Bradley Eros

Scenes from the life and work at Anthology Film Archives. Much of the footage in this video was shot by Auguste Varkalis.

Mistaken identities converge and separate again in the harsh burn of optical truths. Images revolt and stand on their heads. The story of photography told as a Western.

An actress living in New York performs an audition, then goes to meditation and winds up at a party of artists viewing a film. At home, she and her girlfriend explore buried memories and later nightmares trigger sleepwalking. Finally, the actress enacts a childlike performance inspired by a Frank Wedekind play.

A beautiful actress struggles to connect with her disfigured co-star on the set of a European auteur's English-language debut.

A transmutation of mystery/history/hysteria, where sex and sacrifice mix with death and voyeurism. Soundtrack by Einstürzende Neubauten and Psychic TV.

Eros & Geraghty compilation

Mistaken identities converge and separate again in the harsh burn of optical truths. Images revolt and stand on their heads. The story of photography told as a Western.

A transmutation of mystery/history/hysteria, where sex and sacrifice mix with death and voyeurism. Soundtrack by Einstürzende Neubauten and Psychic TV.

Eros & Geraghty compilation

A radical remix of the recent Transformers film, via synthetic collapse and critical revenge on its old & new fascist tropes > celebrating SPEED. NOISE. + DANGER. The fervent declarations & violent poetry of the Futurists are superimposed on the mythic morphology of the Autobot blockbuster’s machine mayhem. Images of death & destruction reign in a delirium of transformations as, to quote Marinetti: “We Decompose the Universe!”

a highly personal document of architectural structures, nature & landscape, and the body’s intimacy fabricated from thirty years of collected material

An homage to two lyrical surrealists of the cinematic collage, Joseph Cornell and Jean Painleve. Made entirely of science & nature footage, through a process of subtracting the original expository devices, and emphasizing the oneiric beauty and confusion of scale, where the microscopic is analogous to the astrologic, and the insertion of unexpected diversions and creatures creates nocturnal associations and uncanny perceptions. A work more alchemical than clinical, focused on decay and regeneration, with a hypnotic soundtrack by Messiaen. – BE

The séance is the prototype of modern multi-media. I approach the séance as a medium, or a structural form of media manipulation, somewhere between an art and a belief-system, a cutting-edge demonstration of new technologies mixed with psychic projection. It originated as a novel form of interactive performance, or staged improvisation with a live audience. It ingeniously employs technological innovations in a theatrical environment that incorporates newly developed and experimental devices, such as the phonograph, slide projection and cinema, as well as hidden speakers, magnifying lenses, and mobile lighting., often creating, through special effects, the experience of disembodied voices and floating human figures approximating visitations of the dead and ghostly presences. -BE

Hand-painted Bradley Eros film

For spidery, mixing original shot material with colored filters, shown through a prism of water and cut crystal, to elongate and splinter the angular animal grace of the arachnidan limbs and elegant web, giving the appearance of a spider trapped in a microscopic pool or suspended within the actual projector lens. The music box soundtrack of Stockhausen's Zodiac rhymes the anthropomorphic notion of the plucked web as a sensitive stringed instrument.

Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin's Dreammachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenuousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.

“A site-specific cinema performance employing the myriad parameters of the technical apparatuses of analog film projection and light, using Anthology’s Maya Deren Theater projection booth & projectors and operated by our skilled projectionists. The work will include all of the variations of lenses, aperture plates, bulbs, lamps, gates, screen masking, shutter speeds, frame rates, change-over, focusing & framing, etc., in a composition for illuminated flicker and filmless geometries of light, for all types of projectors: 8mm, Super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm, and slide, from an instructional score for the performers. It is a work of contracted cinema, or cinéma concret, focused on the cinematographic machine and filmic light: an exercise in analog fetish, pushed towards the revelation of the invisible mechanisms, foregrounding & celebrating that which is usually hidden from sight.” –Bradley Eros

Erotic Psyche [Bradley Eros & Aline Mare] ELECTRAMORPHIC 1987, 14 min, Super-8mm-to-16mm Visions of creation & destruction: the birth of pyromania and explosive technology. Promethea’s homage to Reich & Tesla and the Orgone of Alternating Current. ‘Very Kali-graphic.’

A study of fire, death, and rebirth.

In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life. – Karl Marx A fantastic voyage through the cycles of decay and regeneration in the body and the world. Sublime psychotropic sound and a dark sensibility compels us into molecular memory, the structure of living culture, and the electronic architecture of Apocatopia, where beauty and terror merge. Unique chemical treatments emphasize the film's seething materiality.

The mummy signals from the threshold of the living and the dead. Secrets seep through the skin, and tattooed oracles reveal the body is a sign divine. This film is an inscription of the mysteries in action.

“Without giving away too much, I’ll just say that the ‘soundtrack’ is inside the mind of the viewer, as they experience the ‘film’. An experiment & a provocation.” –Bradley Eros

“In the context of an ‘Imageless Films’ series, it’s significant that ‘mercury’ is radio as cinema, ~ a looped excerpt from Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre radio play of DRACULA, a performance of sound creating sight, but especially, the utterances and hallucinated descriptions of Mina (from Bram Stoker’s novel) in a trance, picturing what she visualizes in a hypnotized state: the narcoleptic sibilances of a somnambulistic cinema, manifesting what is not present to others ~ & the experience ends (for the live audience) with a shock of mirrored reflection ~ something real in the room!” – Bradley Eros

"Deliquescence" offers a double layer of marine flowers and aquatic erotics, with Richard Sylvarnes on electronic shadows. A Bradley Eros' original olfactory cinema with perfume scents.

Riddles in the LAByrinth. A ritual shadowplay in 7 movements with intertitles, from a live performance at The Gas Station, East Village NYC circa late 80's. Thanks Jack Vengrow for the welding light, and thanks to the FDNY for dousing the burning chair (oops). Creating an intense aura in the blue light of the electronic cave, two creatures in conflict, creation, communication, and the urge to liberate.

Featuring, our music videos & video music, stolen treasures & unburied graves, detournèd objects & cultural corpses, including: BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD

A modern multi-media myth. To explore and expand the realm of eroticism. A mediation between Eros and Psyche: sexual politics, desire and consciousness. Love under will, to change power. Interrogation. Tenderness. Rage. Rapture. Questions. In search of the militant, androgynous-utopian hermaphrodite. A synthesis of live performance, film, edited images, singing, text, ritual and shadow magic.

“Featuring, our music videos & video music, stolen treasures & unburied graves, detournèd objects & cultural corpses, including: DAHLIA NOIR,

"A collaborative expanded cinema composition featuring live music, poetry, and performance. We aspire to weave together a spectrum of elements of the mycelium underground and its visual fruiting bodies, represented here by the film medium & its offshoots. Our images & themes including death, decay, regeneration, remembrance, transformation, and the biomorphic ecology of the body and mind. In this, we hope to evoke the connective and regenerative potential of mycelium." - Bradley Eros

Tribute to Jonas Mekas

"AERODYNAMICS OF THE BLACK SUN is an alchemical process reflecting decay and regeneration in the solar realm. The elasticity of materials under chemical change creates metaphors & abstractions for manipulated plastics burning in the gate. These pyrographic ruptures are inspired by entropic phenomena and disintegration, as well as by artists who explore surface distress, puncture & erosion, such as Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri." -- B.E.

COLOUR THEORY uses a multitude of white projector light [all possible variations: 35mm, 16mm, R8 & S8mm, 35mm slide] with a spectrum [RYB/OGV] of hand-manipulated coloured gels, moving apart & over-lapping in layers, to create a blended mixture of myriad shades, performed live from the booth as a sequence of variations from a colour-coded score.

"Rite is an alchemical process reflecting decay and regeneration in the solar realm: metaphors and abstractions for manipulated plastics burning in the gate." (BE)

Dorothy's l'amour fou evoked in evanescent fragments unexpectedly encountered. The missing link between Rose Hobart and Maria Montez via Rrose Selavy's bride stripped bare by the song of the sarong.

“eau de cinema is an attempt to contain the uncontainable, to bottle the essence of poetic thought and accident, as a perfume of the creative act. It is also memory driven by an irrepressible mourning, the way scent is linked to both loss and longing. Like cinema, it is both material and immaterial, an apparatus and the experience of light and time. It is disappearance and the obsolescence, of not only technology and culture, but also hybrids and beautiful mutations coming alive. “ — BE

Bradley Eros companion piece to X-Ray Eros.

“X-ray Eros” is a short video featuring actual medical scans and imagery of the artist’s internal body taken in connection with a life-threatening stroke within the past year, involving (successful) brain surgery, and a very recent hernia surgery.

Originally super-8mm in a 16mm projector, found footage hand manipulated in the gate, the work derived from 'intentional accidents' developed from a Robert Beck Memorial Cinema program called "Mistakes (everything you can do wrong)." It uses a short strip of super-8 footage of 1970s bondage porn pulled through the projector gate and burned frame-by-frame, in a live performance.

Totems of destruction and desire. An operation on the combustible urges in a junk black mass. A swiftly-sliced nightmare of history and erotic autobiography.