FILM & VIDEO

This was a product of Pop Art and the sixties, and partly inspired by  an etching by Gerardo Aparicio. The film was lost, and I barely remember the plot—a stolid businessman meets exotic woman who turns out to be Death. I experimented with stabilizing a hand-held camera (before I met Wolfgang Treu) and got a great sulphuric effect by over-exposing Death's yellow sweater.

This was Miniskirt all over again but upside-down: a woman artist instead of a businessman, and a mad photographer as Death. It's not that I was obsessed with death or art or this story, just that I was working a fairly dull 9-to-5 job and couldn't seem to come up with any new ideas. Plus, the actress had a loft. I tried a few experiments with sound but found that 16mm doesn't lend itself to that.

Tiempo de violencia (Time of Violence) is a documentary about the socially motivated work that Spanish artist Rafael Canogar was doing in the late 1960s. The film follows the creation of a single work of art, but along the way it shifts back and forth to other paintings and to images with disconcerting associations. The emphasis was far more visual than verbal.

This animation was inspired by a conceptual piece by Catalan artist Francesc Torres, who had copied a dollar bill, copied the copy, and so on. Each copy added flaws and distortions, and moved the image slightly off center. Eventually, the original was too degraded to be recognized.

I used a still from Fable, the dead artist lying on the floor and made about 100 photocopies (of copies of copies). Then I filmed it, one frame at time, and created in-camera dissolves to match the funereal sounds of Bach's Toccata and Fugue, which I had earlier taped and measured in the editing room.