Joan's Studio

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.

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

A slow four-part film on death and the persistence of the dead. Where ignorant armies clash by night: the dolphin-torn and gong-tormented sea.

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.

Based on a series of ads in 2008 on Телеканал звезда [the Star Channel], owned by the Russian Department of Defense. The ads seek to draw parallels between stereotypical feminine daily gestures of fashionable self-imaging and stereotypical activities of male soldiers. These ads are sequenced, then juxtaposed with “upskirt” footage of a famous Italian fashion model, downloaded from Youtube. By means of this juxtaposition and strategic interventions in speed and chronological orientation (backwards and forwards) two forms of gendered construction of the gaze are compared and contrasted. This work is a single channel version of part of an on-going series, called Equivalences, generally presented in the format of a site specific installation.

“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

8mm-to-digital and 16mm projector performance. This work includes the film NAVIGATION, which has been preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

In one incredibly long take we see the arrival and disappearance of John Kennedy's body as it is delivered from Dallas aboard Air Force One.

My aim is to create a highly compressed museum of cinema, consisting of some of the most notoriously engaging, difficult, and lengthy works of film history—those nearly invisible works that explore the limit conditions of film. Works that have become invisible precisely because of their status as “classics.” The experiment is to see just what comes to light when these works are compressed into a familiar yet brief span of time, where one might hold the whole film in memory at once, or refresh one’s memory in a Proustian rush of images, or simply experience that energy of delusion.

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.

A film by Keith Sanborn

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