A Prepared Text

In 1978, Northwestern University film professor Dana Hodgdon created an experimental film based on a phonetic alphabet. He recruited 45 students and faculty members to join him in speaking a single phoneme, which he filmed on 16mm color film. Each phoneme had an example that was an ideological loaded term: revolution, theory, language, Marx, Brecht, and so on. Then, using an optical printer, he excerpted the phonemes and edited them into words and sentences.

One man's improbable journey through twentieth-century history.

An experiment in synchronized sound

The construction of a projected window in the basement.

Psycho, backwards and forwards

the life of buffalo bill cody and the history of cinema

An acting and directing exercise gone wrong.

A witty examination of the disjunction between the film's image and its soundtrack. Which voice belongs to which speaker? Each speaker makes certain claims about which voice is his. Later remarks contradict these claims and the viewer is left with a neat logical problem and an acute awareness of filmic illusion and structure.

Dana seemingly records a fellow professor reading each word in an encyclopedia.

A conceptual film about the limits of the frame

A blend of home movie and structuralist film

Amanda, after testing positive for the BRCA gene mutation, has a specific plan to say goodbye to her breasts the weekend before her preventative double mastectomy, but her sister comes to town with a list of her own ideas for the weekend.

Screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival

Screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival