Blackbirds

1998, 16mm, color, b/w, sound, 9 minutes

Televised footage of the Rodney King/Reginald Denny beatings is re-presented as an extended series of hand-processed images that slowly dissolve from recognizable beings into anonymous figures. As each generation of images becomes increasingly distressed, King and Denny are revealed as victims of the same moving pictures that originally captured their innocence.

The mutual disintegration of filmic and racial color is illustrated through a broad range of photo-chemical manipulations, including: negative and cross-process developing; solarization; and temperature and agitation-based effects on grain, color, and emulsion. Suburban and natural sound elements rise and fade with each successive generation of images. Originally presented as a 6-projector, live performance piece.

Screenings

• Rotterdam International Film Festival
• Ann Arbor Film Festival, MI
• Anthology Film Archives, New York City – What’s New in the Avant Garde
• Telluride International Experimental Cinema Exposition, CO
• Image Movement Cinematheque, Taipei, China
• Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, New York – A Night of Films Handmade
• San Francisco Cinematheque, CA
• Singapore International Film Festival
• Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival, Brazil
• Splice This! Super 8 Film Festival, Toronto, Canada
• Video Ex Festival, Zurich, Switzerland
• The Lab, San Francisco, CA – Projection Art Lab
• Global 8 Day, Switzerland
• Other Cinema, San Francisco, CA – New Experimental Works
• Super Super 8 World Tour (USA, Europe, Japan)