Back Against the Wall

Filmed in saturated colors on out-of-date film stocks with an aggressive soundtrack, the story of The Nest is told – The marriage of two young professionals unravels after an unnamed accident physically and emotional traumatizes the wife. Government agents, shadowy investigators and transgender beings appear, trying to solve the nervous-breakdown-mystery of secret alien forces that chose the couple as their target. In-camera tricks, drawings, derelict optical printing, miniatures, puppets and prosthetic makeup effects convey the dual collapse of the protagonists’ lives and the film structure as one unified entity.

Christabel is an abstract interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Gothic poem about female possession. Adhering to the poem’s structure the film is presented in four parts – Two digital video half hour segments and then two short 16mm conclusions. The contemporary relevance of the poem’s symbols and themes is underlined using performance combined with heavy image and sound layering.

Jerusalem is the first of four videos (followed by Sublimation [2003], Conjunction [2003] and The Pearl [2004]) exploring inter-dimensional travel. In this inaugural episode a group of young actors inhabit an empty apartment, their behavior taped and edited in-camera. An analog solarization technique captures their rituals of improvised dance, frozen poses and trimming of hair. Each cast member recounts painful personal life episodes that unfold like cheap sci-fi stories of otherworldly abductions, familial vanishings, strange dreams and reptilian passions.

An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.

Video (color)

A drifter of a small storefront church's congregation stumbles across a large insect last seen before Christ and emerging en masse to render a new plague upon the world.

2003, 5 min, color

Written in 1993, Thick Comb was James Fotopoulos’ earliest unrealized script, about a criminal porn producer hunting down the world’s greatest lover for thieving an adult film’s production budget. A couple years ago the script was resurrected and rewrote with the protagonist confessing to his lover other incomplete Fotopoulos film scenarios from the 1990s.

The story of young sisters in the American Midwest left alone with their increasingly unstable mother while their father is fighting in the Civil War. The film traces the girls’ naturally fraught sibling dynamic and the ways that their father’s absence ignites their imagination. When they meet a stranger in the forest they become enchanted by a world of creative work and nature, a welcome distraction from their volatile mother. Play and the dreamlike space they inhabit provides an expansive and ultimately grounding setting for the girls’ response to war.

Collaboration with Grandpa’s Ghost.

The past, present and future. Final Obscura is a visionary film that unfolds on a space where the lines between past, present, and future dissolve into a single, phantasmic experience—an Exquisite Corpse of perception, desire, and transcendent imagination. The film submerses the viewer in a captivating, liminal dimension where the waking and dreaming worlds merge, inviting us to reflect on the nature of time, and the anamorphic emerging worlds of the anamnesis expression in seeing the sound

Part 4 of 5. Color

"...the simplest and most beautiful of [Fotopoulos'] early video features, which simply follows the movements of a model whose body is (re)filmed so closely that she appears as abstract swirls of colour and video grain." —Maximilian Le Cain

Part 1 of 5. B&W

Two of the female characters from Jerusalem (2003) appear in a new location: a black and white minimalist apartment. With the aid of drawings to illustrate their psychological probing, the ladies perform basic physical repetitions and frozen poses while being captured on video and re-lensed through low-fi cyan solariziations. Layered stereo monologues speak of their continuing personal explorations into the science-fiction dream-symbol terrain of their private histories.

Short film from James Fotopoulos