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Professor
of Film/Video |
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Her Work |
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"The
Settler," 16mm film and digital video, 2000
The Settler takes place in 2067, and tells the story of the
first man to settle the Planet Mars. The narrator reflects back when
he left Earth, the early exploration and development of Mars and how
the planet was "terraformed" to support humans. Ironically,
the entire film is shot in the Anza-Borrego Desert of Southern California
and Los Angeles. It draws a haunting parallel between Mars and the
history and development of California. The Settler is an astro-philosophical
tale that reminds us of the price of forging new frontiers and conquest
of new lands. It is shot on 16mm and digital video and juxtaposes
these two esthetic textures into a tale that compresses the present
with the future.
"Saca
Una Foto," 16mm film, 22 minutes, 1994
Saca Una Foto was completed several months after the Zapatista
Revolution in January of 1994. Filmed throughout Chiapas and Yucatan
the film juxtaposes the Western influences on the Maya and the filmmaker’s
own sense of intrusion. It is an experimental ethnographic film, with
layers of optically printed compositions. The sounds of Spanish opera
interwoven with the shaman chant through the corridors of Palenque,
and the reoccurring voice of a young Mayan girl asking to have her
picture taken for money – "saca una foto" – take
my picture, depicts the complexities the filmmaker has towards making
the film. The layering of modern day Mexico with its ancient tradition
is reflected through the awkwardness of the eye of the camera. The
images have a timeless quality of magic realism, transporting the
viewer through a visual and audible trance-like experience.
"Presence
of Water," 16mm film, 27 minutes, 1999
Presence of Water is a visual diary of a young woman’s
estrogen induced memory of the last few months of pregnancy. A luscious
blend of collage and memoir, it takes place in Northern Italy when
she is eight months pregnant. Time compresses into the finite, and
the woman becomes a stranger to herself as she physically becomes
"two people." Formally it is a hybrid, a grafting of two
genres, a crossroads between the experimental film and the autobiographical
essay, gracefully defying the boundaries of any particular genre.
Two voices; an Italian father and American mother guide the viewer
through multi-layered optically printed surfaces and vibrant saturated
colors in a personal documentary about taking detours, loss and rediscovery.
Shot with her baby in one arm and the camera in the other, the film
speaks directly about the interference between life and the camera’s
24fps documentation. The presence of water reflects time, eternally
in motion, and mirrors the ebb of tides as a central metaphor to this
sensuous story of one woman’s voyage to Italy.
See
more of her work
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Artist's
Statement |
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Rian
Brown, co-director of Wandering Pictures is an experimental filmmaker
and professor of film/video at Oberlin College. Her Mexican short
ethnographic film Saca Una Foto, 1995, about the Maya people
in Chiapas premiered at the Harvard Film Archive, and has also shown
at the L.A. Municipal Gallery in 1998. In January 1999, she finished
a 16mm film, The Presence of Water, which has shown at the
Women in the Director’s Chair, Nashville Independent Film Festival,
Ann Arbor Film Festival, Independent Feature Project, Bar Harbor Film
Festival and Media One Digital Film Festival. Her most recent film
The Settler, which she finished in November 2000, parallels
the history of Los Angeles with the development of cities on Mars.
She is currently working on a new film, Traces and Lines: Western
Avenue, which explores the longest city street in the world, a
project based on the futuristic urban sprawl of the West Coast. She
is also designing the visual conception for a multimedia instrumental
ensemble, The Tree of Remembering, for the German New Music
Festival. |
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Video/Film
Student
Faculty
