Coalfields

Coalfields

1984 · 39 min · ★ 10.0

West Virginia industrial landscapes are collaged on an optical printer through a series of jagged shapes that transform the photographed scenes into a semi-abstract kinetic field. The technique developed by Brand in his earlier films, extends the already complex visual idiom by inlaying social, sexual, personal and political subject matter. Woven into the fabric of the film is the story of Fred Carter, a retired coal miner and black lung activist who was framed by the Federal Government in its effort to undercut the black lung movement and to stop his bid for president of the United Mine Workers Association. His story is told through fragments of documentary interviews and by a poet whose narrative forms a counter theme within the film. The film’s thematic content and formal visualizations sit in precarious balance.

Directed by Bill Brand · Written by Kimiko Hahn

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Cartoons: Before the Fact

Cartoons: Before the Fact · 1974

Cartoons: Before the Fact

Made at S.U.N.Y. at Binghamton as a class exercise, filmmaker Saul Levine performs with students who each try to mimic his previously recorded phrase and then try to imitate each other imitating the recording.

Cartoons: The Central Finger

Cartoons: The Central Finger · 1974

Cartoons: The Central Finger

The Central Finger (16mm, silent, 5 1/2 minutes, 1974).

Split Decision

Split Decision · 1979

MovieDramaAnimation

This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life of artists in Lower Manhattan and at the same time dramatizes questions about the nature of filmic representation. Split decision is a boxing term used when the judges divide their votes in finding a winner. In this case the fight is between the two heroes of the film who are seen intermittently in a bar, negotiating a pick-up, and at home, breaking up in a domestic quarrel. The fight is also in the telling, between modes of conventional representation and modes of radical representation - between conventional continuity editing, and abstraction created through computer generated grids. The film features an appearance by Carolee Schneemann and digital imaging from before the era of personal computers.

Cartoons: New York State Primaries

Cartoons: New York State Primaries · 1975

Cartoons: New York State Primaries

New York State Primaries shows stenciled lettering that dissolve between the words, “red,” “blue,” and “green” but don’t create secondary colors. The film is a response to Saul Levine’s 1972 NOTE: CHICAGO REDS AND BLUES.

Cartoons: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Cartoons: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin · 1974

Cartoons: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Flickering flames viewed through air vents of a wood burning pot belly stove resemble the shutter of a film projector.

Skinside Out

Skinside Out · 2002

Skinside Out features paint on skin, carried out in an expressionist mode on both of the filmmakers' bodies. The emphasis is on the pleasure of looking -- at the edge of repulsion -- and the implications of making public an essentially private gesture. The film posits painting as a gendered, bodily act, whose location shifts continually within a context that's always changing. Images filmed in the studio are juxtaposed with footage of a construction barge along the Hudson. By examining both in relation to surface, the work paradoxically looks for what lies within, while questioning who and where we take ourselves to be.

Cartoons: An Angry Dog

Cartoons: An Angry Dog · 1974

Cartoons: An Angry Dog

An Angry Dog is a hand-held animation made from a Cracker Jack toy.

Cartoons: It Dawn Down

Cartoons: It Dawn Down · 1974

Cartoons: It Dawn Down

In It Dawn Down an ordinary take-up reel spins to make colorful and delicate patterns even though the film is black and white.

Cartoons: Still at Work

Cartoons: Still at Work · 1975

Cartoons: Still at Work

Still at Work, a self-portrait of the artist in his places of work: the studio in Lower Manhattan and Sarah Lawrence College, the school where he taught. The film animates a still photograph through a grid of random dots.

Rate of Change

Rate of Change · 1972

This film has no literal subject, no frames, only slow continuously shifting colours, cycling around the perimeter of the spectrum. The changes are so slow as to be unseen, yet they alter our perception of colour. Part of a trilogy (Acts of Light), which develops a study of pure colour, based on the notion that film is essentially change and not motion.

Home Less Home

Home Less Home · 1991

MovieDocumentary

People who are homeless reveal homelessness from their own experiences dispelling common misconceptions and prejudices. Told as a personal journey, the film gives a broad analysis of the causes and conditions of homelessness while it analyzes news, TV reports and historical images of poverty. This film presents new ways to look at homelessness, displacing the debate from questions of charity to ones of social justice.

Huevos a la mexicana

Huevos a la mexicana · 2018

Huevos a la mexicana

This is my digital/analog contribution to “Xochimilco Treasure Hunting” in Mexico City on the final day of "HAZLO TU MISMO," Do-it-Yourself Independent Analog Film Laboratory Encounter, Sept. 9, 2018.

Sound Strip/Film Strip

Sound Strip/Film Strip · 1972

Sound Strip/Film Strip

Sound Strip / Film Strip is Paul Sharits' first "Locational" work, made in collaboration with Bill Brand. The piece was commissioned for the 1972 opening exhibition of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston,Texas. “...Sound Strip / Film Strip consists of four film loops simultaneously projected sideways so that the four images abut one another horizontally. Sharits made each loop by filming colored surfaces, scratching the film, projecting it so that the sprocket holes showed on the screen; he then filmed that projection, scratched the result, and projects that as the final object. The resulting image is a continuous flicker of various color ranges with both actual and ‘virtual’ scratches and sprocket holes running horizontally (normally vertically) across the screen. Thus, Sharits is working with filmic abstraction which employs no image save for that inherent in the medium itself....”

Home Movies 1971-81

Home Movies 1971-81 · 1985

Home Movies 1971-81

MovieDocumentary

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

Tracy's Family Folk Festival

Tracy's Family Folk Festival · 1983

Tracy's Family Folk Festival

This is an impressionistic portrayal of the 1982 folk festival at Tracy and Eloise Schwarz’s farm in Central Pennsylvania. The festival, dedicated that year to the legendary Elizabeth Cotton, includes Bluegrass, Old Timey, Cajun, Country, and Gospel music. In contrast to the easygoing atmosphere of the festival, the film is a frenetic swirl of elaborately collaged shapes derived from traditional Pennsylvania Dutch designs. While sometimes the music seems to animate the image, at others the image itself becomes visual music on its own, eliciting ephemeral and sometimes forlorn emotions. The film offers an unusual meeting of a folk tradition and the avant garde, implying a fundamental connection between the two.

Touch Tone Phone Film

Touch Tone Phone Film · 1973

Touch Tone Phone Film

TOUCH TONE PHONE FILM scrambles the system by which film represents time and motion. In the film, a phone rings and a woman gets up to answer it. Although the event is recorded on film, we only see it as a sliding strip.

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