Science Without Substance

Joseph, a young gay male, finds himself the random target of a hate crime and is severely beaten. He retreats into his own world and loses all faith upon hearing that he has permanently lost sight in one eye. In a loving, albeit misguided attempt to help him reclaim his life, Joseph's mother Rachel and best friend Derrick present him with a very unexpected present for his birthday, a face-to-face encounter with his attacker and a chance for revenge.

Sudan, East Africa, 1980. A team of Israeli Mossad agents plans to rescue and transfer thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. To do so, and to avoid raising suspicions from the inquisitive and ruthless authorities, they establish as a cover a fake diving resort by the Red Sea.

The Chinese Typewriter is about education and language, and the way a society is shaped by them. Exemplifies the politically committed film that defies the strict rubric of avant-garde. Barnett seems less interested in challenging traditional form than in exploding his own occidental vision. -- Gregory Solman

Legendary among filmmakers who have witnessed it, White Heart is a symphonic exploration of cinematic meaning that unfolds through a multi-layered, contrapuntal audio-visual montage of numerous and disparate ingredients: images of city streets, verdant forests, and ocean waves; bits of film leader and editor’s marks; oblique footage of Barnett’s colleagues Larry Gottheim and Saul Levine; an interview with two young missionaries; the sounds of classical music, typewriters, video tone, and, most centrally, a brief passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. These elements and more emerge and re-emerge like musical motifs, continuously and meticulously altered through processes like bleaching, staining, and multiple print generation, dramatically extracting the formal particularities of the Kodachrome reversal print.

In the near future, glacial melting has covered 98% of earth's landmass. Sharks have flourished and now dominate the planet, operating as one massive school led by a mutated alpha shark.

The second film in the Sweet Dreamers Trilogy

Third segment in the Sweet Dreamers Trilogy.

"Born in the 1960's. Died young." Boston and NYC, 1970.

One of the founding members of the hard rock movement, Deep Purple rose to worldwide fame with monster hits like "Hush" and "Smoke on the Water." The group's legions of fans travel far and wide to attend their live events that feature screaming guitar riffs, screeching vocals, brilliant keyboards, dynamic drumming, and amusing stage antics, all translating into a signature Purple show and a remarkable concert experience.

This video is about WATER WHEEL

My only student film by virtue both of my having been an (extremely short lived ) graduate student, but more because I made it explicitly to learn something about perceived screen time by watching it myself over and over again to see what continued exposure would do to the sense of subjective length. –Dan Barnett

"Untoward Ends, along with Dead End, Dead End and Endless are a kind of cross between diaries and structural films and span the main part of my career working in 16mm. These were not happy years for me and they are not happy films. They were all conceived as silent films and I was very consciously working out my ideas about visual rhythm and visual/musical form. When I had them transferred to digital I had the opportunity to see how they would work as sound films - How hard would it be to compose musical tracks for them that would complement their spirit without detracting from their purity as silent film compositions? I had lots of fun in the process and have learned a great deal from them about the interaction between the two modalities as kinds of musical expression. I will leave it to others to decide if they are successful or not." -DB

The film I made from Gary Henoch and Harlow Robinson’s footage, An Anagram is not a documentary at all, but rather a poetic essay on the impact of the sudden collapse of a belief system on a culture. It has a 17 part quasi-musical structure inspired by Dmitri Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues that at times ignores the literal meaning of certain interviews for the fragrant affect of the language and body language; that is, certain interactions are left un-translated so that the viewer is given full and unfettered access to the musical spirit that animates the arguments and quarrels caught so delicately in the sound and images. - Daniel Barnett

"This video is about some of the people of Burma" -DB.

Essay on dualism in the snow.

A Full Life is the sequel to the 1968 3 min silent film: "Anticipation of a Full Life" which was actually the first roll of film that I ran through my new 16mm bolex . "A Full Life" is also the first silent film I've made in more than 30 years. –Dan Barnett