Path of Totality

Path of Totality

2017 · 35 min

Projector performance for 16 mm film loop, invented lenses and objects, inspired by the total solar eclipse of August 2017 yet contains no photographic images whatsoever. Simple objects both concrete and transparent are physically handled producing an expansive projection environment beyond the frame. Visual concepts of light latency, peripheral vision, and the cosmic imagination are activated and propulsive. Unsatisfied with photography’s ability to render the ineffable light conditions of the solar eclipse, I replace the solar with the projection system, deliberately creating a work that is not a picture of the physical world, but could not exist without it. Sounds by the band of poets: Eric Baus, Phil Cordelli, and Oren Silverman, originally performed live at Georgia Art Space, Denver Colorado.

Directed by Jeanne Liotta

Your Rating

Make it a double feature

1h 17m together

Path of Totality

Water Spell

Both from Jeanne Liotta.

More from Jeanne LiottaSee all →

Water Spell

Water Spell · 2007

"Sandy Ding's WATER SPELL is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure... and back. For me, this film is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This is not an easy film, but it is a powerful one."  --Nina Menkes

Dervish Machine

Dervish Machine · 1992

Dervish Machine

Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin's Dreammachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenuousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.

Muktikara

Muktikara · 1999

From the Sanskrit, ‘gentle gazing brings liberation’, the title is also the name of the particular body of water which is the image-subject of the film. Landscape as inscape, not inertly present but beckoning an active perception; a seeing and a seeing into.

Clear Blue Sky

Clear Blue Sky · 2006

"The visual was recorded through, not a lens, but an adjustable slit-like opening, which was attached in front of the image sensor. I was changing the length of the slit and rotating the angle to modify the visual, as my response to the activities taken place at Washington Square, San Francisco, on a beautiful sunny day." (Tomonari Nishikawa)

Observando el cielo

Observando el cielo · 2007

Observando el cielo

Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth.

Subverted Horseplay

Subverted Horseplay · 1994

Subverted Horseplay

Mistaken identities converge and separate again in the harsh burn of optical truths. Images revolt and stand on their heads. The story of photography told as a Western.

Soma Sema

Soma Sema · 1988

The mummy signals from the threshold of the living and the dead. Secrets seep through the skin, and tattooed oracles reveal the body is a sign divine. This film is an inscription of the mysteries in action.

fungus eroticus

fungus eroticus · 1990

fungus eroticus

In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life. – Karl Marx A fantastic voyage through the cycles of decay and regeneration in the body and the world. Sublime psychotropic sound and a dark sensibility compels us into molecular memory, the structure of living culture, and the electronic architecture of Apocatopia, where beauty and terror merge. Unique chemical treatments emphasize the film's seething materiality.

Open Sesame

Open Sesame · 1989

Riddles in the LAByrinth. A ritual shadowplay in 7 movements with intertitles, from a live performance at The Gas Station, East Village NYC circa late 80's. Thanks Jack Vengrow for the welding light, and thanks to the FDNY for dousing the burning chair (oops). Creating an intense aura in the blue light of the electronic cave, two creatures in conflict, creation, communication, and the urge to liberate.

Sutro

Animated glitch portrait of the eponymous television tower on the hill, guardian of fog and electronic signals in that earthshaking city by the Bay... sounds by Scanner, from Lauwarm Instrumentals

Dark Enough

Dark Enough · 2011

In a text collaboration with poet Lisa Gill, Jeanne Liotta parses the difference between text-as-image and text-as-text, as well as the variables of machine-made sound with elemental vibrations.

Sweet Dreams

Sweet Dreams · 2010

Shot on location in Second Life, at "Beneath the Tree That Died" by AM Radio. Featuring Sunshine Hernandoz, BillyBob Mahoney, and Astra Thorne as themselves. Commisioned for the Artists Karaoke Throwdown at PDX Festival May 2009, Portland OR. "it is the possible we place before us" Gilles Deleuze, on the virtual

Property

Property · 2013

A few simple techniques of the cinema--a direct quotation, a framed location, an actress in costume, a few cuts to the quick--conspire in a compact couple of minutes to produce an image replete with historical and geographic visibility, to wit: an implied and uncontainable expanse of a landscape bought, sold and inhabited. An anti-landscape film and a one-two punch.

Window

'Window' is a lo-fi, trance-inducing trigger into other realms. A static, formal elegance masks the teeming energy coursing through its electronic heart.

Blue Moon

Blue Moon · 1988

MovieDocumentary

Erratic, erotic, arrhythmic lunar trauma. Strong poetic textures of female psycho-sexual experience, altering the film’s surface through selective bleaching and scratching, and uncanny percussive editing.

Haiku (for Onizuka)

Haiku (for Onizuka) · 2007

Haiku (for Onizuka)

"On January 28, 1986 the Challenger Mission 51-dash- L set out to observe Halley's Comet from space but exploded a minute into the launch killing everyone on board. A monument to Challenger astronaut Ellison J Onizuka stands in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, from which I made a graphite rubbing of the text onto a sheet of plain paper, and noticed it was nearly a perfect haiku. Then re filmed to emphasize poetic structure / disaster duration."

More Like This

Couldn't load this row right now.

Rate this film

Your ratings make Midnight smarter