Self-Portraits

Caldwell's pulp storytelling, proto-feminist stance and unabashed social dramatization of his characters are a distinct vision of the condition of women -- specifically working class women. His broadly drawn themes of small town hypocrisy and restrictive moral values contextualize the titular characters' struggle for sexual expression, stability and independence. Certain Women is a disconcerting parable that pays tribute to but also defies the 50s period style of Caldwell, opting for contemporary small town situations and cinematic style. This cautionary tale of four heroic yet ordinary women is fashioned out of the past but relies on observations of the present historical moment and its political reality.

 Rebecca gazes into the crystal ball. It is afternoon in a Brooklyn neighborhood of industrial buildings. Rebecca has a way with words just as words have a way of seeking her out. The crystal ball intensifies this. The A train rumbles over the Manhattan Bridge. Rebecca gazes into the crystal ball. Nighttime in a suburban neighborhood of burnt out buildings. Words have a way with Rebecca just as Rebecca has a way of seeking them out. The crystal ball intensifies this. Shot using analog video equipment from the early Seventies, Gossip is the second in a series of works stepping into the mystic beyond which encircles us on every side.

Prophecies of doom, disaster and political catastrophe envisioned by some of the world’s most famous psychics between the 1960’s the year 2001 are conjured up through 3D-animation, industrial films, text and historical footage — the sum of which combine to form a visually stunning meditation on the forces that guide us into a dark, paranoid and uncertain future. 

The set of Bewitched is a spiritual battleground of overlapping zones — human, alien and cyborg — in Bobby Abate's latest ontological mystery film.

SECRETS AND LIES become an aggressive virus when injected into the binary code of several video clips -- degrading them into a visual corpse.

A solid state cyborg tale on the set of a 1960's evening newscast. A mysterious unearthly being has claimed a test subject and is making use of the station's control room in attempt to communicate and perhaps reunite with its counterpart. Zenith is a celestial space, high above the clouds, where lonely frequencies and frantic spirographs pulse the dimension that separates the real from the rendered, the now from nostalgia–and ultimately divides these two beings (alter egos or lovers?)

Abate’s 16mm films The Tanti Man, The Zero Order and Chisholm invoke Kenneth Anger-esque horny montage fantasies of personal psychodrama and popular culture syncopated to nostalgic tunes.

Crafted from softly pixilated QuickTime, NetMeeting sessions, emotive vintage pop, airplane disaster footage, online porn, streaming Hollywood trailers, and the curious hypnotic qualities of taping off computer monitors, Bobby Abate's internet-sex-n-death thrillogy explores new anxieties made possible by technology, and the profoundly intimate places that tiny images and lonely piano chords burrow deep within the soul.

A séance is performed by three cloned versions of the filmmaker in order to make a connection to another plane.  The rules of the séance, written in 1920 by parapsychologist Hereward Carrington, are invoked on camera by novelist Lynne Tillman.  According the text, roses which are seen as lights by spirits on the other plane, are placed on the séance table as a beacon. The spiritual dimension of the séance is captured with black and white video cameras dating back to the early 1970's that create visually stunning artifacts of light trails, black halos, and scan lines that swirl endlessly into the unknown.

An analog video mix of Sylvester Stallone's first porno "A Party at Kitty and Stud's" and a sound piece from 1993 making Kitty's lonely dance in pink see-through nightie even more hypnotic.

A dysfunctional family deals with mortality, life and sexuality as they watch a soap opera.

This is a summer memoir of two personal intertwined love affairs; one with Salisbury Beach and the other with a strange and charming drifter the filmmaker met randomly through a friend. It is highlighted by melodramatic journal entries from his teenage years lamenting the difficulties of a homosexual life and ultimately exposing a deeply rooted internalized homophobia that kept him fumbling though uncertain places and relationships.

A high & low fidelity record of obsessions past & present.  A hooded man named Cobra Commander (drawn naked) and a boy with black glasses. A fanged woman and a girl in a rose colored wig. Heaven on Earth, Live to Tell, and headphones (worn naked). An airport terminal. An old Montgomery Ward catalog.  That old orange bedspread, the red flowered couch.

An update on avant-garde psychodrama (its 21st-century sensibility signaled by low-end video effects) in which a gay man’s sexual identity crisis is reflected in a kind of karaoke version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I consider this video to be a rough journal entry of what I experienced directly after the attacks on September 11th 2001. I felt like my concept of reality was shattered, that our sense of security and what it meant to be living in America was all a Matrix-like illusion, suddenly gone. In the days that followed I was dumbfounded and pretty pissed off at the overwhelming effort on the part of the government, mainstream media and corporations to reboot this broken reality.

An analog recreation and reclamation of the January 22, 1987 news conference in which Pennsylvania's State Treasurer Budd Dwyer grasped onto the pages of his final speech before shooting himself on live television.