Coleen Fitzgibbon

Exploring the pre-fame years of the celebrated American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and how New York City, its people, and tectonically shifting arts culture of the late 1970s and '80s shaped his vision.

Super 8mm transfer to digital, color, sound, 5:07 minutes. Still images of things passing; a diary between city and country. Marjorie Keller and Coleen Fitzgibbon drive to Carolee Schneemann’s to feed Kitsch.

A Nietzschian parable on the fate of innocence, THE TRAP DOOR follows the mishaps of Jeremy (John Ahearn) as he is fired by his boss (Jenny Holzer), gets laughed out of court by Judge Gary Indiana, loses his girlfriend to sleazy Richard Prince, is hustled by prospective employer (Bill Rice) and mauled by predatory bird-women. Finally, he seeks the help of a shrink (the legendary Jack Smith) who turns out to be the most demented of all.

Micro text film of the February 6, 1976 Daily News, New York City issue cover to cover

16mm and digital, b/w & color, sound, 9:51 minutes. Micro text film of the June 1976 issue of German magazine Der Spiegel with rock music.

By Coleen Fitzgibbon and Cara Perlman; Hi8 to digital, sound, looped every 3 min.

16mm transfer to digital, b/w, sound, 8:22 minutes. Taking it public: micro text film of records (warrants, debts, bank checks, etc.)(2011/1976)

A separated couple try to keep in touch through postcards of typically "American" sights: motels, monuments, parks; but their postcards cross in the mail. Misunderstandings arise; passion subsides; romance fades... Yet the postcards keep on coming.

Digital, color, sound, 3 minutes.

Micro text film of selections from the English dictionary (contemplation: the yellow notebook and blade-less knife handle were missing when the blue car impacted the red car).

"In one of her more minimalist films, the viewer is presented with nothing but a blank monochromatic frame slowly shifting through various intensities of color saturation, flickering / shuttering repeatedly from light-to-dark (and back again) for a duration of 45 minutes. The only hint of information we have to navigate through this complex and difficult film is at the head and tail of the film, in the rolling text "credits" introduced as positive at the head of the film and negative at the end. Technical information such as film stock, film speed, film length, camera lens, shutter, projector, and a host of other data appear on the screen like hieroglyphs of some secret language to be decoded." -Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder

16mm transferred to digital, first shown in De Appel, Amsterdam and Corps de Garde, Gronigen in the Netherlands in 1977, also shown 1979 Colab TV's Potato Wolf and at the Times Square Show, 1980, organized by Collaborative Projects. Car crashes, hurricanes, pygmies, X & Y, the Third Person, lion hunting. Experimental film video and avant garde art and performances created by X&Y.

Micro text film of the Nov. 1974 issue of U.S. magazine Time cover to cover.

The destruction of cinematic imagery and sound, which allows for the release of subliminal thought.

Super 8mm transfer to digital, color, sound, 5:07 minutes. Still images of things passing; a diary between city and country. Marjorie Keller and Coleen Fitzgibbon drive to Carolee Schneemann’s to feed Kitsch.

16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes. The filmmaker performs her solitary act of cleaning. A static camera tightly frames the studio sink, dirty with paint and other residue while the artist engages in a concerted ritual of scrubbing and scraping … a treatise on the over-cleanliness of certain reductivist gestures in history of art making. (1975)

Lower East Side (LES) (2011/1976) Super 8mm transfer to digital, color, sound, 16:31 minutes. Documentary style critique of the Island of Manhattma’s fiscal state of affairs and the John Dough Cult. Written and directed by C. Fitzgibbon. Narrated by Robin Winters. Cast: Tom Sigal, Diego Cortez and Robin Winters.

Expanding a system; enhanced excerpt from "Internal System" with optical sound track and video raster in frame. 1974-2010

Original hi-8 video to digital, color & b/w, sound, 16 minutes. Persons unknown wait on a street in a large city for something to come their way. The greeting is “are you anywhere?” They float past the infinite set of stairs going nowhere during one day out of several days from 1985 to 1995. Land of Nod is an experimental short documentary shot NTSE in the late eighties and transferred to digital. Nod captures a day of black marketeers in the street waiting for action.

A collage of recurring speech fragments, which provide a patchy voice-over "commentary" which skids across a sampling of found film.

Documents performances of DNA, James Chance and the Contortions, and Boris Policeband in NYC at a benefit concert for X Motion Picture Magazine and artists’ group Collaborative Projects Inc. It was shot in black and white super 8 and edited on video. It was filmed in 1978 but not completed until 2009.