Updated 3/28/2023
Why do I make films? I'm not a solo artist. I cannot do this alone; there are always others, a team of collaborators. It starts with a new vision of the world and the adventure of discovery towards new ways of seeing and creating new contexts for what can be seen, felt, and experienced. Each film represents a personal dream coming true and a fulfillment of the dreams of those who join me. Filmmaking as dream machine, a deep river of images flooding forth from a dream vortex, where the personal meets the collective in the transpersonal.
MY BACK STORY
I come from an experimental theatre background. Between 1975 and 2018, I wrote, directed, and sometimes performed in numerous experimental theatre productions that have imprinted my films with their distinct theatricality. Since 1993, I wrote and directed fifteen feature-length art films exploring the interplay between the Imaginal and the Actual. My films were sold as DVDs and screened publicly at arthouse cinemas almost every year between 1995 and 2015 while touring the USA west coast, from Los Angeles CA to Bellingham WA (after 2015, they screened ony in Portland OR). Though I never profited from my movies nor have I aimed for fame, most of them have garnered favorable reviews from film critics. With no mainstream ambitions for target markets or demographics, I've been free to make only the movies I've wanted to make. I am self-taught; making movies has been my film school.
Over the last decade, DVDs have become all but phased out by online streaming services though I do believe in a DVD resurgence. DVD's are less compressed than streaming and have better picture and sound quality. Committed cinephiles have already started personal dvd libraries of their favorite films in a retro-trend that promises to expand in the coming years. My dvds are available through my book publsiher, The Original Falcon Press. In 2016, I started posting links to all my films as free views on YouTube and Vimeo. I reached a point of simply wanting to share the bounty of three decades of work with the world. Though I realize my films are not for everybody, it appears they are finding their own eccentric audience.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN.
My films don't fit into any existing cinematic genre. Most of my movies are veiled autobiographies, oneric docufictions, giving narrative and poetic form to my internal landscape and its reactions to real world stimuli. This process started after the sudden tragic death of my 2-year daughter Zoe in September of 1992. The worst thing that could ever happen to me, happened to me. Great losses sometimes come with great gifts and, this unfathomable loss hammered my psyche with the gift of searing 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. I saw the eternal cycles of Life; people come and go but Life continues. I've seen true Love upstage Death in the Theatre of Life. However I also became overwhelmed by more perceptions of reality than I knew what to do with. That's when I bought my first consumer camcorder.
x
x "The Oracle " (1993) and "The Drivetime" (1995)
TRANSFORMING TRAGIC INTO MAGIC
Waves of grief and epiphany guided the scripting and production of my first feature, THE ORACLE (1993), about a cynical elder patriarch whose granddaughter, Ariadne, appears in his dreams as a guide on his final night on earth. My own cynicism withered after being inspired by my friend Rob Brezsny's concept of "the drivetime", an interface between dreamtime and daytime realities. Together, we wrote and produced THE DRIVETIME (1995), about a federal time-traveling librarian from the year 2023 returning to 1999 via the dreams of a Seattle video activist shooting police riots. Five years later, I was moved to explore conflicting religious beliefs in TRAGOS (2000), a cyber-noir witch hunt tale about a fundamentalist Christian attorney convinced that a blind pagan woman was the leader of a 'satanic suicide cult'.
x
"Tragos" (2000/01) and "Under a Shipwrecked Moon" (2003)
The racial profiling immediately following the 9/11 attacks outraged the making of HYSTERIA (2002), written with Jakob Bokulich, about a Croatian Catholic soldier who drinks datura tea and mistakes a powerful hallucination for a visitation from the Holy Virgin Mary with catastrophic consequences. On my fiftieth birthday, I felt compelled to explore my Finnish roots in UNDER A SHIPWRECKED MOON (2003), where a Finnish-American family visits their hospitalized, comatose patriarch whose deceased true love beckons him from the great beyond. Highly creative women standing at the existential crossroads between Art or Motherhood inspired the making of THE GREATER CIRCULATION (2005) where the poet Rainer Maria Rilke transforms his grief over the sudden death of his friend, the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, into an epic prose lament, "Requiem for a Friend". Meanwhile, three women and their director prepare to stage an avant garde performance of Rilke's lament in present time, Berkeley California where the past meets the present
"The Greater Circulation" (2005) and "The Invisible Forest" (2008)
FEAR AND TREMBLING
Fear-mongering politics triggered the making of my anxious Christmas comedy, THE MIND IS A LIAR AND A WHORE (2007), about a quirky Berkeley household riding the slippery slopes between actual and perceived threats during lockdown after an alleged bioterrorist attack in their city. I returned to my earliest theatrical influence, Antonin Artaud, for THE INVISIBLE FOREST (2008) about an insomniac theatre director (whom I portray) conducting a paratheatrical experiment in a forest when a series of disturbing dreams forces him to enter hypnotherapy. My next film, TO DREAM OF FALLING UPWARDS (2011), was based on the true story of a deathbed signing of proprietary documents between a former mentor, Christopher S. Hyatt, and his son - a zany occult thriller where an urban sex magician seeks help from a Castaneda-style desert witch to solve a vexing esoteric problem of demonic possession.
x
"To Dream of Falling Upwards" (2011) and "The Book of Jane" (2013)
PSYCHOLOGICAL JOURNEYS
My need to work through unresolved psychological Anima projections led to the making of FLAMINGOS (2012), an outlaw romance noir about twin sisters in love with a bank-robbing junkie enflamed by apocalyptic visions. My feminist fable THE BOOK OF JANE (2013) developed through a vision of three generations of women and the overlapping worlds between the nomadic homeless and ivory tower academia.
My ongoing internal dialogue with the autonomous Muses archetype inspired OUT OF THE WOODS (2015, recut in 2021) as an uncommon love story about a boy with an imaginary friend who accompanies him through manhood and into old age.
xx
.
"The Vanishing Field" (2020) and "The Alchemy of Sulphur" (2021)
After a five year hiatus from filmmaking, the Cinema Muses called me back with THE VANISHING FIELD (2020) - inspired by the ongoing impact of a spontaneous out of body experience I had in my early twenties. Filmed mostly in a Zen monastery with resident monks, The Vanishing Field was chiefly improvised on site. My "imaginal romance", THE ALCHEMY OF SULPHUR, (2021), mirrors my ongoing process of transforming trauma into art in a story about a writer attempting to escape heartbreak by writing herself into a story as a fictional character -- with unexpected real world repercussions. My Psi-Fi Noir feature, TRACER (2022), erupted from the ubiquitous surveillance culture around the world and how it acts on the collective psyche in a cat and mouse yarn unraveling through a maze of underworld
drug culture,
Russian remote viewing experiments, and a fractured family trying
to pick up the pieces.
"Bardoville" (2017) Paratheatre Video document
PARATHEATRE. In 1977, I was deeply impacted by the late Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski's paratheatrical experiments in the forests of Poland and by his book, Towards a Poor Theater. From that point on, I began to develop my own "paratheatre" medium which I've documented in three books, "Towards an Archeology of the Soul" (2003), "State of Emergence" (2020) and "Sacred Rites" plus ten videos demonstrating various modalities of this dynamic group ritual process. Many themes, stories, and characters in my films were informed by Paratheatre experiences between 2010 and 2019 when we courted the archetype of the Muses. In late 2015, after nineteen prolific years of music and film production in Berkeley, Sylvi and I relocated to Portland Oregon and staged five original paratheatrical productions (documented on video) and recorded a series of original songs that we made into music videos as "bird&wolf".
x
"Living with a Sorceress" (2020; videopoem)
"Deep Blue" (2020; bird&wolf music video)
THE VIDEOPOEMS
Since 1992, I have been crafting numerous short "videopoems" using text by Blake, Rilke, Neruda, H.D., Rimbaud, Plath, & others, as well as, many short experimental works and music videos. Almost all my work was made in collaboration with many others. I am especially grateful for support from and inspiration with the multi-talented Sylvi Alli (since 1990) and my features editor, Chris Odell (from 2000-2015). So far, all my movies have been self-funded and/or co-produced with peers; I have avoided applying for grants. Each of my features take anywhere from four to twelve months, from concept to final cut. When some folks discover my films they sometimes ask, “which one should I should I watch first?. Read the descriptions, look at the images, choose one that speaks to you. I only ask that you don't watch my movies on the f*cking phone. I like reading responses to my films and if you are so inclined, send them to me at: verticalsource@gmail.com
xx
