Daddy Cool

The Suicide Squeeze

A fascinating case of narrative deconstruction, THE SUICIDE SQUEEZE is a '40s style whodunit pressed through the wringer of an optical printer.

Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy

Tony Buba, a film maker from Braddock, Pennsylvania, tells the story of his hometown's decline (along with the rest of the steel mill towns along the Monongahela River) while he dreams of making higher budget films. The picture documents, in a lighthearted way, the community anxiety and activism that accompanied the failure of the steel industry around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Fainter Echoes

Fainter Echoes uses an array of 16mm and super-8 film fragments that I shot over several decades. It is built on a single outtake from a traditional documentary (of my grandfather) I made in the 1970s. His voice was recorded in 1976 and my own in 2024.

No Action

This unusual short portrait film combines animation with live action in a way that makes the viewer wonder, at first, what is real and what has been manipulated. Natural settings are transformed through time-lapse animation, while ten discrete cyclic animations occur simultaneously in a bank of windows behind the motionless protagonist. NO ACTION contrasts sound and imagery to describe conflicting internal and external realities.

Frequent Seas

Frequent Seas is a lyrical experimental film. It combines live action with hand-drawn animated mattes to create an abstract, sometimes disturbing portrait of a woman. Images break apart randomly and come back together. Nothing is ever completely revealed. This is a highly manipulated, non-linear, non-narrative piece. It does not tell a story, but it does create a feeling.

A Metamorphosis in Logic

Combining animation with live action, this is an absurd, dark, slightly comic portrayal of a man who feels stuck and wonders how he got there. While it borrows images from Kafka's Metamorphosis and from Jack Arnold's Incredible Shrinking Man, it is not an interpretation of either. This is a film about logic that feeds on itself. In developing its own peculiar logic, the film plays with narrative form. A METAMORPHOSIS IN LOGIC is the meditation of a man who can't decide whether he has gone too far or not far enough.