Living in the World

Confessions of a Sociopath is an autobiographical film on digital video and Super 8 film, conceived as a real-life version of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. In this film, Joe Gibbons plays a fictionalized version of himself as he discovers a roomful of Super 8 footage from his own life, detailing events he can no longer recall. This footage shows his earlier film experiments, his descent into destructive behavior, and his “bottoming out” on drugs and alcohol. At a certain point, the films are replaced by random photos, police records, and psychiatric hospital records.

Gibbons enters the woods to begin his destructive campaign against spring, snapping the buds off trees while babbling maniacally. SABOTAGING SPRING is an impressionistic peek at Gibbons’s paranoid fancy; he explains the facts of life, evolution, and whistling to his dog Woody.

Spying is equal parts diary film, structural film and conceptual film. The filmmaker “spies” on neighbors, passersby and day workers—whomever is visible from the vantage point of his camera as he gazes across the San Francisco cityscape. The film is a subjective portrait of the neighborhood: the routines of the inhabitants, their unconscious gestures of domesticity, an intimate look into the private moments of strangers as they are caught unawares by the voyeurism of Joe’s camera.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

Shot with a cell-phone camera, focuses on the sound of rain and visuals of pretty, multicolored lights blurred in a watery car window.

Joe Gibbons plays Dr. Joe Baldwin, the self-styled child education expert who prepares Zoe from birth, for acceptance into a coveted gifted-only kindergarten program. What becomes evident is one man’s misguided quest to manipulate pitted against one child’s exuberant resistance to being controlled.

A man who has devoted his life to tending roses finally confronts his love objects, castigating them for their preening self-regard and disregard of his own feelings, resulting in a violent catharsis.

A portrait of a filmmaker confessing his remorse at the scandalous manner in which he gathered material for his voyeuristic film, Spying. here an eerie interpersonal relationship is developed between the filmmaker and his camera which culminates in violence…

A real-time video-meets-digital animation trilogy of shorts featuring the highly excited (and mildly delusional) Joe Gibbons. Brilliant computer animation by collaborator Emily Breer provides an additional layer of biting commentary.