Long Eyes of the Earth

Paul Schmidt sent me a set of five poems from a series called WAR SONGS. He treats the war in a brilliant and sarcastic way, evokes his seduction. Mark Bennett's score is itself provocative, languorous, and close to a waltz. The whole thing is a series of songs cast in the mode of melodrama, that is to say music in tandem with a narration. My contribution lies in the superimposition of war scenes, coupled with what I called an image of Gabriel: a young and handsome soldier, a personification of the good warrior, a protective image. He gives off strong impressions throughout the duration of the film. She makes him appear sometimes active and aggressive, sometimes asleep or beckoning. The film uses footage from the Vietnam War and World War II. They show soldiers marching, tanks rolling. Explosions reveal in passing our dear “Gabriel”.

The object of the film is to apprehend the rite as a mode of seeing. The images of the film try to update the spirits summoned by a berdache. As an elementary figure, the berdache is close to nature and all its components. As a gay man, I'm interested in the relationship between sexual identity, spirituality and creativity. It is in this spirit that I made this film.

Virgil Thomson composed many musical portraits of people as they faced him. Like a visual artist using different visual elements, Virgil established personal sketches using the palette of musical expression. EVERBEST VIRGIL perpetuates this tradition by linking the portrait of a composer to his own composition. I filmed Virgil, in his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel, in Manhattan, shortly before his death. These are the last images taken from the life of one of America's most treasured composers.

De Profundis is a three part, hand/alternative-processed experimental film based on Oscar Wilde's prison letter De Profundis. Incorporating home movies from the 1920's and early gay male erotica along with images from Radical Faerie gatherings, queer pagan rituals, drag performances and images of confinement, this 65 minute film sets up a haunting investigation of queerness, masculinity, history and sexuality. These images are buttressed against a soundtrack composed of Wilde's aphorisms, a voice and piano setting of Wilde's prison letter, and multi-tracked interviews with a diverse group of contemporary gay men.

Each film in this series has been created for a musical score, pre-existing or composed specifically for the project. By way of explanation, the music is often put on a film after it is finished, but in this case the film images and rhythms come from the music. Thus allowing the score to be a sort of script for the film.

Experimental, 16mm

Imusicircus is a threefold realization of John Cage's Circus On by composer Douglas Cohen and film artist Lawrence Brose. The score to Circus On is a set of directions for creating an audio performance piece based on a text. First, one is instructed to "write through" a book (using mesostic form) to distill a text for recitation (i.e. Cage's Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake). This mesostic text is then used as a guide to make a "circus of relevant sounds." The recited text and "circus of sounds" are combined to create a stereo recording (i.e. Cage's Roaratorio). This project is about translation. It is about the translation of a score for music into a "score" for video and film. It is about translating Cage's ideas and aesthetics in the world of sound into the visual realm.