Mark Street
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Mark Street has been making films, videos and installations for 30 years. His work has moved from tactile, abstract explorations of 16mm film to essays on the urban experience to improvised feature length narratives. He has shown at places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery in Washington DC as well as venues such as the Point Reyes California Oyster Farm. His current project, Work Songs, is a feature length documentary on how work has changed in the face of the gig economy and increasingly automatized job sites. Street hold degrees from Bard College and the San Francisco Art Institute He has shown work in the New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series, at Anthology Film Archives, Millennium, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. His work has appeared at Tribeca (5 times), Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, San Francisco, New York Underground, Sarajevo, Viennale, Ourense , Mill Valley, South by Southwest, and well as numerous other film festivals. Street is Program Director of the Visual Arts Program at Fordham University where he teaches film/video production and other courses that engage contemporary artistic practice.
Director
A pandemic diary filmed mostly in NYC, incorporating Super 8 and digital video recorded with Street's unique experimental eye. "From the uncertain first months when every foray felt perilous to various re openings, outings are recorded and reflections shared. Stills punctuate abstract and documentary footage, offering a collage of mediums in the face of the unknowable. "Sorties" is a military term-- a mission launched from a defensive position. That's sort of what a walk felt like in March 2020 in NYC. And then of course things changed; cases went up and down, the science evolved, fear waxed and waned. Of course, the pandemic continues; but I had to limit myself in making the film; March 2020-August 2021."
Director
Fragments and minor moments coalesce and argue in this paean to overlooked and forgotten sketches. Recorded over five years in New York City, Berlin, Barcelona, Athens, New Orleans, Rome, Paris, Havana, Madrid, Budapest and Marseille. A shadow dances, a kite dives into the ground, a smoker exhales in a public market: this is a song about looking when you're not at all sure what you’re looking for. And a testament to the ethos of always carrying a camera even when you don’t know why.
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Based on Barbara Hammer’s 1973–85 correspondence with Jane Brakhage, as well as outtakes from her 1974 film "Jane Brakhage".
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Through interviews and observational footage Work Songs explores how various workers find meaning in their jobs. The gig economy, automatisation and the decreasing power of unions are explored in planned and spontaneous interviews, leavened by finely observed evocations of work places.
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Mark Street collaged and mixed hand-processed 16mm film, stills, found footage, and digital video to create this shimmering document of physical work in New York City’s Brooklyn Navy Yard.
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4 minute hand painted 35mm film digitally collaged to create an abstract nest. -MS
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A troubled man makes decides to alter his life.
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"I buried a 35 mm trailer for the Mike Leigh film in my garden and came upon it several years later. The vagaries of nature (snow, rain, ice, sun) yielded a scrupulous document of the passing of time. Soundtrack made up of ambient musique concrete and snippets of music sung by women."
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A wabi sabi summer in Japan, observing that which is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete, produces a series of visual haiku in search of teeming street life bodies in emotion, and leaf prints in the mud.
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A skewed take on film detritus: 35mm movie trailers rescued from the trash and affected by hand and digitally, holding up a funhouse mirror to the industry of expectations.
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The X Y Chromosome Project is the creation of artists Lynne Sachs and Mark Street. In addition to our two daughters, we make films and performances that use the split screen to cleave the primordial and the mediated. After returning from an inspiring week long artist retreat at the Experimental Television Center, Lynne asked Mark to collaborate with her on the creation of a piece in which they would each ruminate on the other's visual, reacting in a visceral way to what the other had hurled on the screen. Lynne would edit; Mark would edit. Back and forth and always forward. No regrets or over-thinking. In this way, the diptych structure is sometime's a boxing match and other times a pas de deux. Newsreel footage of Ronald Reagan's assassination attempt is brushed up against hand painted film, domestic spaces, and Christmas movie trailers. Together, we move from surface to depth and back again without even feeling the bends.
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A Year is a dynamic and conflicted middle aged diary film featuring Street's anxious, deadpan onscreen commentary.
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Mark Street’s portrait of the late-night bustle of the historic Fulton Fish Market, filmed two years before its closing in 2005, shows a world not usually considered when people speak of “New York nightlife.” The textures of the gutted fish and trays of ice under the fluorescent light are complemented by Street’s hand-painted celluloid abstractions throughout the film. (Screened 2/17/22 at MoMA as part of Millennium Film Workshop: “Nighttime” NYC event).
Director
Images shot on walks in the forest with an old, twisted 35mm camera. The film trudged through the camera, on a last mission. I buried the film in the front yard. Let the dirt on the film kiss the dirt in the ground. Maryland humidity wore it down to its wisps. Much later, sound recorded in Brooklyn. Teenage skateboarders smoking cigarettes and jumping off the steps at my local subway entrance. A Russian festival in the park, much singing and speechmaking, all incomprehensible to me. The schism between the country and city, so clear at last.
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A stab at depicting fatherhood: fleeting images burst onto the screen only to recede from view just as quickly, suggesting transition and decay. Tendrilsof images cluster together and then dissipate. A snowy walk, kids enthuse and infuse my own daily rhythms, affording great joy but also making it clear that all things change all the time.
Director
A day like any other: Brooklyn beckons so they dart out into it. Daughter and father traipse from playground to subway and back home again. The 18-month-old cackles and the 32-year-old tries his best to keep up. They stumble upon a fruit vendor, a street preacher and a wall of city sound. Negative and positive hand-manipulated images collide and shimmer as they walk and talk their way through spring in the city. Maya babbles but her father is mostly silent: he can’t believe that he’ll never meander quite this way again.
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A smattering of repeated performances culled from old porno films and hand painted. A man bends over a body, but what we really notice is the texture of the wall behind him. A woman stares back at the viewer with annoyance. On the soundtrack Anais Nin declares: “but while I’m doing this I feel I’m not living.”
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Using hand-manipulated images, ECHO ANTHEM attempts to uncover the underbelly of jingoism in 1991 America, and show its destructive conclusion. In a perverse twist, the film invites the viewer to be at once soothed and repulsed by the seething display of the flag and what it leads to. The film establishes a tension between visual beauty and narrative and thematic concerns. ECHO ANTHEM is made up of three sections, each suggesting the same sequence of events. The viewer is challenged to fluctuate between states - from being engulfed by the visuals to being concerned about the narrative particulars and thematic possibilities.
Director
A kaleidoscopic reverie recorded over a period of five years in various urban milieus. An excavation of the concept of montage: small moments public and private brush up against each other, creating a charged tapestry of the immediate. Inside and outside, motion and stasis, home and travel, light and dark: a series of contrasts do battle.
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An homage to two ramshackle cities, made up of footage shot while wandering. I meander city streets with a camera, looking to be haunted by unfamiliar vistas. I find solace in the forgotten landscapes, odd voices on a ham radio, shimmering water in a desolate harbor. Later I attack the film, moving it this way and that, trying to squeeze it against its will, wrest strangeness from the everyday.
Director
WINTERWHEAT was made by bleaching, scratching and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about the farming cycle. I wanted to manipulate the found footage to create lulling, hypnotic visuals while also suggesting an apocalyptic narrative. Though the images can be viewed purely for their graphic idiosyncrasy, a quiet but persistent theme of destruction winds its way through the film.
