Michael Robinson

Directing

Michael Robinson

Known for

Directing

Credits

29 titles

Michael Robinson (b.1981) is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and dangers of mediated experience, riding the fine lines between humor and terror, nostalgia and contempt, ecstasy and hysteria.

Known for

No artwork available
6.0

A very special episode of television's Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.

Light Is Waiting

2007

The Dark, Krystle poster
NR

The cabin is on fire! Krystle can't stop crying, Alexis won't stop drinking, and the fabric of existence hangs in the balance, again and again and again.

The Dark, Krystle

2013

No artwork available
NR

In the near future, amidst the aftermath of civil war, a band of female prisoners ambles across an otherwordly coastal exile, supervised and sorted by a group of idle soldiers. Rummaging, stuttering, and smashing through the leftovers of American culture, these ragged souls conjure an unstable magic, fueled by their own apathy and the poisonous histories imbedded in their unearthed junk. Suspicion, boredom, garbage, and glamor conspire in the languid pageantry of ruin. Feel the breeze in your hair, and the world crumbling through your fingers.

Circle in the Sand

2012

No artwork available
NR

Viewed at its seams, a National Geographic slideshow from the 1960s and '70s deforms into a bright white distress signal.

You Don't Bring Me Flowers

2005

No artwork available
NR

A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist remake/drag-show circa 1992.

Carol Anne Is Dead

2008

Polycephaly in D poster
6.0

Informed by an underlying sense of anxiety and anguish, Michael Robinson’s Polycephaly in D nestles fragments of narrative within a collage of sound, image, and text that oscillates between the elegant and the discordant.

Polycephaly in D

2021

Behind the camera

No artwork available
6.0

A very special episode of television's Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.

Light Is Waiting

2007

The Dark, Krystle poster
NR

The cabin is on fire! Krystle can't stop crying, Alexis won't stop drinking, and the fabric of existence hangs in the balance, again and again and again.

The Dark, Krystle

2013

No artwork available
NR

In the near future, amidst the aftermath of civil war, a band of female prisoners ambles across an otherwordly coastal exile, supervised and sorted by a group of idle soldiers. Rummaging, stuttering, and smashing through the leftovers of American culture, these ragged souls conjure an unstable magic, fueled by their own apathy and the poisonous histories imbedded in their unearthed junk. Suspicion, boredom, garbage, and glamor conspire in the languid pageantry of ruin. Feel the breeze in your hair, and the world crumbling through your fingers.

Circle in the Sand

2012

No artwork available
NR

Viewed at its seams, a National Geographic slideshow from the 1960s and '70s deforms into a bright white distress signal.

You Don't Bring Me Flowers

2005

No artwork available
NR

A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist remake/drag-show circa 1992.

Carol Anne Is Dead

2008

Polycephaly in D poster
6.0

Informed by an underlying sense of anxiety and anguish, Michael Robinson’s Polycephaly in D nestles fragments of narrative within a collage of sound, image, and text that oscillates between the elegant and the discordant.

Polycephaly in D

2021

Polycephaly in D poster
6.0

Informed by an underlying sense of anxiety and anguish, Michael Robinson’s Polycephaly in D nestles fragments of narrative within a collage of sound, image, and text that oscillates between the elegant and the discordant.

Polycephaly in D

2021

Polycephaly in D poster
6.0

Informed by an underlying sense of anxiety and anguish, Michael Robinson’s Polycephaly in D nestles fragments of narrative within a collage of sound, image, and text that oscillates between the elegant and the discordant.

Polycephaly in D

2021

Desert States: You Win Again poster
NR

Culled from segments of the Miss USA pageants of the late 1980s, Robinson’s silent two-channel video, 'Desert States (You Win Again)', reduces and refracts the source’s highly-gendered pageantry to its rawest form of ceremonial spectacle.

Desert States: You Win Again

2015

These Hammers Don't Hurt Us poster
6.0

Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escorts her favorite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.

These Hammers Don't Hurt Us

2010

Tidal poster
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Tidal

2001

No artwork available
NR

Twin attempts at structuring images of home and loved-ones collapse in the face of the romantic.

Chiquitita and the Soft Escape

2003

Victory Over the Sun poster
1.0

Dormant sites of past World's Fairs breed an erruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory; nothing lasts forever even cold November rain.

Victory Over the Sun

2007

No artwork available
NR

Commissioned by Matador Records for the release of Interpol's 2004 LP "Antics", and presented at "Interpol Spaces" gallery events in London (The Ragged School), Berlin (Galerie Tristesse), Paris (Agnès B. Gallery), New York (199 Lafayette Street) and Los Angeles (Subliminal Projects Space).

FIrst Cousins

2004

Mad Ladders poster
5.0

A modern prophet’s visions of mythical destruction and transformation are recounted across a turbulent geometric ceremony of rising curtains, swirling set pieces and unveiled idols from music television’s past. Together, these parallel cults of revelation unlock a pathway to the far side of the sun.

Mad Ladders

2015

WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES poster
NR

Made for the 2009 PDX Film Festival "Karaoke Throwdown" in Portland, OR.

WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES

2009

No artwork available
5.5

A charred visitation with an icy language of control: "there is no room for love". Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness.

All Through the Night

2008

No artwork available
NR

A dark wave of exile, incest, and magic burns across the tropics, forging a knotted trail into the black hole. Three star-crossed siblings wander in search of one another as a storm of purple prose and easy listening slowly engulfs them.

If There Be Thorns

2009

No artwork available
NR

A dark wave of exile, incest, and magic burns across the tropics, forging a knotted trail into the black hole. Three star-crossed siblings wander in search of one another as a storm of purple prose and easy listening slowly engulfs them.

If There Be Thorns

2009

No artwork available
NR

This is the new choreography of devotion, via the vlog of southern nightmares. This is the light that never goes out. This is the line describing your mom.

Line Describing Your Mom

2011

//\///\////\ poster
NR

//\///\////\ contemplates the same-day deaths of Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, and John F. Kennedy (all deceased on 11/22/1963) through the voices of the their respective wives (Laura Huxley, Joy Davidman and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). This meditation on visionary states of being unfolds across three sites of radical ambition: a failed desert commune, the ruins of a secret fascist compound and an empty glass cathedral. Part of the ongoing collaborative project by Phillip Andrew Lewis and Michael Robinson, Our Hyddeous Strenkth.

//\///\////\

2020

No artwork available
NR

An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, spreading deception and myth along its murky path, singing the dangers of the mediated spirit.

And We All Shine On

2006

Motel Flora poster
NR

A collection of discarded souls, rescued from the trash of a college darkroom.

Motel Flora

2003

Hold Me Now poster
NR

Plagued by blindness, sloth, and devotion, a troubled scene from Little House On The Prairie offers itself up to karaoke exorcism.

Hold Me Now

2008

No artwork available
NR

"Designed as a get well card, this experimental film was completed just two months before leukemia took my father's life. Through use of the optical printer I pull him back to an easier time." - Michael Robinson

Carpenter

2001

Onward Lossless Follows poster
NR

A password-protected love affair, a little vapor on Venus, and a horse with no name ride out in search of a better world. Against the mounting darkness, a willing abduction offers a stab at tomorrow.

Onward Lossless Follows

2017

No artwork available
7.0

Shaping a concurrently indulgent and skeptical experience of the beautiful, the film draws an uneasy balance between the romantic and the horrid. A Frank O'Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.

The General Returns from One Place to Another

2006

The War of 1987 poster
NR

A self portrait in copy and paste.

The War of 1987

2002

Birds of North America poster
NR

An exercise in repetition enacted across nine summer landscapes.

Birds of North America

2004