Stuart Sherman

The filmmaker intersects the flow of traffic on narrow streets and on the canals of a European city.

An experimental documentary that looks at its subject John Cage through the eyes of contemporary Avante-Garde artists as well as those who play his music.

A naked man jumps off the deep end from a diving board into a surrealist watery world of fish and cellar stairs.

Through "solipsistic, demiurgic actions," Sherman leaves his imprint on the theater world. He sits in a seat in the audience, occupies a chair onstage and stands at the door of the theater. Becoming transparent, he leaves his trace everywhere.

Cultural and perceptual contrasts are evoked in this non-linear mythic episode in which a hammer, a paintbrush, a bucket, a pile of clothes, a window full of globes and a couple are manipulated via the filmmaker/demi-urge.

Using the accoutrements of baseball, Sherman analyzes the magic of tv/film representation and offers a pun on the word "catch." "The camera catches the image, just as a baseball player catches the ball."

Juxtaposition and editing are used in this meditation on the human/environmental act of skating and its component parts.

Sherman underscores the oppositional component of the board game with split screen techniques and evocative black and white graphics.

Sherman creates an elegant, graphically precise choreographed dance from the rhythmic, symmetrical movements of two elevators, two escalators and their two riders (a man and a woman) tethered to the aural image of an imposing jukebox.

The filmmaker's waving hand, its wooden facsimile, a steamship, a rowboat, the ocean and a bowl of water are the main elements in this visual pun that is also a study of scale.

Hors Titre I (Off-Title I) is a hermetic movie deliberately mysterious. Figure interpreted by Stuart Sherman shines in the first part of the film by his anonymity. The man drowned in the crowd, activity, all this urban life that is foreign to him. It expresses nothing, does nothing, to the point of appearing to blur the image. In the second part, it works. Always very mysteriously. The viewer built himself a sense of all these actions cut by the film. Whatever it is, its activity is internalized: slide analysis, reading, writing. The outlines of this figure then draw, and blend back into the urban landscape, this time in the open. The character became somebody through a symbolic initiation: nighter? read de Sade? photographic activity? maybe three at a time, perhaps in a dream. The key is in becoming.

The filmmaker effects a variety of visual tricks that confound spatial relationships and defy gravity.

Meshing the visceral and the intellectual, "Sherman proposes, through editing and parallel camera movement, that the act of reading is exhilarating, like riding a roller coaster."

Scotty and Stuart