Movies: Keith Sanborn

“DREADFUL PENNY DREADFUL dares to violate every remaining shred of ‘good taste’ using the vehicle of Brecht and Weill’s much-abused ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer,’ aka ‘Mack the Knife.’ Over 200 versions collide, taking you from its origins in Weimar Be...

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for tra...

My aim is to create a highly compressed museum of cinema, consisting of some of the most notoriously engaging, difficult, and lengthy works of film history—those nearly invisible works that explore the limit conditions of film. Works that have become...

Made in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, The Deadman is based on a story by Bataille, charting "the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to the house to die — a combination of elegance, rau...

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns...

"A didactic treatment of the Reagan assassination event /coverage as spectacle. Nearly anyone in the world who turned on a television that day, or with regularity in the following six months, has had the images of the event burnt into his or her cons...

An experimental film essay on architectural excess, with its aim not functional shelter but conspicuous destruction of wealth...

A slow four-part film on death and the persistence of the dead. Part 1 explores Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-icon. Part 2 is the image of my father in his coffin before his interment. Part 3 investigates the stillness and subtle motion around a roadside cro...

Henry Hills’s Emma’s Dilemma reinvents the portrait for the age of digital reproduction. In a set of tour-de-force probes into the images and essences of such downtown luminaries as Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneemann, Hills’s cinemat...

Part three of a cycle of digital video works I'm beginning to call-after Bataille-«Theory of religion, theory of ecstasy.» The other two parts are Mirror and The Zapruder Footage.... This tape is inspired by the 11th century Sufi mystical text The Co...

An exploration of Joan Jonas’s studio in Nova Scotia in August 2019, by night with torch, but no spear. Special thanks to Peggy Ahwesh for pelican lighting effects....

Based on a series of ads in 2008 on Телеканал звезда [the Star Channel], owned by the Russian Department of Defense. The ads seek to draw parallels between stereotypical feminine daily gestures of fashionable self-imaging and stereotypical activities...

An exploration of Keats’s proposition, that “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all c...

“A theory discourse among three participants, enacted in silhouette.” –Tony Conrad...

Joan of Arc and Dorothy of Kansas become one thanks to Hildegard von Bingen....

A short essay on the triangular Square du Vert-Galant, one of the favorite repairs of the vanishing Paris of Guy Debord. Yet another slow film....

2019, 1 min, digital...

Various permutations and combinations of the Zapruder footage of the assassination of JFK. Intended as an investigation of the footage as visual, experiential, and cultural document. In the USA this footage is both notorious and invisible; seldom act...

Mirror is an attempt to reach Joan of Arc in her final moments as she beholds the beatific vision. To reach her, however, some anachronisms and a few propositions about psychology, mysticism and eroticism were necessary (Keith Sanborn)....

An attempt to problematize ownership and authorship in the age of digital reproduction. Inspired by the Walter Benjamin essay of the same name and the activities of the Situationists....