of artists in Lower Manhattan and at the same time dramatizes questions about the nature of filmic representation. Split decision is a boxing term used when the judges divide their votes in finding a winner. In this case the fight is between the two heroes of the film who are seen intermittently in a bar, negotiating a pick-up, and at home, breaking up in a domestic quarrel. The fight is also in the telling, between modes of conventional representation and modes of radical representation - between conventional continuity editing, and abstraction created through computer generated grids. The film features an appearance by Carolee Schneemann and digital imaging from before the era of personal computers.
Director
Still at Work, a self-portrait of the artist in his places of work: the studio in Lower Manhattan and Sarah Lawrence College, the school where he taught. The film animates a still photograph through a grid of random dots.
Director
New York State Primaries shows stenciled lettering that dissolve between the words, “red,” “blue,” and “green” but don’t create secondary colors. The film is a response to Saul Levine’s 1972 NOTE: CHICAGO REDS AND BLUES.
Director
An Angry Dog is a hand-held animation made from a Cracker Jack toy.
Director
In It Dawn Down an ordinary take-up reel spins to make colorful and delicate patterns even though the film is black and white.
Director
The Central Finger (16mm, silent, 5 1/2 minutes, 1974).
Director
Flickering flames viewed through air vents of a wood burning pot belly stove resemble the shutter of a film projector.
Director
In this film, circles of colored light (red, green, blue) pulsate and flicker as they move around the frame. Where they intersect, they display a variety of secondary colors. The term, circles of confusion belongs to the physics of the lenses. Here it has to do with the focus of light. Here it refers to the focus of mental and emotional energies as an irrational system for composing a film.
Director
Made at S.U.N.Y. at Binghamton as a class exercise, filmmaker Saul Levine performs with students who each try to mimic his previously recorded phrase and then try to imitate each other imitating the recording.
Editor
DEMOLITION OF A WALL takes six frames of the falling wall from the 1896 Lumiere film and shows reorders these six frames in all their permutations. With a score for piano that follows a similar pattern the film resembles change ringing, a musical form developed in England in the 17th century where the tuned bells of a church tower are rung in a series of mathematical patterns called "changes". Here, we see 718 additional variations on the original "theme".
Director
DEMOLITION OF A WALL takes six frames of the falling wall from the 1896 Lumiere film and shows reorders these six frames in all their permutations. With a score for piano that follows a similar pattern the film resembles change ringing, a musical form developed in England in the 17th century where the tuned bells of a church tower are rung in a series of mathematical patterns called "changes". Here, we see 718 additional variations on the original "theme".
Director
Nearly continuous colour changes rotating around a spectrum, occurring at varying speeds of rotation and in varying values of light. Colours are seen on the scraped area starting nearly white and rotating very slowly. As the film progresses the colour values become darker and the speed of rotation increases until by the end of the film, the colour is nearly black and is rotating around the spectrum about once per second. On the right the opposite occurs, starting nearly black, rotating very slowly. The moment to moment combination of colours and values is a function of the varying rate of rotation.
Editor
In a 2.5 minute sequence, a simple series of ordinary gas station events is seen intermittently through the opening display. This sequence is then divided and rearranged 7 times in reverse order. Each time the divisions are greater in number (smaller in size) until finally the film appears to move smoothly backwards, divided by a single frame. The inspiration for the film as well as the title is derived from information theory where a 'moment' is defined as the shortest duration at which no distinction can be made between units of information. This work is a demonstration and exploration of the line between human information and machine information. It dynamically reveals film's basic unit, the frame.
Director
In a 2.5 minute sequence, a simple series of ordinary gas station events is seen intermittently through the opening display. This sequence is then divided and rearranged 7 times in reverse order. Each time the divisions are greater in number (smaller in size) until finally the film appears to move smoothly backwards, divided by a single frame. The inspiration for the film as well as the title is derived from information theory where a 'moment' is defined as the shortest duration at which no distinction can be made between units of information. This work is a demonstration and exploration of the line between human information and machine information. It dynamically reveals film's basic unit, the frame.
Editor
This film has no literal subject, no frames, only slow continuously shifting colours, cycling around the perimeter of the spectrum. The changes are so slow as to be unseen, yet they alter our perception of colour. Part of a trilogy (Acts of Light), which develops a study of pure colour, based on the notion that film is essentially change and not motion.
Director
This film has no literal subject, no frames, only slow continuously shifting colours, cycling around the perimeter of the spectrum. The changes are so slow as to be unseen, yet they alter our perception of colour. Part of a trilogy (Acts of Light), which develops a study of pure colour, based on the notion that film is essentially change and not motion.
Director
A simple home movie of a cat is reprocessed through a 'Zip-a-tone' dot pattern making a complex of layers. In combination with freeze frames, positive and negative, and color motion, this work attempts to visually construct a system of overlays like those in Baroque musical composition.
Director
A woman wakes up, gets dressed, makes breakfast and walks down the street. This daily ritual becomes extraordinary seen in a trance-like structure of continuous lap dissolves and continuous spectral color shifts.
