Film and Video

Here’s a small sample of the film and video work I’ve done. [NOTE: Until whatever issue going on with WordPress and videos is fixed, please click through to watch the vids on YouTube. Otherwise, with the embedded version, the images often freeze on a single frame while the audio continues on. Just click the vid and then click the YouTube logo at the bottom to fix that issue for now.]

A lot of my early video work involved being a street videographer in a radical media collective, so you see that flavor here. But I’ve been shooting both film and video for a very long time. I love the shit outta the extremely experimental ones nobody watches but me. But the ones everyone else seems to like are the political ones and the science ones… so those are here too.

Pandemia: You can read more about this project in the YouTube description. Long story short, I took some of the voices in my head and all of the pieces in a collection that was supposed to have hung in a New York gallery last year (that got shuttered by the pandemic) and made a film out of them.

Fuck the Corporate Media:

https://youtu.be/36A8DV3dk24

An examination of the ways that the corporate media distorts reality and functions as the PR wing of the corporate police state. Real journalists are HEROES! Recently the right wing has co-opted concerns about the corporate media to criticize anything unflattering about them – no matter how accurate. I do not agree with this, but to be fair, the corporate media enabled this rise to fascism by prioritizing the perspective of the wealthy and failing to ever question the police state narrative for decades. Now that they are in the cross-hairs that many of us have been in for generations, they are feeding on their own harvest. So… there are a lot of feels about this subject. Real journalists are not lapdogs, and too many of them were, for far too long.

Pharaoh’s Army:

Pharaoh’s Army examines the militarization of the police state and the rise of the use of “less lethal” weapons in the service of the class war. For some reason, YouTube put an age restriction on it, possibly because you can hear the word “fuck” in it, but probably just because someone with a lean to right wingnut politics reported it for not being in alignment with their boot- licking sensibilities. You can see it by clicking through, though. Shot and edited nearly 20 years ago to document attacks by police on US citizens, it turns out this was a film way ahead of its time: we saw this coming and it did.

28 Seconds (The Killing of Fouad Kaady):

https://youtu.be/anDbhBHaG38

Fouad Kaady was an unarmed accident victim who was assaulted and killed by police for being in shock. His name was then smeared in the media, where reporters ignored mountains of disturbing evidence of police violence and cover-up in favor of innuendos that Kaady “may have been on drugs” at the time of the killing. In fact, toxicology reports were available to show that there were no drugs in his system, but this is one form of shorthand used by the police-state PR wing to suggest that victims of police violence do not deserve consideration by the public.

Farewell:

https://youtu.be/6QTWdmAwIgI

I spent a dozen years desperately trying to save the Columbia river sealions from being scapegoated and killed by the government in the service of the collapsing fishing industry. This short is one of many that I did as part of that work. While most of that work was documenting the struggle and the reasons why killing Sea lions was not only pointless, but immoral. This one though, comes from the heart. It was my response to the unnecessary murder of 8 Sea lions at once for no goddamn reason at all.

Refusing to be Silent:

https://youtu.be/0KkC3oFccXM

Interview with Josh Harper, just before he went off to prison for years, for the crime of speaking up for the animals.

Petty Fascism 101:

https://youtu.be/658ShAzvZaU

Ashes O’Capitalism talks about what it was like to go down to Sacramento for the WTO Ministerial Meeting on GMOs, where thousands of police officers spent days attacking, beating, pepper spraying, and illegally detaining people who came out to protest the meetings. Ashes was arrested there, as was almost the entire Indy crew, for a “parade violation.” He was wearing a bandanna, and says before the WTO met there, the city of Sacramento had passed a secret ordinance making it illegal to wear face coverings. They didn’t tell anyone, and here we wander through the city a day after the mass arrests, speaking to officers on hidden camera about the mask ordinance.

Dumpstering 101:

Surviving the end times, Portland style.

Dumpstering 102:

Same as above, only with food. The most Portland vid EVER.

Goth Girl

These are part of a strange project I’m still not sure what to think about. I keep a lot of cartoon journals, full of true stories narrated as they happened. A friend told me I had to “do something with all those,” so I am. These are the first 4 episodes, all very short. The first is a noir-ish origin story, based on an actual conversation, whereby the title character learns who she really is. That one is the longest, at 5 minutes. The other 3 are between 30 seconds and 1 minute.

Day X:

https://archive.org/details/vftr_dayx

While I did not do the editing on this one, I did shoot a lot of the video. This is what happened in the streets the night the bombs started falling in Iraq.

Dear Maskholes (a Public Service Announcement): https://vimeo.com/496072056

Home By Bicycle:

On April 19, 1943, Albert Hoffman rode a bicycle home, apparently in a “most severe crisis.”

The Animal People:

I didn’t produce this film or have very much to do with it at all; it just has some footage that I shot in it. This is a new (as of 2020) documentary produced by Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Casey Suchan. This extremely important film explores the repression of political activists in the United Stays of America via the lens of the animal rights activists involved with the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign, known as the SHAC 7. I had friends involved in that campaign, some of whom went to prison for the “crime” of speaking. So I contributed footage to the film, including an interview with Josh Harper, which you can see on its own, above, in the short Refusing to be Silent. You can see a lot of my footage – including parts of the Josh Harper interview, and a some of my “riot porn” – in the trailer for The Animal People, found here: https://youtu.be/IXcmqguK3DE. You can also read about the film here, in the Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2019/12/12/animal-people-documentary-shac-protest-terrorism/.

Misunderstandings: I’m still confused by how people can honestly believe they’re speaking for God when… in my view anyway… they so obviously are not.

Holding Up that Blood Stained Banner: Kendra James weighed 100 lbs. She was a young mother, who had been a passenger in a car pulled over, one night, by the Portland police for DWB. She moved to the driver’s side and tried to leave the scene. Although the officers knew her, and could simply have arrested her later… they murdered her. This was the response of my community to that killing, many deaths-by-cop ago. Fuck the portland police.

Solidarity Benefit for Tre Arrow: Shortly after Tre was arrested, I went up to Victoria BC to see him. It was a hellacious trip, with a lot of its own stories, and I wound up not seeing him until years later, when he got out. But here’s a vid I managed to shoot that night anyway, at a benefit being held for him. The band is One Less Felon, so-named because Tre was supposed to have been playing with them. Nobody in the band had known he was the infamous Tre Arrow, on the run from the US, until he was arrested.