Bill Brand

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life of artists in Lower Manhattan and at the same time dramatizes questions about the nature of filmic representation. Split decision is a boxing term used when the judges divide their votes in finding a winner. In this case the fight is between the two heroes of the film who are seen intermittently in a bar, negotiating a pick-up, and at home, breaking up in a domestic quarrel. The fight is also in the telling, between modes of conventional representation and modes of radical representation - between conventional continuity editing, and abstraction created through computer generated grids. The film features an appearance by Carolee Schneemann and digital imaging from before the era of personal computers.

This film has no literal subject, no frames, only slow continuously shifting colours, cycling around the perimeter of the spectrum. The changes are so slow as to be unseen, yet they alter our perception of colour. Part of a trilogy (Acts of Light), which develops a study of pure colour, based on the notion that film is essentially change and not motion.

Made at S.U.N.Y. at Binghamton as a class exercise, filmmaker Saul Levine performs with students who each try to mimic his previously recorded phrase and then try to imitate each other imitating the recording.

Sound Strip / Film Strip is Paul Sharits' first "Locational" work, made in collaboration with Bill Brand. The piece was commissioned for the 1972 opening exhibition of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston,Texas. “...Sound Strip / Film Strip consists of four film loops simultaneously projected sideways so that the four images abut one another horizontally. Sharits made each loop by filming colored surfaces, scratching the film, projecting it so that the sprocket holes showed on the screen; he then filmed that projection, scratched the result, and projects that as the final object. The resulting image is a continuous flicker of various color ranges with both actual and ‘virtual’ scratches and sprocket holes running horizontally (normally vertically) across the screen. Thus, Sharits is working with filmic abstraction which employs no image save for that inherent in the medium itself....”

This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life of artists in Lower Manhattan and at the same time dramatizes questions about the nature of filmic representation. Split decision is a boxing term used when the judges divide their votes in finding a winner. In this case the fight is between the two heroes of the film who are seen intermittently in a bar, negotiating a pick-up, and at home, breaking up in a domestic quarrel. The fight is also in the telling, between modes of conventional representation and modes of radical representation - between conventional continuity editing, and abstraction created through computer generated grids. The film features an appearance by Carolee Schneemann and digital imaging from before the era of personal computers.

People who are homeless reveal homelessness from their own experiences dispelling common misconceptions and prejudices. Told as a personal journey, the film gives a broad analysis of the causes and conditions of homelessness while it analyzes news, TV reports and historical images of poverty. This film presents new ways to look at homelessness, displacing the debate from questions of charity to ones of social justice.

People who are homeless reveal homelessness from their own experiences dispelling common misconceptions and prejudices. Told as a personal journey, the film gives a broad analysis of the causes and conditions of homelessness while it analyzes news, TV reports and historical images of poverty. This film presents new ways to look at homelessness, displacing the debate from questions of charity to ones of social justice.

This is an impressionistic portrayal of the 1982 folk festival at Tracy and Eloise Schwarz’s farm in Central Pennsylvania. The festival, dedicated that year to the legendary Elizabeth Cotton, includes Bluegrass, Old Timey, Cajun, Country, and Gospel music. In contrast to the easygoing atmosphere of the festival, the film is a frenetic swirl of elaborately collaged shapes derived from traditional Pennsylvania Dutch designs. While sometimes the music seems to animate the image, at others the image itself becomes visual music on its own, eliciting ephemeral and sometimes forlorn emotions. The film offers an unusual meeting of a folk tradition and the avant garde, implying a fundamental connection between the two.

A simple home movie of a cat is reprocessed through a 'Zip-a-tone' dot pattern making a complex of layers. In combination with freeze frames, positive and negative, and color motion, this work attempts to visually construct a system of overlays like those in Baroque musical composition.

A claymation and abstract object animation consisting of organic shapes and crocheted afghan squares synchronized to an original guitar duet by classmates Ray Goldstein and Nick Katzman. This is Bill Brand's first 16mm film completed in 1969 while a student at Antioch College.

Part of the SUITE series. Here, my body is explicitly a screen on which I project my father’s photographs of the family to articulate my position of difference within the family experience of illness and death. —Bill Brand

Consisting of a 300-foot-long painting made on reflective material, Masstransiscope is a public artwork visible from the subway tunnels of the Manhattan-bound B and Q lines. It is in a special enclosure with 228 narrow slits and fluorescent lights. To someone passing by, it looks like an animated movie.

Mountain landscapes, Manhattan cityscapes and images from magazine covers and television news are fragmented through optical printing with computer generated mattes. Intercut with a found documentary about family life in Malaysia, the film becomes an essay on reading. Watching the film is like an accelerated game of Concentration with glimpses of the image appearing inside swirling grids. The juxtaposition of the gridded sequences to the conventionally assembled Malaysian footage formulates an inquiry into the nature and meaning of the "document" in cinema.

In this film, circles of colored light (red, green, blue) pulsate and flicker as they move around the frame. Where they intersect, they display a variety of secondary colors. The term, circles of confusion belongs to the physics of the lenses. Here it has to do with the focus of light. Here it refers to the focus of mental and emotional energies as an irrational system for composing a film.

Still at Work, a self-portrait of the artist in his places of work: the studio in Lower Manhattan and Sarah Lawrence College, the school where he taught. The film animates a still photograph through a grid of random dots.

West Virginia industrial landscapes are collaged on an optical printer through a series of jagged shapes that transform the photographed scenes into a semi-abstract kinetic field. The technique developed by Brand in his earlier films, extends the already complex visual idiom by inlaying social, sexual, personal and political subject matter. Woven into the fabric of the film is the story of Fred Carter, a retired coal miner and black lung activist who was framed by the Federal Government in its effort to undercut the black lung movement and to stop his bid for president of the United Mine Workers Association. His story is told through fragments of documentary interviews and by a poet whose narrative forms a counter theme within the film. The film’s thematic content and formal visualizations sit in precarious balance.

Rampla Juniors Fútbol Club is a local team from el Cerro, Montevideo that has served as the heart of this Uruguayan working class neighborhood since 1914! Neither about the game nor the team, the film instead is a poetic evocation of the ritualized pleasure and dedication of the fans and the spectacular landscape of their time worn stadium.

4K video, silent, 8 1/2 minutes. (continuous loop)

Scattered in seemingly random order, on the screen, we see the light that traverses the kinetic fields of Bill Brand’s latest film August Garden. Made for a group exhibition at Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre (Paris), the film accompanies a series of flower ink paintings, carefully made by the artist. Before, in the first seconds, we’re able to see an animation of August Garden 07 (ink and watercolor on xuan paper, 9″ x13″, 2019), which titillates lively for brief moments.

Nearly continuous colour changes rotating around a spectrum, occurring at varying speeds of rotation and in varying values of light. Colours are seen on the scraped area starting nearly white and rotating very slowly. As the film progresses the colour values become darker and the speed of rotation increases until by the end of the film, the colour is nearly black and is rotating around the spectrum about once per second. On the right the opposite occurs, starting nearly black, rotating very slowly. The moment to moment combination of colours and values is a function of the varying rate of rotation.

New York State Primaries shows stenciled lettering that dissolve between the words, “red,” “blue,” and “green” but don’t create secondary colors. The film is a response to Saul Levine’s 1972 NOTE: CHICAGO REDS AND BLUES.

My Father's Leg is a self-portrait where I imagine the disease and pain that caused my father's death twenty-five years earlier. Having become older than he at his death, I found, in images of my own body complex feelings of love, guilt, grief and regret.

SICÓMORO is a meditation on travel and home revealed through ornate doors and architectural details in Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo, Uruguay. The text by Carolina Noblega takes the form of a letter to a friend.

Flickering flames viewed through air vents of a wood burning pot belly stove resemble the shutter of a film projector.

Chuck's Will's Widow is a eulogy for my father and mother whose ashes are spread in the Adirondack mountain woods where the film is shot. Visualized through a field of swirling shapes, the fragmented landscapes weave an emotional fabric containing inexplicable personifications and associations.