Portraits
Shot on digital video, Portraits is three experimental films with each one focusing on an actor who helped me on two of my recent projects. Portrait of Yazmin focuses on the beguiling Yazmin Omana, Portrait of Alexia focuses on the stunning Alexia Fraser and Portrait of Natalie focuses on the lovely Natalie Tango. I made these short films as a thank you to each of these actors for helping me. They are a bit like film haikus that capture the essence of these beautiful friends.
Pizzica
Shot on Super 8mm film and digital video, Pizzica is an experimental dream film. Pizzica originated as a folk dance in the 1400s in Southern Italy. Though there are several different theories about its origin, the most accepted story is that this dance could fight off the poisonous bite of a tarantula.
Mental Radio (a.k.a. Open Kennedy)
"Our situation on earth seems strange... Everyone of us appears here involuntarily and are invited for a short stay without knowing why. To me it is enough to wonder at the secrets." -- Albert Einstein
"One must cultivate one’s own garden"-- Voltaire
Believing she had telepathic powers, Mary Craig and her husband, the writer Upton Sinclair, set out to test these powers in the 1920s. Sinclair would draw pictures and then transmit them mentally to Craig; she would draw the image she received in an adjacent, closed room. Their experiments were 75% successful. The telepathic interaction between Craig and Sinclair served as one of the starting points for my film Mental Radio which depicts psychic and telepathic interactions between soul mates both animal and human. This film is also visual interpretation of my thyroid illness Graves Disease, diagnosed late in 1990. The physicals in the film replicate the weekly examinations I received for a 6-month period. The film’s editing was dynamically composed but not necessarily meant to fit the sounds and music. The pacing between staccato vs. still shots is meant to parallel or simulate the physiological sensations associated with Graves Disease which include heart palpitations and unstable feelings counterpoised with periods of tranquility. Mental Radio is also documentation of my garden following a chronological development -- from early Spring to mid-Summer with the garden in full bloom. The film juxtaposes the vitality and fragility of the human body with that of the earth/nature.---AGN
Cold War Blues or Effects of the Bomb Varied, But...
A playful cut-out animation focusing on the Cold War. With special guest appearances by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Mao Zedong, Nikita Khrushchev, John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and many others.
Aurelia or Echo In Her Eyes: Part 3 (1985)
A woman sleeps. She dreams of a troubling encounter with a man at a futuristic cathedral. In this dream the proliferation of a day's images is reduced and refined into more enigmatic renderings. The world of color and movement translates into one of stone, shadow and light. In the epilogue the woman, now awake, lingers over the dream scenario which has just played; she prepares new variations. The film poses the problem of defining the relationship between dreaming and waking consciousness. Aurelia was shot on location in Barcelona, Spain at the unfinished Sagrada Familia church designed by Antonio Gaudi. It is based in spirit on Gerard de Nerval's novella Aurelia.
Lamiai
Shot on Super 8mm film and digital video, Lamiai is an experimental ghost film which is loosely based on a section of John Keats’s poem The Lamia.
Lamia -- the daughter of Poseidon -- haunts the D+R Canal in central New Jersey.
She rises up from the water and confronts a trespasser.
Lamiai is the third part of an experimental dream film trilogy which includes Dream Screen and Pizzica.
