Tin Pressed

Tin Pressed

2011 · 7 min

Opening with jarring violence, Dani Leventhal’s Tin Pressed proceeds to negotiate a balancing act between the bewildering tonal variances of daily life—with all of its unnamable and enchantingly fragmented specifics—and the gravitational urge to construct both private and shared narratives. The world discovered through these images revolves around multiple centers. The camera’s odd equanimity feels both generous and dangerous. Leventhal’s deft oscillation between elision and inclusion reveals a brief but vast taxonomy of beauty, peace, longing, and terror.—Jeremy Hoevenaar

Directed by Dani ReStack

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Cinetracts '20

Cinetracts '20 · 2020

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A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.

A Hand In Two Ways (Fisted)

A Hand In Two Ways (Fisted) · 2017

A Hand In Two Ways (Fisted)

A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted), is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.

Come Coyote

Come Coyote · 2019

Come Coyote is the second chapter in the trilogy, Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (SOTD) by Dani and Sheilah ReStack. Come Coyote continues their investigation of climate change, queer desire, motherhood, reproduction and collaboration.

Future from Inside

Future from Inside · 2021

Future from Inside

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The third part of a trilogy regarding "feral domesticity," following "Strangely Ordinary This Devotion" (2017) and "Come Coyote" (2019). "Future from Inside" is a meditation on the environment, domestic space, queer desire, and magic.

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion · 2017

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion

SOTD was birthed out of a desire to privilege and amplify the strange and banal quality of daily life, to see what it can yield as an entrance to larger concerns, such as the environment, representation of motherhood, queer desire, the domestic as site of radicality.

3 Parts for Today

3 Parts for Today · 2007

3 Parts for Today

Subtitled "The Refusenik," "The Zealot," and "The Father," this video takes us on a journey where Germans, Turks, Israelis, Palestinians, fathers, grandmothers, daughters, and animals are together for 13 minutes.

She Left Before I Was Ready

She Left Before I Was Ready · 2014

She Left Before I Was Ready

A film by Dani Restack

Platonic

Platonic · 2013

In Dani Leventhal’s Platonic, geometric specters twirl in space; pet cats foam at the mouth; a little boy mistakes his junkie dad for a superhero; and a confused adolescent worries he has sired a centaur.

17 New Dam Rd.

17 New Dam Rd. · 2012

In Dani’s Leventhal’s latest video we are invited along on a house visit with a familial group. There’s trash in the garden, guns on the sofa, and martial arts in the living room. A photo session records a young woman throwing punches at a man, playacting for the camera, but sweating anyway.

54 Days this Winter 36 Days this Spring for 18 Minutes

54 Days this Winter 36 Days this Spring for 18 Minutes · 2009

54 Days this Winter 36 Days this Spring for 18 Minutes

Material is presented as short scenes: documentation of the quotidian, interviews, on-camera monologues, and performative or expressive shots that are constructed. So the material, while mostly generated as a diary, is heterogeneous enough to include just about any kind of footage. At one point, a baby cries inconsolably, in another, a boy in a baseball uniform is playing Bach while his mother sits next to him putting on mascara. The 18 minute video montage of impressions has a cumulative effect, accessed and read differently depending on the mental connections the viewer makes.

Show & Tell in the land of Milk & Honey

Show & Tell in the land of Milk & Honey · 2007

Show & Tell in the land of Milk & Honey

In this piece Dani Restack recounts to camera her experiences of living and working in Israel, the fabled land of milk and honey of childhood lessons. With time spent in a metal factory and a battery farm for chickens, her harrowing tale includes stories of sexual harassment and sick birds. Against this background, there are idyllic images of bees and flowers, cows and calves, intimate caresses, dead birds. Every thing is worthy of Dani's gaze, and is transformed by the encounter, becoming more human or sacred, and we are closer to the pain and beauty of being alive.

Sister City

Sister City · 2013

Sister City channels moments of paradoxical experience--of being a superhero or being for sale--into reverberant conduits, articulating a nature divided by panes of glass or suspended in watery solitudes. Each shift begets a kind of origin story: one encounter traces the specific azure of a James Turrell installation to a pet shop jellyfish, in another, a modern-day putto purifies a horrific tale by blowing bubbles in a tub. Sister City, like water, seeks its own level; cresting and displacing continuous bursts of life spiritualized, succulent, and ultimately alone. -Deirtra Thompson

9 minutes of Kaunaus

9 minutes of Kaunaus · 2007

9 minutes of Kaunaus

Inside a Lithuanian synagogue, young Domas Darguzs regales the filmmaker with a whispered, wide-eyed account of mythical events, while the film cross-cuts to images of a goat farm. Kid brother of a Isreali soldier, Domas’ stories are part fantasy, part hopeful ruminations of a courageous, young mind interrupted only by an impatient adult.

Recitation

Recitation · 2007

The Grandmother recites the Mourners' Kaddish over her granddaughter.

Peeper Palace

Peeper Palace · 2010

16mm to video. Five 16mm black and white silent films transferred to video and projected onto eighteen foot long vellum banners. A fan blows the vellum which makes the projections spill onto the walls and floor. There is one unifying sound track of peeper frogs (Pseudacris crucifer) singing their mating call.

Draft 9

Draft 9 · 2003

The craft of montage is alive and well in Leventhal’s work. Delicate and harrowing juxtapositions of skinned animals, the tattooed arm of a Holocaust survivor eating bagels in a coffee shop, and neon flowers on a disco floor. In her work emerges something that is extraordinarily immediate, both fresh and painful, hard to watch and yet impossible not to watch. - Genevieve Yue

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