Peter von Ziegesar

A diary film, recording the summer weeks I spent with Robin Hill at her cousin’s house in Vermont where she’d been hired as a baby-sitter.

Influenced by Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests” I set about recording some of the artists who populated my world in Kansas City during the 70s.

Horseflesh is an artifact of a year spent living on a horse farm in Vermont listening to Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. A meditation on country living, and our weird, anthropomorphic relationship to horses.

Arriflesh is a diary film recording a period I spent, very much at loose ends, dividing my time between Vermont and New York City. During those months I was also filming Horseflesh, so they are companion films. Various friends filled my universe in that confused, interim period: Cindy Revel, Margery Cohen, Tony Heath, and a bearded neighbor who was perpetually collecting scrap wood and who eventually made me a very complete astrological chart. In imitation of Jack Kerouac's Ray Smith in The Dharma Bums, I would walk up into the snowy hills every afternoon to meditate alone among the trees, with the same results as Kerouac…nada and a sense of the stony muteness of nature. This whole period was colored by memories of a teenage cousin who’d shot himself in a house just a few miles away, two years before. Like my bearded neighbor I was collecting scraps in the hope that they would someday come together into a cohesive whole.

The Earth is warmed by the Sun, then cooled by the Moon. A Horse is rounding the corner.

A cat climbs a screen, men squat on the pavement to gamble behind a 7-11, solarized film warbles in and out. A personal, quiet diary film, portraying an early apartment, an early cat, an early relationship in Kansas City. Uses self-conscious Eisenstein cutting to convey the indolent, charged air-before-a-storm atmosphere that pervaded that era.

In Just Sprouts, my goal was to make a film completely divorced from the camera and from such concerns as composition, lighting, camera placement and exposure. To do this, I sprouted alfalfa seeds at stepped intervals on a large piece of glass, made a contact print, then cut the resulting negative into strips and taped the strips onto clear 16mm film stock, always aware of Stan Brakhage’s 1963 film, Mothlight, in which Brakhage glued moth wings directly on film. A second inspiration was Man Ray’s Rayogram film, Le Retour à la Raison, in which pins, salt and pepper and thumbtacks cavorted wildly on the screen and caused a riot when first shown in 1923. In another section I cut negatives of magazine advertisements into strips and taped them onto film stock, thus hugely magnifying the Ben-Day dots with which the ads were printed. - PvZ

Based on the idea of Indonesian shadow puppet plays, which combine popular songs and Hindu mythology with political satire and broad comedy, None Saved satirically plays off of the events and mass emotions surrounding Jimmy Carter’s drive for the presidency in 1976. In the film, a Javanese-style monster rises up through several incarnations until it reaches a kind of shadow-cultural Nirvana. I often made paper shadow puppets based on images of white people I found on Chinese and Japanese toy packaging, thus reversing a trend in American animation to stereotype Asian features. None Saved was strongly influenced by Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic, which presented similar tactics of disassociation and, according to the artist, a trek to heaven and back.