Scott Stark

“Using found family photographs (mostly 35mm slides), I cracked open the family archive to generate imaginative and at times illogical narratives. “The Last Forever” (in collaboration with Polish filmmaker Kamila Kuc) unravels a story of a missing spouse and possible murder." - Scott Stark

A succession of guilty souls is viewed through a mysterious portal as they are dispatched to eternal damnation. The clips are taken from the closing moments of the popular 1960s television show “Perry Mason”, where the “true” murderer is unmasked and confesses in an emotional breakdown. The movements are arranged in a succession of cascading and overlapping images that suggest a commonality of distorted humanity.

An instructional video for a software development platform is illustrated with found family photos and musical accompaniment.

“Discarded Christmas trees, colorfully arranged flea-market finds, a museum of animal kills, microscopic views of kitchenware, and other overlooked cultural artifacts are interwoven with flickering journeys through mysterious, shadowy realms. Traces/Legacy uses a device called a film recorder to print a series of still digital images onto 35mm film. The 35mm projector can only show a portion of the image at a time, so the viewer sees alterations between the top and bottom half of each frame. The images also overlap onto the optical sound area of the film, generating their own unique sounds.”—Scott Stark

Archival films from itinerant filmmakers who traveled the south in the 1930s through the 1950s are reworked, the footage presented as ghostly apparitions in modern urban Texas settings.

Scott Stark leads us through a dizzying array of consumerist goods in his stereoscopic mannequin melodrama The Realist. Composed of flickering still images, this entrancing romp conjures retail worlds both familiar and strange, in which chiselled mannequins may in fact be communing with each other amid the overwhelming array of apparel. Whether viewed as consumerist critique or spellbinding, operatic fantasy, The Realist employs a deft binary structure that skews toward the metaphysical.

Industrial penetrations into the arid Texas landscape yield a strange and exotic flowering. Using images from the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, based on oil drilling footage from the first half of the 20th century..

Hand-printed sections from 35mm movie trailers create a chaotic and densely layered retelling of Hollywood form. Loosely about desire, fear of coupling, and the consequences of moving forward, with results both catastrophic and ecstatic.

Worldly surfaces, shifting shadows and overlooked patterns: a series of short 35mm films generated from digital still images and printed onto movie film. The top and bottom half of each image alternate in the projector gate, arranged in a dizzying array of rhythms and patterns. The images also bleed onto the optical soundtrack area of the film, generating their own unexpected sounds.

Compressive/Percussive is a double-projector performance using two digital video projectors. The imagery is taken from a double-decker interstate freeway a few blocks from my current residence in Austin, Texas. At certain times of the day, this monstrous structure, which years ago laid waste to a thriving neighborhood and divided the city between the haves on the west and the have-nots on the east, comes alive with a mesmerizing interplay of light, shadow and rapidly moving vehicles. The sequences are all randomly edited using a random sequence generator I developed for Final Cut Pro, with cuts between 4 and 10 frames in length. During the performance, I will use the computer to pull the sequences together in real time, at times matching them up, and at times letting the images drift in relation to each other. Compressive/Percussive is a meditative study of a monolithic urban structure that is both monstrous and beautiful.

Excited football fans move through a visually kinetic space in slow motion toward their goal.

Medical 3D photographs of human vulvae are interwoven with surfaces and textures in natural and human-made environments.

A playful study of one of the U.S.A.'s most ubiquitous symbols, and an attempt to re-invent it as a thing of problematic beauty. Overlayed on top of the imagery are snippets of an email exchange I had with a person who was and remains a staunch apologist for the Bush administration's hundreds of lies leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as for the administration's many other crimes, corruptions and failings.

All About The Illusion (2006) uses two synchronized cameras, one pointing forward and the other behind, to explore an abandoned train repair yard: a site of industrial neglect, decay, toxicity and new growth. The journey also becomes a shared experience of visual discovery with a close friend.

Driven attempts to blur the lines between video gaming and urban reality, finding in both a seductive resonance.

In Shape Shift, Stark uses two cameras positioned opposite each other to reveal, as Stark writes, “a body transposed upon itself.” In his boxers, Stark performs a simple and almost ritualistic dance sequence. He creates a “flicker” effect by rapidly switching between the images captured by these cameras, shifting the spatial perspective from one side to the other. This effect becomes especially interesting when Stark does things like look side to side, or sway his right arm, then the left. He showcases his ability to confuse and distort his body’s own form.

Made with two parallel cameras, To Love or To Die is a brief binocular odyssey through a suburban wonderland of desire and fulfillment.

Collection of 3d stills of people on the beach reprocessed for cinema

More Than Meets The Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda is a remake of one of Jane Fonda's exercise videos, with Scott Stark as the performer, set in a variety of locations, both public and private. The filmmaker underscores a sense of the supposed embarrassment a male might feel by inhabiting what is essentially a feminine landscape. By overlaying the diligent exercise imagery with provocative and pointed quotations from Jane Fonda's activist days, as well as her thoughtful ruminations from her recent autobiography on war, political transformation, female anxiety, and the "need to be perfect," this remake gives voice to the artist's feelings about the criminality of contemporary war-making and our complicity in a world that gives rise to a kind of cultural bulimia. In the process, the video becomes an indirect chronicle of the remaking of a celebrity activist and the cultural shifts that allowed it to happen.

More Than Meets The Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda is a remake of one of Jane Fonda's exercise videos, with Scott Stark as the performer, set in a variety of locations, both public and private. The filmmaker underscores a sense of the supposed embarrassment a male might feel by inhabiting what is essentially a feminine landscape. By overlaying the diligent exercise imagery with provocative and pointed quotations from Jane Fonda's activist days, as well as her thoughtful ruminations from her recent autobiography on war, political transformation, female anxiety, and the "need to be perfect," this remake gives voice to the artist's feelings about the criminality of contemporary war-making and our complicity in a world that gives rise to a kind of cultural bulimia. In the process, the video becomes an indirect chronicle of the remaking of a celebrity activist and the cultural shifts that allowed it to happen.

in.side.out is a very personal piece. On the surface it's about the changes taking place, over a two-year period, in an empty lot and a decrepit old building next to my house. Deeper down it's about the walls and windows between my interior and exterior selves, and how the fragile constructs of identity are etched, eroded, re-shaped and transformed by outside forces.

NOEMA is philosopher Husserl's term for "the meaning of an object that is formed in the domain of consciousness." Pornographic videos are mined for the unerotic moments between moments, when the actors are engaging in an awkward change of position or when the camera pans meaningfully away from the urgent mechanisms of sex up to a cheap painting on the wall or the distant embers of a crackling fire. A piercing musical score loops endlessly throughout, and the repetitive and curious iterations of movement become furtive searches for meaning within their own blandness.

A found footage film that innocently plays with many of the elements I explore in my own work. A family's playful interaction with a 16mm sound movie camera, singing along as a group with Gene Autrey's title song in front of the camera, combines western fantasy, American kitsch, gender posturing, deterioration of the film's surface, the wonderment of the cinematic process, and the use of controlled accidents to shape the form of the film. My only intrusion on the footage was to print it first in negative, which adds a mysterious, ghostly edge to it, and to print it again in positive, which seems to answer many of the questions raised in the first version.

Using emergency information cards surreptitiously lifted from the backs of airline seats, I'll Walk with God pictorially charts an airline flight attendant's stoic transcendence through and beyond worldly adversity. Through an elaborate system of posturing and nuance that evokes an almost ritualistic synergy, the female protagonist(s) are shuttled toward a higher spiritual plane, carried aloft on the shimmering wings of Mario Lanza's soaring tremolo.

An urban sabotage video in the highly structured and territorial world of the financial services industry. Barriers are broken, trespass is the means to transcend privilege, property and perspective.

A snapshot taken in a moment of human evolution, where the souls of the living are reflected in the windows of passing trains. The camera captures the reflections of passengers in the train windows as the trains enter and leave the station, and the movement creates a stroboscopic flickering effect that magically exploits the pure sensuality of the moving image.

This film is a succession of visual and aural "notes" generated by the patterns in animals' hides, which are arranged and re-edited into a complex musical architecture, developing intricate rhythms not unlike the complex syncopations found in traditional African music. Elements of sand, dirt, light and shadow cross-reference the film's emulsion with evolutionary history and provide a second level of musical structuring through which the first layer is filtered. The animals' fur patterns, which evolved naturally as camouflage to hide them from predators, ironically now make the animals more visible to human predators who are attracted by their exotic uniqueness. This cinematic analogy underscores modern humanity's relationship to the natural world.

A "filmed biography" of Kirk Douglas -- literally. Pages of a book -- the lines of text, and the tiny dots comprising the half-tone photographs -- create odd musical notes, which are edited into a pounding rhythm. This film examines the molecular fabric of Hollywood superficiality. Winner: Juror's Choice, SFAI Film Festival, 1988

A film for three Super-8 projectors by Scott Stark

A film by Scott Stark

Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces.

A film on Super-8 by Scott Stark

A collage of human-created worldly surfaces - sidewalks, streets, storefronts - that evoke subtle and mysterious noises. "Chromesthesia" is a condition whereby one sees a color or shape and experiences a sensation of taste, smell or hearing.

A Super-8 film by Scott Stark

"Probability" (1985) presents a series of handmade signs featuring wild headlines taken from the tabloid "Weekly World News". Stark temporarily intervenes into the everyday scene of a bustling corner of San Francisco’s Financial District where he held a day job.

The movements across the 2-dimensional space, and in and out of elevators through 3-dimensional space, suggest a conceptual map of the visible environment, which is perhaps drawn by the camera itself.

The movements across the 2-dimensional space, and in and out of elevators through 3-dimensional space, suggest a conceptual map of the visible environment, which is perhaps drawn by the camera itself.

The movements across the 2-dimensional space, and in and out of elevators through 3-dimensional space, suggest a conceptual map of the visible environment, which is perhaps drawn by the camera itself.

The movements across the 2-dimensional space, and in and out of elevators through 3-dimensional space, suggest a conceptual map of the visible environment, which is perhaps drawn by the camera itself.

A silent film made completely in about 15 minutes on a partly cloudy day in San Francisco in 1982. With the 16mm Bolex camera mounted on a tripod, I wound the motor a single crank and ran as far as I could before the camera stopped (about 1 second). I returned and wound it 2 cranks and did the same, then repeated the process adding one crank each time. With these self-imposed limitations, would I make it to the top of the hill before the film ran out?

Abstractions are gently lifted from the urban palette and are posited against shapes both organic and inorganic, in an ebb and flow of urban movement. A kind of breathing. Shot entirely on 16mm film.

First part of ongoing Scott Stark dystopian future movie reprocessing footage from Hollywood blockbuster trailers