Mark Street

A Year is a dynamic and conflicted middle aged diary film featuring Street's anxious, deadpan onscreen commentary.

A skewed take on film detritus: 35mm movie trailers rescued from the trash and affected by hand and digitally, holding up a funhouse mirror to the industry of expectations.

Images shot through architectural glass on Super 8 film in the dead of night in NYC. The title refers to one of the glass samples I used to frame up images of Times Square and other nightspots in NYC. The city peeks its head in as an off screen character, but the glass bends and twists it in its own warped and wonderful way. Music by Erik Friedlander.

Hand painting and bleaching a 35mm Dutch/French thriller reveals another layer of psychological complexity.

WINTERWHEAT was made by bleaching, scratching and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about the farming cycle. I wanted to manipulate the found footage to create lulling, hypnotic visuals while also suggesting an apocalyptic narrative. Though the images can be viewed purely for their graphic idiosyncrasy, a quiet but persistent theme of destruction winds its way through the film.

An homage and reimagining of Norman McLaren’s 1971 film.

A Year is a dynamic and conflicted middle aged diary film featuring Street's anxious, deadpan onscreen commentary.

A skewed take on film detritus: 35mm movie trailers rescued from the trash and affected by hand and digitally, holding up a funhouse mirror to the industry of expectations.

Images shot through architectural glass on Super 8 film in the dead of night in NYC. The title refers to one of the glass samples I used to frame up images of Times Square and other nightspots in NYC. The city peeks its head in as an off screen character, but the glass bends and twists it in its own warped and wonderful way. Music by Erik Friedlander.

Hand painting and bleaching a 35mm Dutch/French thriller reveals another layer of psychological complexity.

WINTERWHEAT was made by bleaching, scratching and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about the farming cycle. I wanted to manipulate the found footage to create lulling, hypnotic visuals while also suggesting an apocalyptic narrative. Though the images can be viewed purely for their graphic idiosyncrasy, a quiet but persistent theme of destruction winds its way through the film.

An homage and reimagining of Norman McLaren’s 1971 film.

A wabi sabi summer in Japan: Observing that which is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete produces a series of visual haiku in teeming street life; Bodies in emotion, and leafprints in the mud.

A smattering of repeated performances culled from old porno films and hand painted. A man bends over a body, but what we really notice is the texture of the wall behind him. A woman stares back at the viewer with annoyance. On the soundtrack Anais Nin declares: “but while I’m doing this I feel I’m not living.”

Using hand-manipulated images, ECHO ANTHEM attempts to uncover the underbelly of jingoism in 1991 America, and show its destructive conclusion. In a perverse twist, the film invites the viewer to be at once soothed and repulsed by the seething display of the flag and what it leads to. The film establishes a tension between visual beauty and narrative and thematic concerns. ECHO ANTHEM is made up of three sections, each suggesting the same sequence of events. The viewer is challenged to fluctuate between states - from being engulfed by the visuals to being concerned about the narrative particulars and thematic possibilities.

4 minute hand painted 35mm film digitally collaged to create an abstract nest. -MS

Using hundreds of transparent photographic stills animated on a lightbox and abstract Super 8 footage, the film meditates on the illusory nature of the passage of time.

Using hundreds of transparent photographic stills animated on a lightbox and abstract Super 8 footage, the film meditates on the illusory nature of the passage of time.

Triptych is a spirited conversation with three screens. Sometimes the interaction seems downright civil, at other times the mood is more contentious. The screens pause for each other’s outbursts, play off one another’s riffs, or else prattle on in their own fashion, oblivious.

Through interviews and observational footage Work Songs explores how various workers find meaning in their jobs. The gig economy, automatisation and the decreasing power of unions are explored in planned and spontaneous interviews, leavened by finely observed evocations of work places.

An investigation of issues surrounding Scottish independence, nationalism and Brexit. Voices float in and out, agreeing and disagreeing as images shot on the street in Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness create the visual world of the film.

An observational documentary made in Peru’s capital. The film begins with the legions of street sweepers who attack the sidewalks with a balletic intensity, and moves on to consider other urban vignettes in this powerful, dense city. The protagonists of the film quixotically and optimistically chip away at the dirt of this locale through a series of repeated gestures.

"Happy? is an exploration of how the passage of time affects people. In the eight months preceding January 1, 2000, I shot digital video in New York City, approaching passersby on the street and asking them direct questions about how they felt about the passage of time. Using the millennium as a starting point (“Are you ready for the millennium?”), a way of opening up discussion with strangers, my interviews took on a rollicking, discursive quality. This project is inspired by Chronicle of a Summer (1961) by Jean Rouch and The Pretty Month of May (1963) by Chris Marker. Both these films use random street interviews to capture the spirit of a time and place. Happy? starts from a similar place—simple questions that some dismiss but others celebrate in varied and complicated ways. The result is a hybrid of documentary and anthropological film, part time-capsule and part taped performance piece."

A walk through Berlin; eyes open, camera ready. Countless vignettes unfold around me, and I imagine storylines for each set piece.

Hasta Nunca follows MARIO LIGHETTI, an aging hipster DJ who produces an underground radio show in Montevideo, Uruguay. He invites listeners to share their intimate thoughts with him and a live radio audience, in real time. Mario re-negotiates his public and private personas during the course of the film and enters into an extra marital affair with JULIA, a divorcee searching for a new artistic spark.

Fragments and minor moments coalesce and argue in this paean to overlooked and forgotten sketches. Recorded over five years in New York City, Berlin, Barcelona, Athens, New Orleans, Rome, Paris, Havana, Madrid, Budapest and Marseille. A shadow dances, a kite dives into the ground, a smoker exhales in a public market: this is a song about looking when you're not at all sure what you’re looking for. And a testament to the ethos of always carrying a camera even when you don’t know why.

Images shot on walks in the forest with an old, twisted 35mm camera. The film trudged through the camera, on a last mission. I buried the film in the front yard. Let the dirt on the film kiss the dirt in the ground. Maryland humidity wore it down to its wisps. Much later, sound recorded in Brooklyn. Teenage skateboarders smoking cigarettes and jumping off the steps at my local subway entrance. A Russian festival in the park, much singing and speechmaking, all incomprehensible to me. The schism between the country and city, so clear at last.

In this short version of what was once an hour long live performance, three altered versions of the same film (made in 1974, 1998 and 2009) are projected side by side. Sound will be mixed from each of the three along with music by Marco Testoni. Narrative slippages, abstract fugues and time-travel counterpoints collide and mingle in this fractious and riotous remake of a remake of a remake of a book adaptation. NYC manages to both evolve and stay the same over the course of 35 years.

LILTING TOWARDS CHAOS is a chronicle of a three-year period of my life. The film attempts to capture the disgust one can feel at being solipsistic and self-involved, but also hints at the good that can come out of such introspection. The film delves into my thoughts about my particular emotional situation, but also shows my attempts to deal with the world outside, if only on a visual level. LILTING TOWARDS CHAOS invites the viewer to examine what I have chosen to show him/her about my life at that time, and determine which musings are honest and useful, and which are circuitous and self-defeating.

An outsider's meditation of the city of Buenos Aires, created during an extended visit. From high above and down in the street, the filmmaker considers Argentina's obsession with psychoanalysis, European culture and Eva Peron.

A stab at depicting fatherhood: fleeting images burst onto the screen only to recede from view just as quickly, suggesting transition and decay. Tendrilsof images cluster together and then dissipate. A snowy walk, kids enthuse and infuse my own daily rhythms, affording great joy but also making it clear that all things change all the time.

An homage to two ramshackle cities, made up of footage shot while wandering. I meander city streets with a camera, looking to be haunted by unfamiliar vistas. I find solace in the forgotten landscapes, odd voices on a ham radio, shimmering water in a desolate harbor. Later I attack the film, moving it this way and that, trying to squeeze it against its will, wrest strangeness from the everyday.

Mark Street’s portrait of the late-night bustle of the historic Fulton Fish Market, filmed two years before its closing in 2005, shows a world not usually considered when people speak of “New York nightlife.” The textures of the gutted fish and trays of ice under the fluorescent light are complemented by Street’s hand-painted celluloid abstractions throughout the film. (Screened 2/17/22 at MoMA as part of Millennium Film Workshop: “Nighttime” NYC event).

A Super 8 portrait of New York City.

An unflinching look at street vendors who make their living selling toy lights to the parents of children attending theatrical plays in Buenos Aires.

A day like any other: Brooklyn beckons so they dart out into it. Daughter and father traipse from playground to subway and back home again. The 18-month-old cackles and the 32-year-old tries his best to keep up. They stumble upon a fruit vendor, a street preacher and a wall of city sound. Negative and positive hand-manipulated images collide and shimmer as they walk and talk their way through spring in the city. Maya babbles but her father is mostly silent: he can’t believe that he’ll never meander quite this way again.

The X Y Chromosome Project is the creation of artists Lynne Sachs and Mark Street. In addition to our two daughters, we make films and performances that use the split screen to cleave the primordial and the mediated. After returning from an inspiring week long artist retreat at the Experimental Television Center, Lynne asked Mark to collaborate with her on the creation of a piece in which they would each ruminate on the other's visual, reacting in a visceral way to what the other had hurled on the screen. Lynne would edit; Mark would edit. Back and forth and always forward. No regrets or over-thinking. In this way, the diptych structure is sometime's a boxing match and other times a pas de deux. Newsreel footage of Ronald Reagan's assassination attempt is brushed up against hand painted film, domestic spaces, and Christmas movie trailers. Together, we move from surface to depth and back again without even feeling the bends.

Shot at night in Paris through various magnifiers, this most iconic city becomes unfamiliar, and then somewhat familiar again.

Images culled from a lot of glass slides bought at a roadside antique shop, animated using an antiquated magnifier/projector and a laser flashlight.

An episodic journey across Belfast, chronicling a city reeling from sectarian violence, and doing it in a distinctly cinematic manner: through the lens of a high grain Super 8 camera.

A walk after 9/11 allows the filmmaker's children to reflect on what just happened.

A pandemic diary filmed mostly in NYC, incorporating Super 8 and digital video recorded with Street's unique experimental eye. "From the uncertain first months when every foray felt perilous to various re openings, outings are recorded and reflections shared. Stills punctuate abstract and documentary footage, offering a collage of mediums in the face of the unknowable. "Sorties" is a military term-- a mission launched from a defensive position. That's sort of what a walk felt like in March 2020 in NYC. And then of course things changed; cases went up and down, the science evolved, fear waxed and waned. Of course, the pandemic continues; but I had to limit myself in making the film; March 2020-August 2021."

"I buried a 35 mm trailer for the Mike Leigh film in my garden and came upon it several years later. The vagaries of nature (snow, rain, ice, sun) yielded a scrupulous document of the passing of time. Soundtrack made up of ambient musique concrete and snippets of music sung by women."

Mark Street collaged and mixed hand-processed 16mm film, stills, found footage, and digital video to create this shimmering document of physical work in New York City’s Brooklyn Navy Yard.

"It's 5 AM. I can't sleep. I have to do something, don't I? Maybe shooting images is the answer."

Tearing away at the emulsion, searching for a soundtrack amidst everyday objects.