The Film of Her 12min, 16mm, 1996
Director: Bill Morrison

A combination of documentary, fiction, and "found" footage tells the story of a Library of Congress clerk who, in 1939, saves an ancient film collection from incineration.

Award-winning filmmaker Bill Morrison has shown his collected works in solo shows at New York's Museum of Modern Art, London's Institute of Contemporary Art, and Buenos Aires' Museo de Bellas Artes, among others. Four of his titles are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art: "Night Highway" (1990), "Footprints" (1992), "The Death Train" (1993), and "The Film of Her" (1996). "The Film of Her" won numerous awards at film festivals worldwide, and is also in the collections of Anthology Film Archives, the Nederlands Filmmuseum and The New York Public Library. "The Death Train" was awarded a Dance Theater Workshop"Bessie" award for excellence in theatrical design, and was included in the Whitney Museum's survey "The American Century: Film and Video 1950-2000". His most recent title, "Ghost Trip" (2000), was awarded the Jurors' Choice at the Black Maria Festival. Morrison recently won an Obie award for his filmwork in the Ridge Theater production of Mac Wellman's "Jennie Richee". He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for filmmaking in 2000, and received grants from NYFA and Creative Capital in 2001.

"I started to see that the Film of Her was the composite, like the opus of what all these things [shorts] were leading to. But, intellectually, it's going back to the roots..." - Bill Morrison http://desires.com/features/thefilmofher/her_interview.html

The Shanghaied Text 20min, 16mm, 1996
Director: Ken Kobland

A collage of appropriated images from Dziga Vertov’s 3 Songs of Lenin, Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth, and Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, together with a piece of erotica and Parisian newsreel footage from 1968, The Shanghaied Text is a frantically paced, highly visual dance macabre meant to challenge the expectations of the television-viewing audience. This manic anti-narrative encapsulates the civic and sexual passion of colonialization and revolution. The Shanghaied Text was screened at New York Video Festival, VideoArt-Karlsruhe, Germany, Media Biennial-Warsaw, 8th International Video Week-Geneva, The Rotterdam Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, and BlackMaria Festival. It won awards at Three-Rivers Film /Video Festival and at Ann Arbor Film festival.

"Since the 1970s, Ken Kobland has maintained a distinguished career as a commercial cinematographer, award-winning experimental and documentary director in film and video, and teacher. In addition to his personal oeuvre of works, he has collaborated on projects for theatrical presentation with such art-world notables as Spaulding Gray, Philip Glass, and the New York City–based experimental theater ensemble The Wooster Group. He has also directed the cinematography for a range of television and theatrical works on visual artists, including Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, and Chuck Close (for which he was nominated for an Emmy). Among his most recent projects is a series of artists’ portraits made for public television’s “ART 21.” Trained in art, architecture, and philosophy, Kobland brings an acute sense of space and its meanings to works of unusual lyricism that explore the urban environment." - Harvard Film Archive

For more information about the films by Ken Kobland, visit http://www.kenkoblandfilms.com

Dark Dark 16min, 2001
Director: Abigail Child

"A gruesome ghost dance of the narrative gesture, in which four story fragments are combined: film noir, western, romance and pursuit.

Dark Dark is an uncanny ghost dance of narrative gesture blending four found story fragments: Noir, Western, Romance and Chase. The music of Ennio Morricone provocatively interacts with the images, tantalizing the audience with webs of memory, meaning and elusive folly. This film is a work of subtraction, repositioning celluloid into a funny and haunting, strangely poignant world. It creates a vortex of reflexive cinema materialised in upside-down and backwards footage." - Rotterdam Film Festival

Abigail Child is a film and video maker whose montage pushes the envelope of form and content with smarts and passion. Her work in the 80s explores gender while focusing on strategies for rewriting narrative, while her recent 90s productions recuperate documentary to poetically explore public space, whether the homeless of Lower Manhattan or Petersburg, Russia after Perestroika. * She has exhibited her award-winning art extensively in both solo and group shows, including most recently:The American Century, 1950-2000, the Whitney Biennial (1989 + 97), the New York Film Festival & Video Side Bar (1989 + 1993), and in Europe- (London , Rotterdam, Torino, Vienna, Pesaro..). She is author of five books of poetry (A Motive for Mayhem, Mob and Scatter Matrix ). and her films and videos have received many honors including: an ITVS Screenwriting Grant, Guggenheim Foundation and Fulbright Fellowships, NYFA, NYSCA, & NEA Interarts Grants, Jerome and Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grants, Massachusetts Arts Council New Works and Creative Artists Public Service Awards. Her films are in the permanent collection of MOMA, New York and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. * Child was an undergraduate at Harvard and is senior Faculty in Film at the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston.

Going Back Home 1min, 35mm (shown on 16mm), 2000
Fissures 2.5min, 16mm, 1999
Director: Louise Bourque

still from Going Back Home

Fissures. A film about forgetting and remembering, about past presences and the traces they leave. In making this piece, I literally manipulated and distorted the film plane through experimentation in doing my own contact printing of personal home movie images. The point of contact is continuously shifted so that the film plane appears warped and the images fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting apparitions, like resurfacing memories. The footage was hand-processed and solorized as well as colored by hand through toning before a final print was made at the lab.

Going Back Home: the turmoil of an unsheltered childhood, which has hidden itself deep inside.

Louise Bourque is a Canadian experimental filmmaker living in the Boston area where she is currently teaching cinema at Emerson College and has been Visiting Film Faculty at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts since 1996. Her films have been widely presented in festivals worldwide and she has received numerous grants, honors and awards for her work.

The Morphology of Desire 6min, 16mm, 1998
Director: Robert F. Arnold

An experimental exploration of the commodified representation of romantic love in popular culture, and the relationship between the still and moving image, using digital image morphing to animate romance novel cover illustrations as a dance of unrealized desire. This cyclical movement is segmented into a minimalist narrative by short passages quoted from romance novels.

Robert Arnold: Studied sculpture before starting to make films in 1980. Earned Ph.D. in Film Theory , University of Iowa, 1994, and has published several articles in academic film journals. Teaching film and video since 1985. Currently Associate Professor of Film Production at Boston University and recently Visiting Professor of video and installation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan', Poland. Recipient of 2001 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists. Resides in Jamaica Plain, MA, with spouse Katie Travis and dogs, Mr. Dog and Stinky.

License to Kill, 2min, video, 2001
Director: Sarina Khan Reddy

This single channel video questions how Pop culture perpetuates colonialists values of created notions of "civilized" through the glorification of violence. This piece uses a James Bond theme song and couples it with graphic footage of a constructed colonialist scene of a massacre of unarmed civilians who are non-white and wearing turbans. In a historical context it starts to question how these past events have contributed to events of today.

Sarina Khan Reddy's video work explores the differences within her cultural identity as an Islamic-American woman. Through the lens of her Indian heritage, she explores the new colonization embodied in globalization. Specifically she focuses on how the economic system is reflected in all social formations and how war and militarization are fueled by corporate globalization. In her latest work she is exploring the blurred boundaries between news and entertainment. She uses appropriated footage from advertising, news, and Hollywood movies. She juxtaposes these sources to subvert the original meaning to create new and alternative histories. She has worked for many years with technology and today strives towards the strategic use of technology and media for social change through volunteer work with local organizations. She has exhibited locally and nationally.

Untitled 7min, video
Director: Arnold Johnson

Arnold Johnson began video work in 1984 utilizing film and miscellaneous TV imagery combined with psychedelic, minimalist, and verbal audio sources. He created works both narrative and, influenced by John Cage, in random form. In 1999, Arnold began to experiment with Hollywood musicals and other dance footage combining it with techno and club music. His works were featured in the Boston Underground Film and Video Festival 2002.

Meat Probe 3min, 16mm
Director: Shawn P. Morrissey

A re-constructed look at the hidden sexuality of Hollywood action movies. Optically printed, re-pasted footage from an anonymous 70's B-stunt film, set to altered sounds from the Die Hard trilogy. Shawn Morrissey is a graduate from the Mass College of Art and has worked at the Museum School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard University. Automatic Meat Probe has Shown at the New York, Chicago, and Boston Underground Film Festivals, Cinematexas Film Festival, Thesseloniki Film Festival, Humboldt Short Film Festival, the San Francisco Inst. of Contemporary Art, and has won honorable mentions at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and Black Maria Film Festival.