Three Films by Phil Weisman2005

KLANDO, THE FUGITIVE CHEF and OUR TREMBLING WAY

KLANDO

I began to think about Brakhage's opening paragraph for Metaphors on Vision and his notion of the untutored eye and although I could sympathize with sentiment, my experience with my own daughter Maddy seemed more concrete. Sometime after September 11, 2001, having been displaced and re-settled temporarily in a furnished apartment in Maplewood, New Jersey, Maddy began reading stories from picture books. At four, she knew how to read a few words but mostly made up stories from looking at pictures. This video is my portrait of her and more, which began in a small industrial city about twenty minutes from Prague, Kladno, early one summer in the year 2000. -Weisman

THE FUGITIVE CHEF

 The deaths of the filmmaker Bob Fleischner, my childhood friend Jeff Tenzer and my father Marc Weisman in 1989 hastened an already made decision to leave the avant-garde art community and seek respite elsewhere. This resolution didn't alter my desire to work at filmmaking or even attempt, occasionally, to alter its known forms; it simply restated it within a different context. The Fugitive Chef is a fractured and layered personal documentary shot mostly in Brooklyn and at the MacDowell Art Colony. Contributors to this film incldue filmmaker Bob Fleishner, poet Julia Kasdorf, painter Sarah McCoubrey, actor Scotty Snyder and filmmaker/performance artist Stuart Sherman. -Weisman

OUR TREMBLING WAY

Unlike one trend today in experimental film, it does not go about its work distilling or deconstructing. Rather it sets its sights on encompassing several interacting stories and visual tropes at once, including a man's trip to a hospital and a woman's trip to the movies, and blends them in celebration of cinema from both a narrative and non-narrative point of view. Utilizing found and originally recorded footage from both film and video sources, this film offers it's audience an opportunity to consider, in a mildly ironic manner, what it is to be mortal on this planet, as well as what it is to be both an observer and the observed. It is a lyrical tone poem, a fictional short story and a dance film and video light and shadow re-interpreted as a digital moving picture. -Stephen Anker, Dean, California Institute of the Arts