The Given

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.

James Fotopoulos’ first feature film is a two and half hour endurance test about a lonely man’s decent into horror, mutilation and psychological collapse. The lines of reality and fantasy blur when the man’s hand-tinted primordial dreams of humanoid sex and violence manifest in his everyday reality as cancer, abuse and mannequin love.

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.

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.

Video (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

16mm film (color)

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

Short film from James Fotopoulos

Collaboration with Grandpa’s Ghost.

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.

A film by James Fotopoulos

16mm film (b&w)

Short film from James Fotopoulos

Part 2 of 5. Color

A video by James Fotopoulos