metropolis m

I comment on popular culture, consumerism, politics, history and sexuality. Now I am working more with ideas of myth, perception, history and the unconscious. In my current projects I am working with French medieval manuscripts, early American art, landscape paintings, and fairytale illustration. I am bridging perceptions of the past and present. I am making films that work with ideas of the loss of faith, obsession with spectacle, self destructiveness, compulsion for violence, etc. Inhibition and fear characterize my work, as uninhibited and fearless they may appear.

‘In What’s On? (1998), I was getting out my frustration with television over-consumption. The film rocked you as much as television does – if not more. Many of my films had this super aggressive quality. I’m interested more now in the pre-technological world and through looking and thinking of this time, I create with a more handmade and simplistic approach. My new film Destiny Manifesto fuses paintings of the American western frontier and contemporary images of the conflict in the Middle East. It explores the visual and psychological parallels between the representations of these two periods. Another new film, Meet Me In Wichita is an indictment of America’s dangerous foreign-policy naivety. The film is a play between fact, fiction, politics, fantasy, terror and morality. The film features Osama Bin Laden (as several characters from The Wizard of Oz) and Dorothy in a battle of dark forces and faces of Evil. It’s a dark film, not unlike my earlier work, but it is painted in pastel and cheery almost fluorescent watercolor colors. I’m making something dangerous; sweet, something dark; light, something violent; friendly. It’s less of a mass –language, or a pop language. More at a meeting point of painting and the moving image and plays with the moving image less like a film and more like a literally moving picture-painting. Our visual dialect is so complicated today. It’s an escapists-attention-deficit dreamscape.’

‘I started making animation in 1994. I made them initially as small titles for found footage films, which unless you want to scratch the text in a 16mm x 16mm frame, are hard to make, so I would animate the titles on super 8 and tape them to the 16mm. By doing this I was seduced into doing animation. In animation I discovered a technique that could contain or convey some kind of control over my imagination. I was making images at the rate they were playing notes, with the same sense of improvisation and freedom. It was a time of seemingly endless fervent creative activity. I didn’t show my work (outside of my warehouse) for years. Now it’s a matter of balancing showing and creating. When I started out, it was 100% creating. Animation was a great medium that I could, out of the detritus of life around me, create works that spoke about big things. Made from out of the squalid corner of my unheated studio it got into contexts so far from where it originated. Animation is magical, it’s making gold out of glitter.’

‘I guess, a film that ends when I end. Finishing works punctuates time in my life, otherwise it would seem to have no rhyme or reason. Lately I’ve been working on films without an end. In other words ‘a loop’. My ideas have started to take on the shape of landscapes and environments and emotion atmospheres, all to the greater point, or idea of the film, but still, the ideas are transported in ‘places’. The processes and realizations cross-pollinate. It’s a “tornado” of sorts, which I try to control.’

‘When I started making films I was inspired by music. My friends and I made avant-garde freak music but often I used the pop format of 2 minutes for my films. When I started making longer films and falling out of this pop format, I automatically questioned its endurance. This became something very specific to my work. I actually want it to last forever. I had quite some people saying me to stop struggling to be a filmmaker or to worry about being an artist and that I’m fortunately more a poet. My work is more about poetry then making film that function as an arc for narration.’

‘I was reading something about this the other day, which made a lot of sense to me. It was about taking your creative forces and creating a place. It’s more a place, actually, but you could say it’s a three-dimensional space. Usually my spaces were places where people didn’t want to go to. They were too aggressive or too loud. Now I’m more exploring spaces in film that bring different realms to me.’

‘I guess it happens to many people when you are on the other side of the ocean and you return to your own country. I left because I needed some distance from America but I had trouble speaking up in Europe because it wasn’t my place to talk about. I felt removed from my subject matter and since my return I’m more focussed. I’m interested in what our conscious does in relation to the early American history. I’m very rooted in that because of my family and where I grew up. I was surrounded by it.’

‘It was rough (pause). You should look on everything, as a good thing even if it’s a rough transitional face. It was interesting to take on that challenge to not constantly stay in my own culture. In other words; if I would have made the transition from Baltimore to New York I don’t think I would have had the state of mind to handle it artistically. Moving to another country gave me time to mature and absorb new impressions. It gave me the chance to grow artistically. There comes a point where you are being challenged to take a leap in your career and it’s up to you know to do this or not.’

‘It was interesting because before I started making films, I was in art school primarily focussing on visual art. Then I switched to purely presenting music and film. The art world gave me the opportunity to break out of that by making, for example, murals. The films were resulting in visual work.’

‘I think that I missed the computer generation. It happened becomes of my environment. I didn’t have a computer. Nobody was using computers in my world. My friends had computers only when I moved to Amsterdam five years ago. I just can’t stand working digitally becomes the technology is always present. There’s something more peaceful about making film.’

‘My work crosses a lot of borders. Last week it was an ivy league university and an inner city high school full of the cities toughest kids (with many tough questions), and a few film festivals in Europe and other exotic corners of the world, and this week it’s the Whitney Museum, an underground cinema in San Francisco and a new music festival in Austria. It’s not for me to position in other words. It’s for me to make. It’s an active part of contemporary society in many different contexts. I like taking my work to places unfamiliar with such work. More than often for it to get there, you have to take it there in person. Sometimes doing intermediate projects helps to free me up. Doing things that aren’t Martha Colburn’s new film. So now I’m working on a German fairytale for a modern classical composers group and it’s going to be shown at the Whitney Museum with live singers and an ensemble. It’s freeing to explore different territories and styles.’