
Michael Robinson
Directing
Biography
Michael Robinson (b.1981) is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and dangers of mediated experience, riding the fine lines between humor and terror, nostalgia and contempt, ecstasy and hysteria.
Known For
A very special episode of television's Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.
Light Is Waiting

The cabin is on fire! Krystle can't stop crying, Alexis won't stop drinking, and the fabric of existence hangs in the balance, again and again and again.
The Dark, Krystle
A charred visitation with an icy language of control: "there is no room for love". Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness.
All Through the Night
An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, spreading deception and myth along its murky path, singing the dangers of the mediated spirit.
And We All Shine On

A password-protected love affair, a little vapor on Venus, and a horse with no name ride out in search of a better world. Against the mounting darkness, a willing abduction offers a stab at tomorrow.
Onward Lossless Follows
A dark wave of exile, incest, and magic burns across the tropics, forging a knotted trail into the black hole. Three star-crossed siblings wander in search of one another as a storm of purple prose and easy listening slowly engulfs them.
If There Be Thorns

No description available.
Tidal

A self portrait in copy and paste.
The War of 1987

Made for the 2009 PDX Film Festival "Karaoke Throwdown" in Portland, OR.
WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES

Plagued by blindness, sloth, and devotion, a troubled scene from Little House On The Prairie offers itself up to karaoke exorcism.
Hold Me Now
Viewed at its seams, a National Geographic slideshow from the 1960s and '70s deforms into a bright white distress signal.
You Don't Bring Me Flowers

Dormant sites of past World's Fairs breed an erruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory; nothing lasts forever even cold November rain.
Victory Over the Sun
In the near future, amidst the aftermath of civil war, a band of female prisoners ambles across an otherwordly coastal exile, supervised and sorted by a group of idle soldiers. Rummaging, stuttering, and smashing through the leftovers of American culture, these ragged souls conjure an unstable magic, fueled by their own apathy and the poisonous histories imbedded in their unearthed junk. Suspicion, boredom, garbage, and glamor conspire in the languid pageantry of ruin. Feel the breeze in your hair, and the world crumbling through your fingers.
Circle in the Sand

A modern prophet’s visions of mythical destruction and transformation are recounted across a turbulent geometric ceremony of rising curtains, swirling set pieces and unveiled idols from music television’s past. Together, these parallel cults of revelation unlock a pathway to the far side of the sun.
Mad Ladders
"Designed as a get well card, this experimental film was completed just two months before leukemia took my father's life. Through use of the optical printer I pull him back to an easier time." - Michael Robinson
Carpenter
Shaping a concurrently indulgent and skeptical experience of the beautiful, the film draws an uneasy balance between the romantic and the horrid. A Frank O'Hara monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces surfacing.
The General Returns from One Place to Another

Informed by an underlying sense of anxiety and anguish, Michael Robinson’s Polycephaly in D nestles fragments of narrative within a collage of sound, image, and text that oscillates between the elegant and the discordant.
Polycephaly in D

//\///\////\ contemplates the same-day deaths of Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, and John F. Kennedy (all deceased on 11/22/1963) through the voices of the their respective wives (Laura Huxley, Joy Davidman and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). This meditation on visionary states of being unfolds across three sites of radical ambition: a failed desert commune, the ruins of a secret fascist compound and an empty glass cathedral. Part of the ongoing collaborative project by Phillip Andrew Lewis and Michael Robinson, Our Hyddeous Strenkth.
//\///\////\

A collection of discarded souls, rescued from the trash of a college darkroom.
Motel Flora
A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist remake/drag-show circa 1992.