Robert Fenz

Documentation of a book project by artist Arturo Herrera.

The night of Marseille seen in a different way

Filmmaker Robert Fenz returned to the locations of three classic films made by the pioneering American ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner. Dead Birds (1964) was filmed in West Papua, Rivers of Sand (1974) in Ethiopia and Forest of Bliss (1986) in Varanasi, India. Correspondence is an elegy for a kind of imagemaking that is in the process of disappearing.

The film came about when Robert Fenz was working on the last film by Chantal Akerman: From the Other Side, an experimental documentary about the border between the United States and Mexico. In her film, Akerman provides a picture of life on both sides of the border, emphasising the fact that it is not possible for the viewer to decide on the basis of the picture which country was being talked about. Fenz takes the same element of a physical border separating two worlds to a more abstract level, in which the sharp line adopts a series of different forms.

The film is the result of a close bond between music and cinema testifying the many relationships between the two. It is visualized through American iconographic imagery and graphics combined with the great evocative power of ad libbing by the trumpet player Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith.

from: "Jazz on the Screen" by David Meeker

Documentation of a book project by artist Arturo Herrera.

The night of Marseille seen in a different way

Filmmaker Robert Fenz returned to the locations of three classic films made by the pioneering American ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner. Dead Birds (1964) was filmed in West Papua, Rivers of Sand (1974) in Ethiopia and Forest of Bliss (1986) in Varanasi, India. Correspondence is an elegy for a kind of imagemaking that is in the process of disappearing.

The film came about when Robert Fenz was working on the last film by Chantal Akerman: From the Other Side, an experimental documentary about the border between the United States and Mexico. In her film, Akerman provides a picture of life on both sides of the border, emphasising the fact that it is not possible for the viewer to decide on the basis of the picture which country was being talked about. Fenz takes the same element of a physical border separating two worlds to a more abstract level, in which the sharp line adopts a series of different forms.

The film is the result of a close bond between music and cinema testifying the many relationships between the two. It is visualized through American iconographic imagery and graphics combined with the great evocative power of ad libbing by the trumpet player Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith.

The film is the result of a close bond between music and cinema testifying the many relationships between the two. It is visualized through American iconographic imagery and graphics combined with the great evocative power of ad libbing by the trumpet player Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith.

from: "Jazz on the Screen" by David Meeker

Structured as an improvisational homage to Cuba's endurance and captures the serene rhythm of Havana's contemporary street life

Filmed in Rochina, Latin America’s largest shantytown.

Shots of streets and subways in New York, Mexico, and San Cristobal de las Casas are intertwined with images of revolutionary figures of the past.

Captures the discipline of a boxer preparing for a fight.

Borders (and all the politics attending the drawing of borders) exist to keep some people in (citizenship) and others out. This film is an attempt to capture the presence of people otherwise denied the political right to be at home in some place that is their home, where they have their roots, where they have their being.

An evocative portrait of New York jazz artist Marion Brown.