Steve Reinke

"Lonely Boy" condenses and combines two films: Wolf Koenig's classic NFB documentary on Paul Anka (also titled Lonely Boy) and a classic gay porn loop from the late 70's The Summer of Kip Noll.

I once had a lover who would occasionally transform into a dog — and not even a purebred. Instead, some patchwork mutt of scrappy fur — but not without charm, not without beauty. It happened when I rubbed his prostate a certain way, and then I'd be trapped, I wouldn't be able to pull out. So I'd have to finish fucking him and after a few minutes I'd be released from his butt. Then I'd be really tired, I'd want to take a nap, but he'd want to play so I'd give him a biscuit and take him out for a walk. We'd go to the park and roll down green hills. I'd rub his belly and everyone who passed would rub his belly. They'd say, "Oh what a nice looking dog you have, what a charming mutt."

The artist is inspired the day after seeing Nathaniel Dorsky's "Arboretum Cycle" to make a video engaging with the natural, botanical world. Thinking, as usual, of the difference between poetry and philosophy.

A found footage montage of young men who elicit, in various ways, an empathic response from the viewer that also carries a strongly libidinal charge. Philosopher Levinas speaks about the face, and what it requires of us.

In a peculiar combination of eroticism and design asthetics, an attractive young man pleasures himself in his living room while a disembodied voice describes the decor.

In Sundown, the acclaimed Canadian video artist Steve Reinke reflects on mortality and overlapping timescales by way of Nietzsche, Gordon Lightfoot, and other markers of moments in a life, whether retrospective exhibitions or new tattoos.

"Lonely Boy" condenses and combines two films: Wolf Koenig's classic NFB documentary on Paul Anka (also titled Lonely Boy) and a classic gay porn loop from the late 70's The Summer of Kip Noll.

I once had a lover who would occasionally transform into a dog — and not even a purebred. Instead, some patchwork mutt of scrappy fur — but not without charm, not without beauty. It happened when I rubbed his prostate a certain way, and then I'd be trapped, I wouldn't be able to pull out. So I'd have to finish fucking him and after a few minutes I'd be released from his butt. Then I'd be really tired, I'd want to take a nap, but he'd want to play so I'd give him a biscuit and take him out for a walk. We'd go to the park and roll down green hills. I'd rub his belly and everyone who passed would rub his belly. They'd say, "Oh what a nice looking dog you have, what a charming mutt."

The artist is inspired the day after seeing Nathaniel Dorsky's "Arboretum Cycle" to make a video engaging with the natural, botanical world. Thinking, as usual, of the difference between poetry and philosophy.

A found footage montage of young men who elicit, in various ways, an empathic response from the viewer that also carries a strongly libidinal charge. Philosopher Levinas speaks about the face, and what it requires of us.

In a peculiar combination of eroticism and design asthetics, an attractive young man pleasures himself in his living room while a disembodied voice describes the decor.

In Sundown, the acclaimed Canadian video artist Steve Reinke reflects on mortality and overlapping timescales by way of Nietzsche, Gordon Lightfoot, and other markers of moments in a life, whether retrospective exhibitions or new tattoos.

Animals debate the sticky subject of body dysmorphia and the merits of reconstructive surgery in this short animation. "Jessie Mott wrote the script for this, recorded the voices and made the drawings. I constructed the soundtrack and animated her drawings." --Steve Reinke

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. This volume includes videos 1-14: Excuse of the Real, Family Tree, Watermelon Box, Family Planning, Eleven Dreams, Emergence of Democratic Memory, Speculative Anthropology, Why I Stopped Going to Foreign Films, I Am Not Like You, Barely Human, ROOM, Michael & Lacan, Joke (Version One), and Joke (Version Two).

Canadian Steve Reinke takes brief images from gay porn and turns them into something lyrical and resonant.

A desktop video in five parts that modestly propose ways of existing with or against history and politics.

Reinke’s excess of images, language, connections and suggestions creates a cinematic essay on life’s questions. Philosophy, archiving, disease cells, nocturnal animals and art are just a few of the ingredients of his work, which is replete with humour and self-deprecation.

The starting point was a video tape of projection footage made by the artist Gretchen Bender, who turned clinical images of infections, deformities, and morbid injuries into an abject flicker film. Reinke and Richards expanded Bender’s medical gaze into a broader perspective, combining new sequences and animations, interweaving them to produce a film with a rich soundtrack of audio and spoken word.

Steve Reinke ostensibly turns to the subjects of friendship and intimacy in A Boy Needs A Friend, in particular investigating the notion of queer Nietzschean friendship. Using his signature dry voice-over monologue to tie together an eclectic array of disparate images, ranging from found footage collages to digital animation and cell phone video, Reinke sets forth theories about the identity of Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, needlepoint doodles, the upsides of owning both U.S and Canadian citizenship, and the ability of corpses to have sex.

Steve Reinke ironically adopts the position of a mainstream documentary filmmaker making a film tracing the slow death of a person with AIDS. The first of Reinke's The Hundred Videos project.

"We know the air is filled with vibrations we can't hear. We can't consider environment as an object. We know that it's a process While in the case of the astray, we are indeed dealing with an object. It would be extremely interesting to place it in a little anechoic chamber and listen to it through a suitable sound system. Object would become process; we would discover, thanks to a procedure borrowed from science, the meaning of nature through the music of objects." John Cage

"Atheists Need Theology, Too, the first of seven videos, begins with a poem by Emily Dickinson, To fill a Gap / Insert the Thing that caused it — . All of Human Events, then, could be read as a gloss on the poem. Or, one could choose — or be compelled by their dwindling subconsciouses and roiling microbiomes to choose — any other link in this chain of associations and use that as the starting point." — Steve Reinke

A film tribute, portrait and investigation of the set designer, photographer and actor Albrecht Becker. Staying with Becker’s self-portraits, artists Steve Reinke and James Richards pair public and private images in ways that challenge and re-signify one another.

The 35th video in Steve Reinke's "The Hundred Videos" project.

A five-minute video collaboration between Dani Leventhal and Steve Reinke.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. This volume includes videos 15-30: Walking the Dog, After Baudelaire, Language of Rats, Language of Flowers, Introduction to the Logo, Deaf, Squeezing Sorrow from an Ashtray, In the Realm of Perpetual Embarrassment, 80 Prominent Dermatologists, Visuals Elf, Pus Girl, Wish, Disturbed Sleep, Testimonials, Little Faggot, and Long Train Ride.

The artist decides to found his own art school and begins by assembling materials for the library. Finding too many words are available, he glues together the unnecessary pages of books.

The artist decides to found his own art school and begins by assembling materials for the library. Finding too many words are available, he glues together the unnecessary pages of books.

In Reinke’s latest provocation, the words of author Hervé Guibert are made flesh through a montage of “human events” that work to collapse the boundaries between the private and public, the perverse and the prosaic.

A group of forest creatures witnesses a diabolical birth that causes unrest, while animals discuss their disintegrating bodies and psyches as they undergo different transformations. A follow-up to Reinke/Mott's previous collaboration, Everyone (2009).

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. This volume includes videos 31-54: Lonely Boy, I Love You Too, Charming Mutt, Ice Cream, Instructions for Recovering Forgotten Childhood Memories, Request, Jason, Experiment, Editorial, Understanding Heterosexuality, Pioneer, My Personal Virus, Vision (With Birds), Self Help, My Erotic Double, Sleep, Dream Work, Artifact, Monologue (with Provocation), Child, Windy Morning in April, Love Letter to Doug, Three Plays, and Screen Saver.

A videotape to placate the 20th century artist Antonin Artaud, who was not very calm. Certainly transgression and nervous energies/violent impulses once went hand-in-hand, but perhaps today requires a calmer, more considered approach.

A short film that features a cast of animal characters -- each of a different, though often indeterminate, species -- who struggle with impending astrological despair and engage in absurdist dialogs, confessing various melancholic desires and transgressive secrets in poetic cartoon abjection.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. This volume contains videos 55-78: Symposium, Jin's Dream, Ghost Production, Minnesota Inventory, Re-enactment of a Performance, Three Examples, Sparky, Black Heart, Box, The End of My Death, Muriel, Attempt to sing, Assplay, Love Among Corpses, Harvey K., Dr. Asselbergs, Corey, My Fear, Dumbo Climax, Apology, How to Build an Igloo, Microscope, Amoeba, and Treehouse.

Continues the journey from the final sequence of Ask the Insects. We turn away from the graveyard, enter the schoolyard, approach the old crippled tree spinning and sit under it to draw a little cartoon for the New Yorker, while — through some sort of temporal displacement — New Year’s resolutions are being made.

Two sections. In the first, the notorious internet video Shake the Bear, in which a woman shoots and kills a bear and has sex on the body, is described and commented scene by scene. In the second section, archival footage of Grey Owl interacting with beavers is discussed.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. This volume contains videos 79-100: The Boxers, Talk Show, The Hand, I have already, Little Monkeys, Stenor, New York Loves Me, Seventeen Descriptions, Children's Video Collective, Three Dreams, 24 Jokes, Video for Intellectuals, Falling, Notes on the Uncanny, Manifestations/Jouissance, Ants and Bees, Ghosts, Camouflage, Underwear, Candle, Story, and Why I've Decided to Become a Painter.

There is no void. The world is full.

In this wry confessional video, Steve Reinke appears—shirtless and lavishly tattooed—in a basement, playing archival clips and delivering arch disquisitions on his filmmaking and the ways in which images represent his engagement with the world. Mortality, desire, empathy, and horror all feature as subjects of Reinke’s idiosyncratic erudition, which mutates from sincerity to irony to provocation.

The artist spends the afternoon in his tiny apartment listening to music he dislikes and ruminating on what it means to be an artist. All the edits are in-camera and the monologues and songs are largely improvised.

You realize, once again, that your life is structured around horrible, false fantasies. That what you most deeply believe are things that can't be reasonable, good, or productive. (They can be beautiful, though the beauty is insipid.) And so you construct a film essay. (https://www.emaf.de/en/index/ Access: 27.04.2026)

"In the first shot of Reinke’s new feature length video, we see the desert landscape of the American Southwest from a car window. Though shaky and handheld, it is an immediately recognizable and iconic image: the great vistas of Hollywood westerns, of American westward expansion, of monumental modernist land art from the late 20th century. On the soundtrack, Reinke’s unmistakable voice apologizes for beginning the film with a shot of a landscape from a moving car, but what is he to do? The camera is already rolling. This moment encapsulates much of what transpires in the scenes that follow: presenting us with an image, dismissing that image and wryly suggesting he is doing nothing here, that the footage is just unreeling. Reinke’s collection and organization of images and sounds seem casual at first, but ultimately reveal themselves to be heavily mediated and orchestrated."