To New Haven and Providence

 I am in the shop at Eben Kling's house.
I am  printing an edition for a collaborative portfolio with nine other folks.

 He lives in Branford
Connecticut. This is the shop
 that his father and
grandfather used
when they made things.

 A lot of conversations about fathers
and their fathers
doing the best that they could.

The space was thick with memory
and we breathed in
the sadness from the place.

Travelled to Occam Projects in Providence to see Taylor Clough's show on SaturdayThe sadness followed us to Providence.Later, I visited longtime friends James and Sandra who were my original guides to Providence and who have always provided me with enjoyable conversation and challenging thoughts.I am home now tired and still sad. 

New Projects for 2017

The New Haven Project

Ostensibly this is a trip into collaboration with Eben Kling and Adam Kology.

Eben is a printmaker and formers student who has set up shop in Branford Connecticut. Adam is also a former student and a Luthier who work and makes violins in Boston. I had wanted to collaborate again with these two since we made a collaborative road trip project in 2008.

 So I wanted to find some thematic core. I know that both Eben and Adam’s fathers have passed away in the last 6 years.  They are both in their 20’s. My father died when I was 29. So I thought that maybe there could be something there to work with in a “let’s be serious about this but not in a sad-serious” way.

Meanwhile, Eben produces a suite of large epic woodcuts 

and Adam makes an exquisite violin in his shop

while I try to finish 3 films that I started last year.

It will be a good year.

Recent Acquisition

ANYEYE has a new camera. Something a little French. A Pathe' Professional AT model 16mm. This camera is in mint condition. A spring wound. later model from the 1970's. It has the unique feature of a drive rewind handle for rewinding, double exposing and dissolves. We have put a Tokina 12.5-75 zoom on it for the first test roll.

Place Royal Nantes France, July 9, 2016

In France for two weeks for the FilmLabs meeting In Nantes France. Sharing information, ideas and films with more than 100 film makers from all over the world.

WORK IN PROGRESS

I have been working since spring on a number of projects that are somewhat related but different in process.
The Velo Frames project is a series of hand printed lithographs derived from frames from films that I capture digitally. I make film positives from these frames and then make photo litho plates which are then printed on a hand litho press. This month, I hav ebeen working with Rosie Farnan at Montserrat to test proof some of the images. If these work I am planning a series of image groupings which make reference to film sequences. These images will be presnted as a series which will work something like a story board to create a narrative from the still images. In essence I am distilling a 10-minute film into 10 or so frames.

The Animated Sound project is an animated film made with a Super-16 camera. This is a camera that photographs a wider than standard 16mm frame. Into the 1/5th larger frame I am creating graphic patterns that will be photographed where the optical sound track would normally be. My first test roll is in progress. I will process the film as reversal and project it to see/hear what I have made.

Xubdued Light Film Series is part of a series of Pop-Up shows at the Montserrat Gallery during the month of June. I invited 17 film makers from the AgX film collective in Waltham to participate in these screenings.

"Prospectus for " Xubdued Light"  June 15-19th , 2015  Montserrat Gallery Montserrat College of Art A series of films which represent the active experimental film community in Boston. This series will be part of the Summer Pop-Up shows happening during the month of June at the Montserrat Gallery at Montserrat College of Art. Although popularly known for documentary film, Boston has a rich experimental film making tradition. These films represent a variety of approaches to the film material and the film form. I have grouped the four evening screenings into broad categories which, I think represent some of the different approaches to film that encompass and typify contemporary experimental film making.; Found Film and Collage Camera-less Films Visual Essays and Journals Documents I emphasize that the primary point of departure would be that the work should have originated on film. This conceit takes into account the fact that many filmmakers present their work in a variety of formats. As a result this series will contain work in Super-8, 16mm silent and sound, digital video and projection/performance. Ethan Berry May 2015 Participating Artists; (as of 5/20) Paul Turano Kathryn Ramey Joe Shepard Youjin Moon Stefan Grabowski Luther Price Saul Levine Doug Urbank Mariya Nikiforova Susan Deleo Luis Arnias Kimberly Forero Arnias Brittany Gravely Robert Todd Kevin Rice Laura Ryan

An Update

After a long absence. I am back to posting.
An update is in order. I have been on sabbatical since January. Working on several films and a helping start a film collective in Boston.
Work on these films is an indirect process everything is deferred. shooting, developing, logging and editing.  Sound and image research are all latent, postponed kinds of actions. I am getting close to my limit of composure. I have set up a circumstance where everything is postponed, deferred or in some state of development.
I am concentrating on one film right now. getting the process through to the finish.
This film is a portrait of Printmaker Haig Demarjian. I am looking specifically at the engraving he has been working on lately. I want to create a sense of the place and process that surround his work.

Summer 2014

Although I had much bigger plans for the summer which involved two workshops and several screenings. I am happy with the course of events so far. I have had three visitors to ANYEYE and one ongoing project.
In July, Doug Urbank came up to bucket process some Tri-x he had double exposed. Doug is a Boston-based film maker and has been making camera-less films for some time. I had wanted him to come visit and work here. The results were not great for this particular roll. Very much over exposure and washing out of the images. This is not the usual look of his images. His intentions are to shoot again. He did leave me with a roll of already exposed images from his light box. I was to expose a second time and develop the result. I made my images yesterday in two different cameras allowing for the double and triple exposures. We will see what results.
Former student Zack Goldstein who is an alternatively driven photographer came by for a week to work on a proposal to resurrect the Cabot Cinema here in Beverly. This 19th century vaudeville style theater closed recently after a 20 year run as a traditional magic show and second run movie theater. His group was interested in purchasing and developing the theater into a movie house, restaurant, performance space. No word yet on the success of their proposal.
While he was between meetings, Zack made a super -8 film. processed and transferred here at ANYEYE. He shot  lot at night with the Nizo on Tri-x and also developed some decades old plus x that he had been given. The digitized result will be up soon.
Anna Gruca stopped by to digitize a film she shot of her thesis show last spring. She had also made a wonderful and surreal animated short that was part of that show. Both of these films feature Markie Remien. Together they have made a number of short, semi-surrealist films. I would like to see Anna make more of these.

Anna Gruca

Zack Goldstein

Pennsylvania Weather

It seems as if the valley below Bowers Junction has a way of generating dramatic weather.
the whole place is called the Lehigh Valley but this was a very local squall. Unlike the coast, the weather moves pretty fast. The sky seemed so big and expressive.

Across the Bridge

It was an exciting and rare opportunity this semester to team teach a course  with Rebecca Bourgault and Dawn Paul. We presented an interdisciplinary course that was focused on the closing of the Salem Harbor Station power plant, and the stories the workers had to tell about their experiences there. We were ambitious and inventive in developing the course. We  accomplished a lot and it is hard to believe that it has all come together in a show at the plant.
It was all made possible with the generous support of the Footprint Power company led by Peter Furniss. It was also possible because the plant workers were generous and trusting with the students. they gave their time and effort to making the project work right up until the show. Even now, the workers are serving an tour guides for visitors to the show.
The students also built trust and trusted the workers in exchanging their ideas and responding creatively to what they heard from the workers.
In the end we all moved across our own thresholds and stepped out of our comfort zone and . The institutions, the students, the workers all moved into uncharted territory in working on this project. Nothing like this has ever been done by any of us.
It has been a rare opportunity to have worked on this project.

Post Christmas-pre New Year

A season of major change. I have realized that my house was a penance project. It functioned as a kind of punishment for the insensitive way I treated those those who loved me when I was in my late 20's. I maintained it as a combination shrine to by broken dreams and a reminder of the suffering I thought I deserved.

Now that is over.

Also the move to Wendy's house. Many difficult choices about what to take, discard or leave behind.
I felt a kind of authority during this transition that I don't often feel. As if I was determining the way my life would be going forward.

New courses and teaching collaborations represent new, never before projects that will carry into the summer.

Volumes of experience and inspiration from the recent film conference in Colorado... Leading to more film ideas than I can write down or draw.

The house in Downingtown Pennsylvania where six years of Thanksgiving dinners took place. This is also the house where my mother died in 1966. I moved through this house in my teens and the beginning of college. The leaving of this place set the pattern for my leaving places. I walked away from what I didn't want, leaving treasured things behind. There is lots of regret left in this house.

How to best cope with the emotions and tasks of this season.?

Life will be getting more difficult, for  a while.

Vibrant Matter

Borrowing a title from Jane Bennet's book on the political ecology of things...

I am moving around and through the house and studio at 10 Cedar Street. Looking at what I have saved and what I have built. I am under some pressure to keep moving, keep making choices. I put things here and leave things there, deciding their fate (as if objects have a "fate"). What is apparent as I do this is how I am still fascinated by this process of spreading things out and grouping them together. Tools here, electrical bits there, hardware over there, until the piles are boxed up. I have not let go of the idea that simply documenting the objects will make some meaning apparent. I imagine simple shelves on which the objects are placed to be changed at intervals. Not a game like Duchamp but more like the pictures posted on  the fences near ground Zero. An ongoing installation of sorts. Do you know this object? How do you know this object? Where is this object? How do you know they way you know this object?

I will make a place for this to happen and be documented here.

SO MANY BOOKS

As part of the move to Wendy's house,  I have set up a small library is a shared office space in Salem. This space will house the overflow of books coming from my studio that just cannot fit into Wendy's house in Beverly. I like this idea of having a place to go and read that is not in my house surrounded by the other work I have to do.


In order to mark the occasion, I am having the first in a series of conversations in the library with my friend Brian Pellinen. Brian is an educator and a writer who is a brilliant conversation person.. He listens and knows how to make connections to what is often a larger conversation. He also really enjoys just playing tennis with ideas. There is no agenda or plan for these conversations just a starting point from  some common interest perhaps.. Maybe a series of questions or projects to be discussed.

 I plan other conversations with lots of other friends and colleagues. I trust that this will turn into an interesting project and make The Library a valuable source for ideas and a fun place to go.

The Slow Tornado

I have been moving this month from a house and studio I have owned for 35 years. There is a long story about this but the short of it is that I have been married for three years now and have been managing two houses, lawns,  snowplowing and  everything else that comes with an old house. I also feel that in the past 12 years of being in a relationship with Wendy that I feel like I have moved into a period of time where I must measure my energy wisely and focus on getting the work done such that my gifts allow. Right now this means being a good partner and making films.
Yes, I will make some kind of film about the move. It has been hard to do the work and be reflective at the same time about what it means. I have found myself just sitting and looking at things that I remember, marks on a table or shelves built for a specific project and spinning the images of those times in my head, over and over.
I have discovered a lot and will discover more. Things that I thought I had lost, thing I didn't know I owned. I see that as I move this stuff to another place or storage and leave some of it behind that I have generated a very slow kind of tornado. In the way that a tornado scatters things far and wide I have removed these things from places far away and moved them with me until now I am moving and leaving behind and moving so that the things are scattered in the same way,  just slower.

New works from the film "Velocity"

"Velo Collages" 12x18" archival ink jet prints.
Frames from " Velocity" a 20 minute black and white 16mm film.

WORDS, UPDATE

Words at the end of January

Gravity, Fullnesss, Abundance, Comprehension, Apprehension, 
and Dwelling.

Words at the end of December

Conquest Acquisition, Arrival, Occupation, Departure, Reflection.

Also, Self-Forgetting, Repetition, Not Figure, Not Ground, Vision, and so much the naming of things.

Words.

Stills from Wenham Shoot 12/16

A chilly evening of exteriors with Leon Vuong, and Dino Traite doing PA. That's Grant trying to stay warm and look like Winslow Homer. Looks more like Byron though. The primary function of this scene is to help get the Grant character out of the film. Shot projections on the smoke. Have not seen the video that Dino shot yet. It looked great in the viewfinder but I have learned...both good and bad to tune to the  the discovering of the image on the film.
Shot Orwo 400T on the borderline. I am superstitious about loosing blacks when pushing this stuff. Off it goes to Burbank tomorrow. The crew were great troopers, ACL worked great in the cold with a body warmed battery. Not much but titles left to do... again I have learned. I know there will be some shots to  pick up.
Photos by Dino Traite

Velocity Film Update

I will be shooting the last bits with Grant and Amy over the next two weekend, compiling the rolls for telecine transfer, and designing the text for inter-titles. This is my structural solution to how I can incorporate text into the film while presenting an episodic narrative. I have gathered a lot of the sound and will be recording Grant and Amy this weekend reading from Ruskin, Krauss, Crary, Dickinson and Whitman along with their own poems. Another structural idea for incorporating the text that I want to sort of lay over the film. 

I'm not sure just what I was thinking when I started this in June, but it has changed into something more poetic than my original idea. Where I was perhaps thinking of an austere alternating of images and text I now am imagining something denser and more expressive of the mean-ness of the time. I have given myself until the end of December to finish the shooting. I will make the film out of what material I have at that time. After the telecine transfer  I will be editing the digital and conforming the original.