Joe Gibbons

A man who has devoted his life to tending roses finally confronts his love objects, castigating them for their preening self-regard and disregard of his own feelings, resulting in a violent catharsis.

Shot with a cell-phone camera, focuses on the sound of rain and visuals of pretty, multicolored lights blurred in a watery car window.

Joe Gibbons plays Dr. Joe Baldwin, the self-styled child education expert who prepares Zoe from birth, for acceptance into a coveted gifted-only kindergarten program. What becomes evident is one man’s misguided quest to manipulate pitted against one child’s exuberant resistance to being controlled.

Gibbons enters the woods to begin his destructive campaign against spring, snapping the buds off trees while babbling maniacally. SABOTAGING SPRING is an impressionistic peek at Gibbons’s paranoid fancy; he explains the facts of life, evolution, and whistling to his dog Woody.

Spying is equal parts diary film, structural film and conceptual film. The filmmaker “spies” on neighbors, passersby and day workers—whomever is visible from the vantage point of his camera as he gazes across the San Francisco cityscape. The film is a subjective portrait of the neighborhood: the routines of the inhabitants, their unconscious gestures of domesticity, an intimate look into the private moments of strangers as they are caught unawares by the voyeurism of Joe’s camera.

An auto-documentary about a disenfranchised Everyman and his struggle to re-integrate himself into society. He fails and turns to crime.

Confessions of a Sociopath is an autobiographical film on digital video and Super 8 film, conceived as a real-life version of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. In this film, Joe Gibbons plays a fictionalized version of himself as he discovers a roomful of Super 8 footage from his own life, detailing events he can no longer recall. This footage shows his earlier film experiments, his descent into destructive behavior, and his “bottoming out” on drugs and alcohol. At a certain point, the films are replaced by random photos, police records, and psychiatric hospital records.

A real-time video-meets-digital animation trilogy of shorts featuring the highly excited (and mildly delusional) Joe Gibbons. Brilliant computer animation by collaborator Emily Breer provides an additional layer of biting commentary.