Director
This documentary consists of the victim impact video introduced in the penalty phase of the trial of Douglas Oliver Kelly, accompanied by an audio recording of the California Supreme Court hearing oral argument as to the admissibility of the video.
Producer
Never before seen Super 8 home movies filmed by Richard Nixon's closest aides - and convicted Watergate conspirators - offer a surprising and intimate new look into his Presidency.
Editor
This short documentary suggests a direct connection between two of Nixon’s greatest triumphs as president: his landmark 1969 "Silent Majority" speech (in which he argued that street protesters did not represent the views of most Americans, despite their increasing visibility) and his historic landslide re-election in 1972 (in which George S. McGovern won only one state and the District of Columbia, losing even his home state of South Dakota).
Director
This short documentary suggests a direct connection between two of Nixon’s greatest triumphs as president: his landmark 1969 "Silent Majority" speech (in which he argued that street protesters did not represent the views of most Americans, despite their increasing visibility) and his historic landslide re-election in 1972 (in which George S. McGovern won only one state and the District of Columbia, losing even his home state of South Dakota).
Director
I shot this roll of film at a party Bard College threw when it awarded Stan Brakhage an honorary degree. A few days after he died, I dug it out and watched it again. I had meant to make Brakhage a gift of the roll, but instead it became a farewell.
Director
Robert Beck was an American soldier from Chicago, who served in the First World War. Struck deaf and dumb by shellshock, Beck was sent to an English sanitarium to convalesce. At some point, the patients attended a movie. Beck began to laugh, and was suddenly cured of his affliction. He became the patron saint of New York's Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, dedicated to films which touch the marvelous. On September 26, 2000, Stuart Sherman, the great performance artist and filmmaker, presented several of his films, interspersed with "perfilmances," in which he re-enacted the passion of Robert Beck. This film is a record of that "spectacle," shot by Lee Ellickson. Stuart Sherman died on September 14, 2001 in San Francisco. This may have been his last New York performance.
Director
A short work by Brian Frye
Director
On December 12, 1863, General Ambrose Burnside's Army of the Potomac engaged General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia... Close combat through the streets of Fredericksburg and multiple assaults on the Confederate army entrenched in the heights behind the town resulted in heavy Federal casualties, which forced an eventual withdrawal. In November, 2001, I attended a small and relatively informal reenactment of the battle of Fredericksburg. About a hundred men and women did their best to illustrate the actions of the thousands of young men who offered their lives a century earlier. An air of absurd theater suffused the entire event, which provided the ground for its peculiar truth. Everyone played their part exceedingly honestly and well, and left something on the film I was myself surprised to find there.
Director
A fragment of tinted nitrate. An acetate recording of a wedding ceremony. Echoes of the bitter sweetness of the Spirit on the tongue of Man. As Frampton tipped his hat to Gloria, so might I.
Director
Alchemical transformation of the remains of a mysterious low-budget film from 1969.
Director
A short work by Brian Frye
Director
Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Show was obviously compiled from a lot more material, which I found over at least a year and a half of hunting about. I spend a good deal of my free time hunting out films. It’s not just any sort of material. I wanted to find films that weren’t totally naïve. None of this stuff is home movies, though some of it almost is. And it’s not professional either. Nor is it newsreel quality. It’s a sort of studied, non-professional filmmaking. It’s by different people, obviously, but they all have a similar position in relation to the camera. To me there’s a sort of beautiful openness to that kind of filmmaking.
Director
An essay toward documenting the ineffable...One might consider it a dialogue between a man of Faith and one who has merely tasted of the absurd, yet struggles to ingest it.
Director
Brakhage has called her the muse, perhaps because she appears only to those who hold a strip of film in their own hands. But here she appears – if only for a moment – to all those who care to look for her. "Let us speak plainly: The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful; indeed, nothing but the marvelous is beautiful." – Andre Breton
Director
The film consists of two rolls of film I shot in 1998 or 1999 while living in a Bushwick loft. I was interested in the perfect simplicity of a movie camera and what happens when a single part is disabled. So I found simple old cameras and deliberately broke one part, to see what happened. In the first reel, I removed the claw. In the second, I removed the shutter. As I recall, I also have a scheme of swinging the camera back and forth and up and down and various f-stop settings. Very Ernie Gehr. Playing, drinking beer & shooting film. No editing to speak of.
Director
Director
".. and yet of that living breathing throng, not one will be encased in a material frame. A company of ghosts, playing to spectral music. So may the luminous larvae of the Elysian fields have rehearsed ...
Director
Sometime in the 1960s, a chiropractor from Kansas City made a short film called "A Portrait of Fear." The film consisted of several tableau shots of amateur actors standing in a field at night reciting painfully overwrought dialogue, apparently lit by the headlights of a car. I assume the cinematographer used an Auricon, as the sound was recorded directly on the B&W reversal original. In 1998, he sold me the outtakes, strung together just like you see them.
Director
A short work by Brian Frye
Director
Short work by Brian Frye
Director
"Frye's Meeting With Khrushchev is not an easy film to like, but repeated viewings reveal a work of immense weight, a moving combination of intense nostalgia and thoughtful meditation on the impossibility of ever completely understanding history [...] The longest 25 minutes of my life." -Edward Smith
Director
A 16 mm. film by Brian L. Frye.
Director
6.95: Striptease might have been titled "Brian Frye Fails to Strip." We see Frye disrobe, but when he gets to his white undershorts, the roll ends in white flare-outs. There's ... something strange about his movements, especially when he drops his shirt — because in fact he ran the camera in reverse while putting his clothes on. As a result, the work is much more than a joke about not doing what so many other student performers are quite happy to do. - Fred Camper
