Creation by Stan Brakhage (1979, 17 mins, color, silent, Print from Canyon Cinema). “...almost like the Earth itself - the green ice covered rocks, the slicing feeling, the compressive feeling of the glaciers. The whole time I was watching I kept thinking that you were a master of the north, the arctic landscape - the dark red flowers in the dusky light, the deep blue light, the tall trees with the running mists, and Jane looking.... The ice, the water, the moss, the golden light. A visual symphony.”

-Hollis Melton.

Eureka by Ernie Gehr (1979, 30 mins, color, silent, Print from Filmmakers Cooperative). When Gehr premiered his latest film last year at New York's Collective for Living Cinema, it was titled Geography. Both J. Hoberman and Amy Taubin, of The Village Voice and Soho Weekly News, respectively, wrote enthusiastic reviews: Taubin found parallels to Michael Snow's Wavelength in its penetration of space, and to Ken Jacobs' Tom Tom The Piper's Son in its refilming of a pre-Griffith “primitive” tracking shot. The point of departure for Gehr's film was a small piece of film shot from a camera mounted in the front car of a San Francisco Market Street trolley between 1900 and 1906 as the car progresses towards the Embarcadero and Ferry Building. “At an even rate of speed it sails through a sea of pedestrians and bicyclists, horse-drawn and automatic vehicles.

“...Geography is crammed with a thousand and one incidents....

“Gehr permits us to savor these events, without arresting their flow, by step-printing the original four-minute trip at a ratio of eight-to-one. A simultaneous increase in contrast causes the grey tonalities of the original to undergo a violent, mysterious shift with each eight-frame pulse... the background flickers in or out - the image oscillating between abstraction and representation... the eye is drawn deep into the frame, not only by the camera's headlong movement, but also by the classic example of these parallel trolley-tracks converging towards infinity. Thus, Geography precipitates a dizzying and majestic play between the exaggerated flatness of the image and the rigorous perspective it represents....”

-J. Hoberman

On The Marriage Broker Jokes... by George Landow (1980, 30 mins, color, Print from filmmaker). “It is the most disorienting, ecstatic, condensed, hilarious film you've ever made....” -Amy Taubin, Soho Weekly News.
A work-in-progress, including a satire on the “structuralist filmmakers.”