A young woman searching for her missing artist father finds herself in the strange seaside town of Point Dume, which seems to be under the influence of a mysterious undead cult.
Documentary on the making of "Messiah of Evil," the surreal horror cult classic written by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, directed by Willard Huyck. Includes interviews with Huyck and Katz as well as cinematographer Stephen M. Katz, editor Billy Weber, co-editor and actor Morgan Fisher.
On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?
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“Freud established that jokes were structurally akin to dreams in their use of condensation, displacement, representation by opposites, punning and ‘nonsense’. All of these strategies are much in evidence in (Land’s) marvelously duplicitous ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE… [...] so clever and...
Thom Andersen's remarkable and sadly neglected hour-long documentary adroitly combines biography, history, film theory, and philosophical reflection. Muybridge's photographic studies of animal locomotion in the 1870s were a major forerunner of movies; even more interesting are his subsequent...
In 1963, living a routine life on Norma Place in Los Angeles, recluse writer Dorothy Parker and bisexual husband Alan Campbell recall their often-rocky relationship, started thirty years earlier.
"The cinematic mechanism cannot be completely deconstructed without resort to other means of mechanical image reproduction; a double system of representation is required; the apparent naturalness of the cinematic sign must be put into question by other indexical signs." —Thom Andersen. Preserved...
In a static medium shot a narrator seated at a table delivers an explanation of the combinations and permutations which the sound and picture elements of the conventional monochromatic sound motion picture afford, as the film itself undergoes them.
Red Boxing Gloves / Orange Kitchen Gloves was shot in 1980 in Polavision, an instant movie format that the videocassette made obsolete. The work is in the form of a pendant pair, a convention that arose in seventeenth-century Holland. The pendant pair consists of two paintings with subjects that...
Morgan Fisher’s Screening Room (1968–) is a tracking shot of the movie theatre in which the film is exhibited, and thus must be remade each time it is shown in a new location. —Erika Balsom
Cue Rolls suggests that the particularity of cinema is its interface of rigorous mechanical equipment and fallible human process, which is dramatised by the juxtaposition of the precision mechanics of the visuals and Fisher’s somewhat halting narration.
Morgan Fisher has long explored the space that segregates art cinema from industrial movie making. The one-minute-thirty-second-long Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm, an eye-blink homage to Marcel Duchamp, is more obviously engaged with conceptualism than with studio manufacturing. What you see is...
P. Adams Sitney, Professor of Visual Art at Princeton University, wrote a short essay for Artforum International "Medium Shots: the films of Morgan Fisher" in which he describes the film "()." "Fisher's most recent film, (), succeeds astonishingly where Frampton's parallel effort, Hapax Legomena:...
Protective Coloration shows Fisher seated at a mottled table. He wears short-sleeved hospital garb, surgical green ‘scrubs’. Nose-clips block his nostrils while a mouth-guard that looks like fake lips covers his mouth. Over the course of 11 minutes he masks his face and covers his hands with...
Regrettably, the labour of projectionists is usually only considered by the audience when they ‘screw up’. This film offers an alternative opportunity. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.
“A film about control. A refinement of energy for purposes of conserving resources, materials, impetus, potential, so they might all be narrowly channeled toward an unquestioned goal of maximum profit with minimum waste. Capitalism, in this example, as a process of understanding how to make use...
As its title indicates, the subject in Production Stills is a series of production stills of a film that was never made, and that at the same time is the film we are watching. A perfectly enclosed narrative of its own production: the image is one long take (11 minutes) of a wall on which a hand...
