I don't call myself an artist. The self-proclaimed "Artist" is a modern-day delusion; that title is for others to decide. I see myself more as an accidental agitator. I do not agitate on purpose. My agitating is a gut response to being agitated. I am agitated by any individual, group, organization, school or Society of Spectacle infected by the ubiquitous fundamentalist virus of over-literalist thinking. What a bore! My aim is to agitate an insurrection of the Poetic Imagination, the chief inlet for Soul in the Hypermedia Era.

"The only Art created by conscious mind is dead Art." -- Anonymous

My journey as a filmmaker began with tragedy. In September of 1992, I faced the sudden death of my beautiful daughter Zoe. The worst thing that could ever happen to me, happened to me. Great losses sometimes come with gifts. This loss gifted me with vision. The eyes of my eyes opened. I saw "death" as an illusion, an intellectual symbol for fear, social control and oppression. I saw through the lies of society and glimpsed the eternal cycles of Life. People come and go but Life continues. I saw how we are all, at essence, Love; I've seen true Love trump Death.

Waves of grief and epiphany guided the scripting and production of my first feature, THE ORACLE (1993), about a cynical elderly man whose granddaughter, Ariadne, appears in his dreams as a guide on his last night on earth. As my own cynicism withered I was inspired by my friend Rob Brezsny's ideas of the dreamtime/daytime interface. Together, we wrote THE DRIVETIME (1995; with ), about a federal time-travelling librarian from the year 2023 returning to 1999 through the dreams of a Seattle video activist. Five years later, the injustices of rampant ideological scapegoating got my goat and I wrote and directed TRAGOS (2000), about an urban tribe of technopagans clandestinely performing their ecstatic rites in Virtual Reality and the fundamentalist Christian attourney who confuses them for a satanic suicide cult.

"The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed,
but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans
fought each other to a standstill." -- Robert Anton Wilson

The racial profiling following the 9/11 attacks in NYC outraged the making of HYSTERIA (2002; with Jakob Bokulich), about a Catholic soldier-turned-boxer who naively mistakes a drug-induced hallucination for an authentic religious vision with disasterous consequences. The heartbreaking dissolution of my own family, both genetic and created, informed UNDER A SHIPWRECKED MOON (2003), an ancestral drama of a Finnish-American family visiting their hospitalized, comatose patriarch while he dreams of his first love. My poetic docufiction, THE GREATER CIRCULATION (2005) tethers the netherworld of ghosts, muses, and dreams when Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke transforms his lament over the sudden death of Paula Modersohn-Becker, a friend and fellow artist, into an epic work of literature, "Requiem for a Friend".

The national political climate triggered the making of my dark comedy, THE MIND IS A LIAR AND A WHORE (2007), where a quirky Berkeley household grapples the slippery slopes between actual and perceived threats during an alleged bioterrorist attack in their city. My lost sense of enchantment was restored by making THE INVISIBLE FOREST (2008) where an insomniac theatre director -- inspired by the radical visions of French Surrealist Antonin Artaud -- undergoes hypnosis in an attempt to stop a reoccuring nightmare (my debut as the lead in my own film).

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick

Completing feature film projects is exhilarating and exhausting. Between these crazy-making adventures I do next to nothing for months at a time. In these creatively fallow periods, I return to my paratheatre roots for recovery and sustenance. These paratheatre processes have also inspired several video documents: ARCHAIC COMMUNITY, 1992; CRUX, 1999; ORPHANS OF DELIRIUM, 2004. Sometimes I find renewal in crafting shorter works such as INERTIA, 1994; LILY IN LIMBO, and 1996; ROADKILL, 2001. Poetry also redeems me, especially through the medium of "videopoems" where I have used text from my favorite poets (Rilke, Neruda, HD, Rimbaud, Plath) as oblique narratives to invoke the spirits dwelling inside the houses of words (some of my techniques are outlined in Video Deconstruction; Essential Cinema Magazine).

"Existence itself may be considered an abyss possessed of no meaning. I do
not read this as a pessimistic statement but a declaration of autonomy
for my imagination & will and their most beautiful act of bestowing
meaning upon existence itself." -- Hakim Bey

So far, my work has been self-funded and/or co-produced with my peers. Why apply for corporate grants or studio funding when I can start creating ? After a film is completed I occasionally submit it to festivals (a dreadful enterprise at best) but mostly I book one-to-two night stands at USA west coast arthouses; sometimes universities will book my films. Online film review sites such as filmthreat.com, mysticalmovieguide.com and mindjack.com have posted critical reviews of my work. My films are also available on dvd at this webpage.

"It is essential to have Knowledge. It is also essential
to escape the Known." -- J. Krishnamurti

With the exception of my shorter works, which I make alone, most of what I do is highly collaborative and would never have happened without the talent, skill and energy of many others. I am forever indebted to my wife and longterm collaborator, the gifted singer, composer & actress, Sylvi Alli and the magic her music has brought to my work (since 1990). I would also be lost without the technical finesse of the talented Chris Odell, my online features editor since 2000.

At some point I would like my work to achieve more exposure in Europe and/or wherever peoplke are still open to new ways of seeing. Until then, I continue making the media I have to make or burn out trying. What is success to me ? Zero compromise. Money ? What I spend on my next project. Fame ? Grease for the publicity machines. Love ? What makes life worth living. Truth ? Everything beyond advertising. God ? Everything beyond that.

truly,
ANTERO ALLI
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