Harry Dodge

A young lunatic director and his devoted cult of cinema terrorists kidnap a Hollywood movie goddess and force her to star in their radical underground movie.

Shy is a transgender man who leaves his small town after the death of his father, and heads to the big city to live a life of crime. Along the way, he encounters Valentine, a quirky adoptee, in search of his birth mother. An immediate kinship is sparked between these men and they become partners in crime.

Feral tribes are the only inhabitants left in a decimated Los Angeles, sustaining themselves on the debris of an annihilated culture.

A blending of documentary and experimental narrative strategies, combining stunning 16mm landscape cinematography with a bold, lyrical voice-over to share two San Francisco stories: the history of the Golden Gate Bridge as “suicide landmark,” and the story of a butch dyke in San Francisco searching for love and self-discovery. The Joy of Life is a film about landscapes, both physical and emotional.

Winner is a fictional interview gone awry, featuring a reticent sweepstakes winner who doggedly avoids receiving her prize and manages to morph an ad spot into a mini documentary about her art work.

A sustained, essayistic meditation on the transformation of matter:into new states, new meanings and—via digitization—into the virtual. The title derives from a well-known continuum fallacy—in which a change is said to be impossible because its exact moment of arrival cannot be discerned. Via a distorted collage of YouTube clips, many of which depict extreme physical incidents, the piece attempts to make manifest transformation, to attempt—even if in vain—a better apprehension of the transitive.

In Big Bang (Song of the Cosmic Hobo), Harry Dodge appears as a low-rent automaton in an urgent quest to launch a small group of cosmic particles back into a state of pure potentiality. In this film, a cyborg (a shirtless Dodge with a Chroma key green cardboard-box robot head) purchases a particle board cabinet at IKEA and, after gloriously smashing it to bits with a sledgehammer, heads out to scatter the dust at a Grand Canyon scenic overlook. In swift order, the work invokes questions about consumerism, materiality, and the possible fecundity of dissolution or destruction.

SD video, stereo sound by Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn 2008

Lost on their way to a desert rock concert, two loners remember the good times.

At first glance, Masters of None could be the home video of a family of neon-pink hooded figures, passing the time with charades, television, and Jiffy Pop on the stove. As in All Together Now, Masters has no dialogue or clear narrative arc, and while the domestic activities seem everyday, they are infused with suggestions of violence and danger.

Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, ©2008

Under a cloudless Los Angeles sky, Kahn—dressed in incongruous heels and a summery dress—runs an electric weed whacker through a hill of overgrown grass.

Harry Dodge's The Time Eaters, sparked by and in dialogue with Frances Richard's Anarch., follows the orientation of a freshly-minted human to earthly matters, both fleshly and phantasmagorical. This orientation, delivered by an ambiguously-gendered guide, is essentially a monologue that plays with comedic and narrative conventions while also exploring foundational questions about language: its relationship to knowledge, time, abstraction, experience, communication, and intimacy. As the title suggests, the video is also interested in the surfeit of information currently at our disposal, the time we take in downloading it, and the relationships forged by human animals in its haze.

A woman with a viking helmet, bloody nose, and large wheel of cheese rambles across Los Angeles, followed by a cameraman hoping to catch some action.

The Fudgesicle, a solo performative video in which Dodge, playing a fudgesicle, parries with an unseen interlocutor in a stripped-down, monochromatic setting. The deceptively puerile premise eventually serves as a container for an effervescent (and existential) meditation on shape, legibility, and the limits of articulation.