Films
History haunts the border town of Columbus, N.M. when Mexican riders on horseback cross the line to commemorate Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid. As border dwellers and their divergent accounts of the Villa raid are introduced, the existential borderline that shapes their lives comes into focus.
Women, anarchists, and spies conjure the fantastically true story of how America entered WW1.
Once upon a time, in 1915, a German saboteur arrived to Manhattan to interrupt the export of American munitions to Britain. He soon finds a collaborator in a wayward stevedore who unwittingly leads him to a group of labor anarchists. Sabotage and betrayal soon turn these bedfellows into agents of the other’s tragic end. In the spirit of a silent film from the era, this musical melodrama plays itself out through the interaction of archival images and the theatrical rendition of lives as they might have been lived on The Manhattan Front.
2012
DV/16mm, 61 min.
Known as one of Italy's most important filmmakers, Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and foremost, one of its poets. Combining staged and archival material, this elegiac essay considers Pasolini's brutal murder in 1975 alongside the texts he published or left unfinished during his last year.
Dialogues by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Starring Bochay Drum, Amanda Setton, and Lee DeLong
Original Score by Beth Custer
Composer and I
2011
On the eve of Le Pen’s defeat in the 2002 French presidential election, a well-meaning American writer must face a bombastic inner voice before it ruins a friend’s act of eco-terrorism and the relationship with girlfriend Oona.
On the Line
2010
This experimental documentary charts a trip around Baja California to the Tropic of Cancer line. Photographed entirely in-camera, the film develops its narrative drive through the rhythm of shot length and composition. Aided by an original score from Beth Custer and a wicked sound design by Jeremiah Moore that utilizes sounds form the Cassini space probe, the piece takes on a humorously sinister tone.
Adrift
2009
A poetic adaptation of the fountain of youth fable, 'Adrift' follows a woman who has come to Rome to die. On her journey through the city’s fountains, she encounters a young girl who taunts her with visions of lost innocence. This film was staged on locations from the Roman films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, includes an original score by composer Ben Kamen.
Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil
2006
The 20th century French philosopher wrote, life is a "composition on several planes." This experimental biography is therefore not simply an account of Simone Weil’s life, but rather the skein of her ideas. The “unoccupied zone” is meant only marginally to refer to the southern part of France under Vichy. It is more importantly an existential labyrinth imaged by the film itself; a psychic space through which Weil passed while in exile in her own country.
The Girl from Marseilles
2000
Excerpt from film adaptation of Andre Breton's surrealist novel "Nadja". This fictional memoir gives voice to the woman who, speaking from the sanitarium as World War II approaches, recounts her love affair with Breton through a matrix of archival and staged images of Paris.
Sketches after Halle
1997
A collision of separate pasts, this film pieces together fragments of the director's own images and text from the East German town of Halle with those produced by Bauhaus painter Lyonel Feininger.
Not for Nothin'
1996
This sensualist's dream follows Louise Brooks look-alike Rodney O'Neal Austin on his search for the Beloved. From the cabaret to opium dens and dancing graces this homage to early sound film explores a world teeming with the mysteries of longing and death. Winner of Best Black-and-White Cinematography in a Short Film (Cork International Film Festival 1996).