Brian L. Frye

A metropolis awash in electrical overdrive crashes in the heat of summer and sends a Bronxite into the clutches of a waterworld further north. It is there that we witness the cooling fogs and diving mammals of maritime yore and sail free in winds of a nautical nature. A nature that fills the summer sky with twinkling tidbits and the tummy with protein rich denizens of Neptune’s soup. A tour of the towering turrets of tomorrow land and the spatial splendor of yesterday’s yearnings captured on both chemical and electrical media.

Never before seen Super 8 home movies filmed by Richard Nixon's closest aides - and convicted Watergate conspirators - offer a surprising and intimate new look into his Presidency.

The film consists of two rolls of film I shot in 1998 or 1999 while living in a Bushwick loft. I was interested in the perfect simplicity of a movie camera and what happens when a single part is disabled. So I found simple old cameras and deliberately broke one part, to see what happened. In the first reel, I removed the claw. In the second, I removed the shutter. As I recall, I also have a scheme of swinging the camera back and forth and up and down and various f-stop settings. Very Ernie Gehr. Playing, drinking beer & shooting film. No editing to speak of.

I shot this roll of film at a party Bard College threw when it awarded Stan Brakhage an honorary degree. A few days after he died, I dug it out and watched it again. I had meant to make Brakhage a gift of the roll, but instead it became a farewell.

A home-processed, handmade work, revises Charlie Chaplin’s screen test of his adolescent soon-to-be spouse (Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill), broken up by irregular interruptions of black emulsion. Frye creates a continuously shifting exchange of glances between her image and the audience: «A surpassingly intense meditation on viewing and being viewed».

"Frye's Meeting With Khrushchev is not an easy film to like, but repeated viewings reveal a work of immense weight, a moving combination of intense nostalgia and thoughtful meditation on the impossibility of ever completely understanding history [...] The longest 25 minutes of my life." -Edward Smith

On December 12, 1863, General Ambrose Burnside's Army of the Potomac engaged General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia... Close combat through the streets of Fredericksburg and multiple assaults on the Confederate army entrenched in the heights behind the town resulted in heavy Federal casualties, which forced an eventual withdrawal. In November, 2001, I attended a small and relatively informal reenactment of the battle of Fredericksburg. About a hundred men and women did their best to illustrate the actions of the thousands of young men who offered their lives a century earlier. An air of absurd theater suffused the entire event, which provided the ground for its peculiar truth. Everyone played their part exceedingly honestly and well, and left something on the film I was myself surprised to find there.

This short documentary suggests a direct connection between two of Nixon’s greatest triumphs as president: his landmark 1969 "Silent Majority" speech (in which he argued that street protesters did not represent the views of most Americans, despite their increasing visibility) and his historic landslide re-election in 1972 (in which George S. McGovern won only one state and the District of Columbia, losing even his home state of South Dakota).

An essay toward documenting the ineffable...One might consider it a dialogue between a man of Faith and one who has merely tasted of the absurd, yet struggles to ingest it.

Man is full of sin and nature, and all he does don't bear looking at, and a heap of what he says is a shame and a mawkery. But cant no witness hurt him. Some day something might beat him, but it wont be Satan." – William Faulkner in "A Fable". The annual Civil War re-enactment at Gettysburg is one of the largest and best attended in the country. Why Gettysburg? Partly because – rightly or not – we take it as the moment at which the outcome of the struggle for America was most in doubt. But truly because the words Lincoln spoke there made of it that moment, framing the struggle in its starkest terms. And so these people who believe in America come to perform its redemption. It is a passion-play, really, a dramatic evocation of the cataclysm in which a young nation expiated its sins in blood, and was reborn. (Silent, accompanied by Civil War songs.)

A 16 mm. film by Brian L. Frye.

".. and yet of that living breathing throng, not one will be encased in a material frame. A company of ghosts, playing to spectral music. So may the luminous larvae of the Elysian fields have rehearsed ...

A film by Brian L. Frye

Brakhage has called her the muse, perhaps because she appears only to those who hold a strip of film in their own hands. But here she appears – if only for a moment – to all those who care to look for her. "Let us speak plainly: The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful; indeed, nothing but the marvelous is beautiful." – Andre Breton

TV Assassin was filmed in 2000. The images are Adolf Eichmann, at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. I used a Cine-Kodak Eight Model 60 with the shutter and claw removed, placed on a Cine-Kodak Titler, to rephotograph the images from a cheap, miniature television, creating a vertically smeared, pulsating image. Then I projected the regular 8mm film at 5 fps on a Bolex Paillard 18-5 and rephotographed it on Super-8. The process was intended to evoke the blurred quality of Gerhard Richter’s “October 18, 1977,” a cycle of photopaintings of the Red Army Faction, or Baader-Meinhof Gang.

In 1997, while attending the San Francisco Art Institute, I made a 1 hour video of myself reading from John-Paul Sartre's book Nausea while drinking an entire fifth of Jack Daniels. My prediction came true, in spades. -Brian L. Frye

Robert Beck was an American soldier from Chicago, who served in the First World War. Struck deaf and dumb by shellshock, Beck was sent to an English sanitarium to convalesce. At some point, the patients attended a movie. Beck began to laugh, and was suddenly cured of his affliction. He became the patron saint of New York's Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, dedicated to films which touch the marvelous. On September 26, 2000, Stuart Sherman, the great performance artist and filmmaker, presented several of his films, interspersed with "perfilmances," in which he re-enacted the passion of Robert Beck. This film is a record of that "spectacle," shot by Lee Ellickson. Stuart Sherman died on September 14, 2001 in San Francisco. This may have been his last New York performance.

A short sound work by Brian Frye

I made this film at the San Francisco Art Institute. I shot the entire film by myself in one day on an Arriflex. It was filmed on Kodak RAR gun camera film, which I hand-processed as a negative and sent out for a workprint. I edited the workprint, which became the final version of the film. -Brian L. Frye

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, Moira Tierney asked for films about snakes. This is as close as I came. -Brian L. Frye

A film by Brian L. Frye

A short work by Brian Frye

A short work by Brian Frye

Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Show was obviously compiled from a lot more material, which I found over at least a year and a half of hunting about. I spend a good deal of my free time hunting out films. It’s not just any sort of material. I wanted to find films that weren’t totally naïve. None of this stuff is home movies, though some of it almost is. And it’s not professional either. Nor is it newsreel quality. It’s a sort of studied, non-professional filmmaking. It’s by different people, obviously, but they all have a similar position in relation to the camera. To me there’s a sort of beautiful openness to that kind of filmmaking.

In 2007, the United States Supreme Court decided Scott v. Harris, which held that where “the record blatantly contradicts the plaintiff’s version of events so that no reasonable jury could believe it, a court should not adopt that version of the facts for purposes of ruling on a summary judgment motion.” (BF)