Poem for the Past

While working on a documentary on his old neighborhood, a young film school graduate shifts the focus of his production onto the disappearance of a local resident and the strange characters who are conducting the search to find him.

A documentary team gets a grant to do a film on a rare fatal disease that is attacking homeless people. However, they quickly find the film too depressing. Ducking into a nightclub, they discover a young Manhattan comedienne and decide instead to follow her as she makes the circuit of auditions in L.A. as she tries to get a TV pilot. Unfortunately, she has failed to tell her boyfriend of this move. He decides he will trail her out west. There, the boyfriend runs into an old friend who has already made a break on a TV pilot. Seizing the opportunity, the actress turns her attentions to the established actor. However, the actress goes nowhere in auditions, but her ex-boyfriend is suddenly noticed and becomes the next hot prospect.

FOGG was inspired, in retrospect, by Marie Menken’s BAGATELLE FOR WILLARD MAAS.

A tableaux vivant. The sound of the victrola employed "live" for screenings, utilizing the Vitaphone sound system. Created as part of Residency Unlimited: Special Features.

A film-portrait of the Loudmouth Collective and Ugly Duckling Presse. These poet-provocateurs are the creators of the infamous "Anti-Reading" series, a carnival-like alternative to the traditional poetry reading. On the film's soundtrack we hear how the Anti-Readings were started, descriptions of various Anti-Reading activities including the Poetry smokable poems known as "Poetry Cigarettes", the memory tester called "I Forgot," and the "Diary in the Shape of a Bunny". The film includes footage shot at Anti-Readings, with time-lapse, double exposures, distorting lenses, and frenetic non-traditional camerawork evocative of the playfully chaotic spirit of the events.

Poem by Wanda Phipps (as read by her) and accompanied by the typeoclavecin, a typewriter as a musical instrument, built by the filmmaker for the accompaniment of poets through the technique of dictation.

A garden portrait for Doris Kornish.

Charged ambiguity in a sado-erotic setting.

A Bacchanalia, kindly provided by the Aesthesians, and set to the music of Saint-Saëns from an old 78 record.

A film in the manner of the Symbolists. A cascade of dream images in a gothic setting. The dreamer imagines flames and fur, Gustave Doré’s depictions of Dante Alighieri and a clutter of objects on a Victorian desk, all amid a web of Rebecca Moore’s haunting music.

A short filmic portrait of Morris Engel’s watch-part collages.

Lights at night on Avenue A, shot on black and white and extensively and laboriously hand-colored.

A short film consisting of “Little Nothings,” a poem by Wanda Phipps, read by her with the accompaniment of in-camera superimpositions. The poem was picked through chance operation, by throwing Wanda’s poems into the air. The superimpostions were done in-camera, thus the synchronizations of word and image were also determined through chance operation. By superimposing in the camera over a sync sound shot the images in this film are presented as they were filmed, without editing.

A three minute roll of film shot by Joel Schlemowitz of Brooklyn, NY and mailed to Nicole Koschmann in Nederland, just outside Boulder, CO. The two collaborators shot images on the same undeveloped film, fusing together images from New York and Colorado.

The birds in BIRDS OF PREY are made from garbage bags and coat hangers, held together with electrical tape. Their inability to fly gives them a sympathetic quality they would not have had otherwise.

After a twenty year period of multiple illnesses and injuries, the filmmaker turns the camera on herself as a way to analyze her chances for a happier, healthier life. In the process, she captures the frustration, tedium and petty annoyances of a revolving-door relationship with the medical establishment, while portraying the complicated web of emotions that accompany any medical problem. With humor and honesty, The Odds of Recovery uses the filmmaker's medical history as a means to address a perennial human problem: the desire to avoid conflict and deny the need for radical change.