Filmography

I began making films when I was 17 and have continued to the present. This is a list of the films by date, and a chronicling of the events which brought them into being. To date I would guess I have made near to 40 films.

*Stills from the works will be added as links shortly.

EARLY WORK: 1997

The Natural History of My Bedroom

This was the first film I ever made, at 17, edited on two VCR decks and completely executed by my own will to explore technology. I collected interviews of around 15 kids, all close to me in age, in order to create some kind of survey about the nature of how each of them had decorated their bedrooms. I believe I saw in some magazine a photographer who had done a similar project, and thought it would be interesting to transfer the idea over into video. I was fascinated with the possibilities of the camera to be able to zoom in and reveal close-ups, while also being able to transport myself into various people's rooms and enter into some kind of intimate space by our interaction, by the process of being a filmmaker and an interviewer. People did everything from just staring at me blankly to reading Allen Ginsberg for the camera. There were highly differing levels of performance and participation. The interviews ranged from a few minutes to 20 depending upon the situation. I also interviewed myself with the same set of questions. I think I got the inspiration for the title from a fiction movie I saw on the Sundance Channel called "The Natural History of Parking Lots". The Sundance Channel was the first place I ever remember witnessing experimental, really more independent cinema. (Video, 55 minutes)

A minute-market for all seasons

This was an attempt at a small narrative film that would take place at the mini-mart near my high school, featuring characters who were all kids I had interviewed in the first film. Still working with no knowledge of technical or academic theoretical filmmaking, I would meet kids at the mini mart and film them doing things I had scripted as a part of the story. I remember wanting to play with time, being very influenced by the power of the ambiguity of temporality in 'Pulp Fiction'. 'Pulp Fiction' was one of many art-texts I experienced at the time, similar to the John Gardener novel 'Grendel', which I thought were all showing me something that was sincere, but representative of a whole world I had never seen represented before as such. Later on in High School my Art teachers and English teachers would begin to express this phenomenon in art-making to me as "Post Modernism". A series of paintings I did on refrigerator doors were classified as such by my Art Teacher. At this time (Junior and Senior year of High School) I had a great relationship with both Art Teachers Betsy Moore and Fred Thieme and they would allow me to have studio time in the class room after school when no one else was around. I cherished this time and began to make a practice of going to the room after school and on the weekends when no one was there to work on paintings and also think about them. I remember I used to listen to one radio station all the time when I would work, on the AM dial, that touted itself as playing "the best songs of all time". They were mostly really intense love songs from the 50's that had a sadness and a pain and a darkness that I liked working to. There was never anyone around when I would work so I could play it loud. I remember if someone accidentally intruded I did felt a little embarassed and exposed. (Video, 8 minutes)

Flat

A very weird, pseudo-fiction film, also interested in some kind of circular or non-fixed storytelling involving gaps. Featuring someone whom I had worked with and met on the first documentary, Matt Worden, as a central character. The story involved the paralell of Matt waiting at his house for something and then a parallel situation of a pregnant woman sitting in a bathtub recalling a memory. I remember specifically that the text of her memory was taken from a poem I had written "the baby in the shopping cart at walmart", which was quite a strange piece about this undying feeling, perhaps maternal instinct I had, to save people, children mostly, or boys my age whom I found beautiful or vulnerable. What is also peculiar is I remember beginning to watch international films a lot at this time and loving the effect of having to read the text at the bottom of the screen (in subtitles), because it felt like a layer was being added to the experience of watching. It felt like you got to experience a poem and a movie at the same time. So, I had the text of my poem read as a subtitle at the bottom of the screen, but it was peculiar because there was no corresponding language being translated. The film involves a very interesting experimental sequence at the end which is just a series of images I had collected on family vacations of small children playing, along with extra images that I had not used but shot for the 1st two films, mostly images of the face in close-up, where some kind of intimate space was I thought being transfered over. This sequence was also silent in nature, and I remember I liked the sense of weightlessness that was garnered by that effect of no sound at the end of the film, there was a sense I got of falling off of a cliff but also being elevated to the heavens. I had never seen a silent film at this time, but I loved the physical aspect I felt when watching it with no sound. I somehow figured out how to have sound for the rest of the piece but to unhook the sound cable for the last minute to accomodate my goals of silence for the end sequence. Also by this time I had sought out a class at the bigger public High school in my town which actually had video equipment. This is how I got my subtitles to appear on the screen and how I could add "real titles" to my previous works. I did not participate in the regualr nature of the class which was mostly news shows and PSA type stuff, but used it as a way to make my movies better. One time I made the mistake of showing one of the films to the class and they were quite alarmed at just what the hell I had made. But, the Teacher was very gracious to let me in to audit the class and was very supportive of my desire to learn more about the craft. My small Catholic High School was also very gracious to let me go to the class 2 times a week across town during the school day. (Video, 5 minutes)

1999

Home Movie

In my first year at Film School I made an insanely experimental film that dealt with identity, autobiography, and loose concepts of objectifying science. Taking a simple idea that humans revolve around each other the same way that planets do, (my kind of poem about things) I pieced together a film which was a portrait of 3 boys whom I had loose crushes on, and chose to create kind of poetic collages about each of them carrying poetry and science together into some kind of revolving circular, time-based language. This was a bizarre experiment I pulled together for a class entitled "The Personal Voice in Filmmaking", one of very few experimentally minded classes which were offered in the film school at USC. I was very much seen as an insane person by many of my teachers and classmates for wanting to make films that were proudly avant-garde. There was a screenwriting professor of mine I told about my excitement for the contemporary french film at the time 'Ponette', which I found utterly amazing, and I remember him cutting me off when I told him the 'synopsis'- And he said directly to me, without flinching,- "...that would never get made in hollywood". Experiences like these were common and frustrating, but I learned to just not care, and I learned that my audience was limited. In these instances I began to view film as a political medium in terms of expression. I learned that film was a political territory, because people had such an adverse, almost fearful reaction to things they did not understand. The film I made for this particular class was interesting in addition, because it became a place where I could first begin to excercise my voice as an instrument. This was a first for me, and now I play music everyday, so it's interesting to see the birth was actually there in Film School. Specifically for some of the collage-sequences I started to freestyle rap over opera tapes I had gotten from my family (My Grandfather loved Opera). These sounds were layed over various images I had shot to illustrate the poetic language I had constructed in the initial idea of planets and humans, in addition to found footage regarding the universe I collected from Carl Sagan documentaries. I was very interested in similarities between stars and humans, and their relationships to the objects around them, in addition to their shared fate of inevitable death or dissipation. At this time also, my Instructor from the class Wendy Appel told me I should consider going to CalArts, and that USC was not the place for me. Instead of seeing this as friendly advice I took it as an insult, once again viewing the cinema-space as a political battleground. I didn't understand why she was "pushing me away". I would later go to Calarts for Graduate School. I somehow believed that I should be there, at USC, specifically contesting these regularities and standards of commercial work, if only to be offering an alternative vision. Several times I contemplated leaving USC because of creative differences, but ended up staying after the death of my father sort of paralyzed me half way through my second year, when I was 19. I thought it would be too difficult to re-locate all together. I also continued to paint on refrigerator doors my whole first year in college, although they became harder and harder to come by! (Video, 12 minutes)

2001

the tunnel

Forays into fiction again. Two young men smoke and then go up to look at the freeway behind their house in South Central L.A. I may as well have been executed in my crit class at USC, that would have been more direct then the things people said. It's funny though because at this point I started thinking people's reactions to my films were hilarious, because they were just so off of the page. The gap became really funny to me because it was such an obvious gap.

The Feminist

An experimental documentary presenting one of my literature Professors at USC, Dr. Diane Blaine, who gave a special exposition relating to the notions of female hysteria as related to some archaic notions of the womb, where it was believed to constantly travel around the female interior, producing various sicknesess of mind and body. She gave the talk in my class one semester and I asked her during the following term if I could return and film her giving the same lecture. She was one of many great Teachers I have had over time. (Video, 5 minutes)

zero

A strange experimental narrative film in which the main character repeatedly washes dishes and then throws them to the floor behind him. Blatantly existential in nature. Near to this time I had read The Stranger and also began to be interested in philosophy. One of the most important books I ever read, which was coincidentally lent to me by the friend I had star in this film, was "The Wisdom of Insecurity". This caused a great awakening in me to question the present as a representation of separate articulations. The book seemed to make clear to me to question not only the function and notion of words, but what could be gotten from not separating anything, realizing consciousness as a whole. This film was hated, I repeat hated by the class I screened it in, its bad reception was laughable. However it was clear to me though at this time that the films I was making had a completely different aesthetic goal than my classmate's. For the most part I felt like a zoo animal. (Video 4 minutes)

Images from Mars

Starring the same friend as above, Koby Winn, who has won a trip to Mars. As a side note I heard he is in Austin now painting artistic curbs for wanting residents, and for those who are interested he also happens to be a very talented photographer. Koby is like no other. This is another film I don't understand, or shall I say I have no idea what possessed me to exert such an effort in its direction with such vigor. The main character wins a trip to Mars, it is all in french, and at the end, which I remember being the driving characteristic of the piece, upon arrival to mars the french news media bait him for a reflection and all he says is "It was red". For this film I can remember that I built an elaborate set for the interior of the ship and just went completely insane trying to realize the piece. It was a hilarious piece of intensity those few months. I gave up a bed for the spaceship's construction in my apartment. I remember realizing that there was quite a madness involved in filmmaking.

The Butterfly Effect

Another film in the style of documenting a Professor I had found particularly exciting. This was a film which featured a dynamic interview of Dr. William McClure from the Neuroscience Department of USC. He was another wonderfully dramatic and beautiful Professor I had during this time who quite illuminated the aspects of the human brain to myself and the whole class I am sure. He quite reminded me of a character from one of my favorite films, 2001 A Space Odyssey. What was interesting is that the film tried to develop relationships between the site of information transfer in brain cells along dendrites and across the gap of the synapse to the depiction of growth across many other phenomena, using the metaphor of a fractal. I was very affected by the Errol Morris film Fast Cheap and Out of Control, which I saw was able to use the documentary form to weave people and situations and concepts together. I liked how Morris was able to paint a broad comparative thesis with film.

LATER WORK / AN INTEREST DEVELOPS WITH THE APPARATUS, with machines as such. 2002

Self Math

I believe with this film is when I was able to actually begin a serious and committed relationship to the camera and the apparatus. This is a structural collage of documentary / photographic images shot over a 3 week period edited together based on internal metaphors that I saw which I belived were able to relate together. Some of the material includes a beauty pageant I came across as well as friend of mine who had suffered an accident and lost part of his finger. Days afterward we walked in the woods near my childhood home in Oregon and I had him recount the tale in 2 separate spots. I think this is the film where I begin to understand myself as a photographer with the videocamera. Also a wonderful class from Michael Renov at USC specifically on autobiographical cinema helped me to see the unity in all of my work in different mediums. It helped me, through our elaborate discussions of philosophy, to understand art, and to understand text, as the articulation of self. And to understand this major articulation of the self as an attempt everywhere at narrative, at construction, was a great discovery indeed.

The Search for Words, In a Nation where the Word is God

This is perhaps the film that people always like best of mine. It deals with a lot of the same issues as Self Math, and they were screened together at one of my first public screenings in LA, entitled "A Confrontation with the Word on the Steps of the Courthouse". The film was largely about communication, sexuality, and trauma. It basically documents my freestyle rapping that I used to do, and watches it fall apart, then build itself back up again. One of the best qualities of this film I think is its texture as document as its video diary began on September 1, 2001, and then just kept going, steadily disintegrating with every move past the 11th. More than anything it is simply a document of the desire and need to communicate, and it is a deconstruction of the Word. (Video, 55 minutes)

Dave Wong why do you taste so good?

This is one of several films I have made with an artistic partner Stephanie Kern, who I shared a lot of schooling in experimental cinema with in college. It is essentially an improvised comedy film which is simply hilarious. It plays with issues of transgression, feminism, and performance. I play the adoring lesbian admirer of a typical rockstar type. More than anything these films were about giving in to the moment of performance to produce something completely absurd, yet endearing. I was greatly influenced to make pseudo-improvised fiction movies in this way by another artist friend Scott Barber.

Triplets

Filming Men

This film came about upon the realization that Stephanie Kern and I both really took great joy and liberty in filming the men we were attracted to. We realized we felt a certain power to explore their bodies and their minds by getting close to them with our cameras. There was a joy in producing sexy images of these gentlemen before us. The film is a collage of our separate experiences in those spheres, and the different reactions we were able to witness within the medium of the camera. The apex of the film comes from what we considered to be the ultimate liberty in exploration we could take with the camera. When hanging out with one of our good friends at the time who took to falling asleep in a group, 3 of us girls were left in my room with a beautiful sleeping man. Stephanie and I had our other friend Caroline film us "exploring" his body while he slept. We did not touch him but we just got as close to him as we could so as to not wake him up. What comes out on the tape is insane. It always makes me think of a snuff film because it just feels illegal, even though there is no nudity or anything of the like. It is just mental space I believe that is being trespassed.

Dolinda Meeker in uniformity

This is a unique film which takes what may be a mainstream space (college basketball) and puts upon it an avant-garde lens. This was a document of the experience of a good friend of mine in the world of women's college basketball. What emerges is more a picture of the tension of sexuality as it was placed in this context. I believe the abstraction at the level of representation helps to communicate the particular aspects of her situtation. What became our question as we were making the film was more and more, "Where do we see sexuality in this space?" rather than "Where is the ball?" It was remarkable to look at the sport in this way, more in terms of bodies than as sport. By E.L. and S.K.

Experimental Film in Los Angeles

2003

People in Airplanes

Only when we land from a flight I believe, do we acknowledge the structure of time. A consideration of the level at which we engage with technology while simultaneously dismissing its significance. A deconstruction of the process of landing on the earth and choosing a time zone. All the films listed in this year were screened at "The Biology of the Rockstar / Philosophy of the Subconscious", another multimedia art event I organized at USC, which the Critical Studies Dept. embraced there with open arms, as they had the first of my shows as well. This second event was insane and featured the work of myself, Scott Barber, Stephanie Kern, and Laura Steenberge. It involved Films, Paintings, Music, and Text. It was miraculous and terrifying. Photos to be posted here soon.

The World Trade Center

Images taken in January 2003 of the World Trade Center site. A record of the hole in the ground and the atmosphere surrounding it. Text is overlayed from a poem I wrote. You can read the text here later. (Video, 3 minutes).

Electric God

A film to illustrate a song with the same name. Also a chronicle of some of the first months spent with the guitar instrument.

the dad song

Images which try to deal with the effect of visual imagery upon the consciousness. Framed to a song by a friend of mine I found particularly powerful regarding notions of the father and leadership of one's self.

Sylvere Lotringer

An intensely political interview shot in an abstract style of the founder of Semiotext(e), Sylvere Lotringer. The first question was regarding the question of death and the American experience of it as related to September 11th. What unravelled was a unique juxtaposition between America and Europe, and the questions of war and technology which surround us at every moment. At this time I was doing some work for Mr. Lotringer and was able to even work on a book for him he was doing with Virilio, called "Crepuscular Dawn". I idolized Sylvere from the first moment I met him. He is a hero of both consciousness and production, and the linking of the two together. You will be able to read the text of the interview here at a later date. By E.L. and S.K.

The Dissolving of a Fantasy: The Full-Emptiness State

Video study of Scott Barber as painter

A unique document of an intensely political time in America and also a contemporary artist. Scott had the idea that for the upcoming show we would share in USC's Film School Studio-Stages "The Biology of the Rockstar the Philosophy of the Subconscious", (where we exhibited in basically a show of our paintings, films, and music), that as part of the film program we could have short films we each made about each other's painting practice. He made a nice film about my paintings called "What do you think about while you paint?" The discussion of the interview also leads toward the subject of power and money in America. There is a great moment where the painter candidly describes money as a "tangible form of power". Once again this film is rich when viewed in terms of the production of a cultural document. (Of a person in a place or a time describing how they feel about a certain political situation). Video can be a time capsule. Another quote I remember from filming is that he said when rationalizing one of his points "...our entire culture is built around some form of abuse." Those words came out like a paint stroke to me, and I liked that. What's great about the work of this year that all of us did, is that I think there was an intense political climate going on in America, stirring itself and heating up, and we were doing something about it, we were involved. We were engaging and communicating with the culture. I remember the flyer for our show said on the back: "Communication saturates the scene. Speak out."

The Role of Information in Relationship to the Spectator

Filmed at a musical recital, this is a commentary over what I saw as an expressive articulation of the camera toward the relationship between the mind and media. The players in the quartet literally bleed into the mind of the spectator.

Voyeur on a Bumblebee

A large insect trying to escape a window sill becomes Cysiphus on the hill.

Werner Herzog

A document of the Filmmaker made at an appearance at the Eqyptian Theater in LA. He was speaking about the German responsibility to live with what has happened in their country's history, and I thought there was a connection between what he was saying and what Americans must deal with now.

Death

A deconstruction of the use of humor in funerals. Trying to deal with my own father's death, to understand the nature of a testimonial, and what it means to tell stories about people after they go. Issues of the nature of communication emerge. This too feels like some kind of illegal footage, because it is just so fucking raw. It uses footage from my father's own funeral. It has never been screened anywhere.

September 11, 2002

One year after 9/11, in 2002, this was taken in the morning as a document of the memory and the fear which still pervaded the present. The KPFK public radio statements in the apartment are chilling. Once again, the intent is to document a political situation in relation to the Self.

The body as a liquid and physical state, most obviously so in times of trauma

Breaking down the physical process of crying as the realization of a fluid state, an ocean of insides which give forth to bluffs and waves over rocks. Raw.

naked

The camera as a way to understand one's beauty. The camera as mirror. The camera as acknowledgement.

race in digital space

Document of a performance art group at an academic conference. (P. Norton and D-Frag)

untitled

the power of the voice in the face of the machine

A documentary of a laptop musician in LA. I have been very interested in the capacity of avant-garde electronic music to critique technology by an expressive deconstruction of its expectation. I gave a talk on this subject entitled "Music and Computers" at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy where I worked as a secretary for one year between USC and CalArts.

2004

Maybe if I had different legs

This one is not for those of a weak conscience. An examination of loneliness. It's remarkable to me that I actually made this film and didn't think twice about it. The relationship with the camera can be a funny thing because there can be things that emerge you are trying to prove, that you will use the camera to prove, and then in the end you have proved nothing, you have only proved your own thought process, you have not proved your thesis, but only produced a pattern which makes your thesis's construction legible.

moving with others

Sheep and horses in oregon, all eating. What I am interested in here is the motion of the animals as they eat and co-exist. One of the first times I experiment with composing my own music for the work.

daybreak

A first experiment with an area between painting and cinema. Trying to work out a space where something is witnessed, where the audience can feel the sense of choice, the articulation of the painter's decisions. Also trying to work out the space of creation, of the point between form and nothingness. This is an unresolved area in my work that I have not yet conquered. I shall return to this throughout time to get better at speaking the language I want to communicate with. Experiments in digital painting.

poem for mother

One of several kinetic letters or motion texts where the object is to show the sense of the letter and the sense of the thought, and the privacy and impulsiveness of those mediums. These are letters which could never be sent because of their directness. Hints at animation through digital painting.

little poem for you

A poem for the feeling of being alive.

digust

poem of the morning

Another impulsive image text poem about desire.

red painting #1

Experimenting with red and white, and the space between film and paint.

red painting #2

Experimenting with red and white, and the space between film and paint again.

animated dream #1 / the resilience of the "I" in textual patterns

From a beautiful dream I had where pages of unreadable text come moving toward me brilliantly in black space. I remember being struck by how the one shape I could make out, the one shape that did manage to represent itself in the dream, was similar to an "I". This seemed indicative of the purpose of the letter in the first place: To signify the self. As a side note I always find it intensely liberating when I get into the dream state of pure cinema, where I myself am gone, and I dream only in images. For once all the other crap gets left behind, I love that. There is only the Filmmaker there, not the weak person who is troubled with intense human emotions that can tear one apart.

2005

New York Ooze

30 blocks on foot in New York City on a hot summer day. Relationships develop between intent and belief. More than anything I try to show the connections, the poems, the lyrics which I already see there in the landscape. My Professor Karl Kels, from my time in Germany, helped me to see the relevance of lyrics in my non-verbal work, in film and video. The image itself is a space of lyrical articulation. Moving toward a silent cinema. (Super 8, 4 minutes).

2007

Looking for Technology

A young man discovers machines and media as the root of his own anxiety. A study in image production and consumption. A private history of Los Angeles. A 16mm, experimental fiction work. Recently completed, yet to be premiered. "Looking For Technology" is the first in a series of what is both a film comic and realist folk musical. Occupying the space of a pre-verbal cinema, the film meanders through the daydreams of a young man, Roland Blue, and his various interactions with electricity, symbology, and narrative. The film is a constant provocation of the space between and the conflicts within man and machine, time and money, men and women, language and song.

*You can buy any film of mine for 7$, by emailing me at elacy@calarts.edu, or spacetimepictures@hotmail.com. Please specify the name of the film or films you would like to purchase and provide your mailing address. Please also specify if you would like the film on VHS or DVD, and in either the NTSC or PAL format. Thank you for your support of my work! All proceeds will keep me from starving, and will also keep me up making more movies!! And more paintings, and more songs, and more essays...

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