Slow Death

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

Joan of Arc and Dorothy of Kansas become one thanks to Hildegard von Bingen.

Made in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, The Deadman is based on a story by Bataille, charting "the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to the house to die — a combination of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor." — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader.

1982, 3.5 min, 16mm, anaglyph 3D

A short essay on the triangular Square du Vert-Galant, one of the favorite repairs of the vanishing Paris of Guy Debord. Yet another slow film.

An exploration of Keats’s proposition, that “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” We live in an age of contradictions and uncertainties and no one was more adept at holding these contradictions together visually and with more finesse than Vincent Grenier to whose memory this film is dedicated, along with a certain amount of lunacy.

1980-88, 11 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives. Separate digital soundtrack accompaniment.

"A didactic treatment of the Reagan assassination event /coverage as spectacle. Nearly anyone in the world who turned on a television that day, or with regularity in the following six months, has had the images of the event burnt into his or her consciousness at the level of myth. Like language itself, these images have entered consciousness at a depth and with such universality that they seem for the present to be inaccessible to analysis. These are 'images that understand us.' The film is an attempt to display something of the institutional quality of the event/experience as it exists in us: as the control of images and the images of control. An anti-Report ." - K.S.

An attempt to problematize ownership and authorship in the age of digital reproduction. Inspired by the Walter Benjamin essay of the same name and the activities of the Situationists.

Various permutations and combinations of the Zapruder footage of the assassination of JFK. Intended as an investigation of the footage as visual, experiential, and cultural document. In the USA this footage is both notorious and invisible; seldom actually seen, it is very well known; when seen, it remains opaque. This work is intended to add a level of "transparency" to original. It is set to Jajouka music in order to bring to the foreground the ritual aspects of this visual, mechanical; and media historical event. For some reason I had a memory of that footage being black and white.

2019, 1 min, digital

An exploration of Joan Jonas’s studio in Nova Scotia in August 2019, by night with torch, but no spear. Special thanks to Peggy Ahwesh for pelican lighting effects.

“DREADFUL PENNY DREADFUL dares to violate every remaining shred of ‘good taste’ using the vehicle of Brecht and Weill’s much-abused ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer,’ aka ‘Mack the Knife.’ Over 200 versions collide, taking you from its origins in Weimar Berlin to the multiple travesties of Rat Pack Vegas and the many imitators of each on East Block TV and in cheesy Jersey nightclubs. Further stops along the way include Midwestern High School chorus practice and performances of ivy college a capella groups, not to mention jazz improvisation sessions, talent shows, and rockers doing high Kultur! A splendid time is guaranteed for all.” –Keith Sanborn

Here Ahwesh's heterogeneous textual approach comes to the fore, as she juxtaposes narrative, faux documentary, comedic and "serious" footage, and merges film, video, and Pixelvision. Suggestions and meanings accumulate: austere, theoretical text is interrupted by shots of women relating bawdy (sexist) jokes; classic R&B music plays while women stomp on records and pour alcohol on the floor. The Vision Machine is a fragmented inquiry into issues of gender, language and representation.

A film by Keith Sanborn

An experimental film essay on architectural excess, with its aim not functional shelter but conspicuous destruction of wealth