
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
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
NRThe 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
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
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
A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist remake/drag-show circa 1992.
Carol Anne Is Dead
2008
6.0Informed 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
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
NRThe 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
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
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
A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist remake/drag-show circa 1992.
Carol Anne Is Dead
2008
6.0Informed 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
6.0Informed 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
6.0Informed 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
NRCulled 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
6.0Tired 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
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Tidal
2001
Twin attempts at structuring images of home and loved-ones collapse in the face of the romantic.
Chiquitita and the Soft Escape
2003
1.0Dormant 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
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
5.0A 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
NRMade for the 2009 PDX Film Festival "Karaoke Throwdown" in Portland, OR.
WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES
2009
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
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
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
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
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
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
NRA collection of discarded souls, rescued from the trash of a college darkroom.
Motel Flora
2003
NRPlagued by blindness, sloth, and devotion, a troubled scene from Little House On The Prairie offers itself up to karaoke exorcism.
Hold Me Now
2008
"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
NRA 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
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
NRA self portrait in copy and paste.
The War of 1987
2002
NRAn exercise in repetition enacted across nine summer landscapes.
Birds of North America
2004
