Brian L. Frye

Never before seen Super 8 home movies filmed by Richard Nixon's closest aides - and convicted Watergate conspirators - offer a surprising and intimate new look into his Presidency.

I shot this roll of film at a party Bard College threw when it awarded Stan Brakhage an honorary degree. A few days after he died, I dug it out and watched it again. I had meant to make Brakhage a gift of the roll, but instead it became a farewell.

An electronic variety show featuring poetry, theatrics, dance, songs, and a plot concerning the cultivation of literary innocence and the preservation of Rondo Hatton's memory (a horror actor in 1940s B movies). A dense work made even denser by staged incompetence. Made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute.

A metropolis awash in electrical overdrive crashes in the heat of summer and sends a Bronxite into the clutches of a waterworld further north. It is there that we witness the cooling fogs and diving mammals of maritime yore and sail free in winds of a nautical nature. A nature that fills the summer sky with twinkling tidbits and the tummy with protein rich denizens of Neptune’s soup. A tour of the towering turrets of tomorrow land and the spatial splendor of yesterday’s yearnings captured on both chemical and electrical media.

A fragment of tinted nitrate. An acetate recording of a wedding ceremony. Echoes of the bitter sweetness of the Spirit on the tongue of Man. As Frampton tipped his hat to Gloria, so might I.

A short work by Brian Frye

Robert Beck was an American soldier from Chicago, who served in the First World War. Struck deaf and dumb by shellshock, Beck was sent to an English sanitarium to convalesce. At some point, the patients attended a movie. Beck began to laugh, and was suddenly cured of his affliction. He became the patron saint of New York's Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, dedicated to films which touch the marvelous. On September 26, 2000, Stuart Sherman, the great performance artist and filmmaker, presented several of his films, interspersed with "perfilmances," in which he re-enacted the passion of Robert Beck. This film is a record of that "spectacle," shot by Lee Ellickson. Stuart Sherman died on September 14, 2001 in San Francisco. This may have been his last New York performance.

TV Assassin was filmed in 2000. The images are Adolf Eichmann, at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. I used a Cine-Kodak Eight Model 60 with the shutter and claw removed, placed on a Cine-Kodak Titler, to rephotograph the images from a cheap, miniature television, creating a vertically smeared, pulsating image. Then I projected the regular 8mm film at 5 fps on a Bolex Paillard 18-5 and rephotographed it on Super-8. The process was intended to evoke the blurred quality of Gerhard Richter’s “October 18, 1977,” a cycle of photopaintings of the Red Army Faction, or Baader-Meinhof Gang.

6.95: Striptease might have been titled "Brian Frye Fails to Strip." We see Frye disrobe, but when he gets to his white undershorts, the roll ends in white flare-outs. There's ... something strange about his movements, especially when he drops his shirt — because in fact he ran the camera in reverse while putting his clothes on. As a result, the work is much more than a joke about not doing what so many other student performers are quite happy to do. - Fred Camper

The film consists of two rolls of film I shot in 1998 or 1999 while living in a Bushwick loft. I was interested in the perfect simplicity of a movie camera and what happens when a single part is disabled. So I found simple old cameras and deliberately broke one part, to see what happened. In the first reel, I removed the claw. In the second, I removed the shutter. As I recall, I also have a scheme of swinging the camera back and forth and up and down and various f-stop settings. Very Ernie Gehr. Playing, drinking beer & shooting film. No editing to speak of.

"Frye's Meeting With Khrushchev is not an easy film to like, but repeated viewings reveal a work of immense weight, a moving combination of intense nostalgia and thoughtful meditation on the impossibility of ever completely understanding history [...] The longest 25 minutes of my life." -Edward Smith

Short work by Brian Frye

A 16 mm. film by Brian L. Frye.

On December 12, 1863, General Ambrose Burnside's Army of the Potomac engaged General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia... Close combat through the streets of Fredericksburg and multiple assaults on the Confederate army entrenched in the heights behind the town resulted in heavy Federal casualties, which forced an eventual withdrawal. In November, 2001, I attended a small and relatively informal reenactment of the battle of Fredericksburg. About a hundred men and women did their best to illustrate the actions of the thousands of young men who offered their lives a century earlier. An air of absurd theater suffused the entire event, which provided the ground for its peculiar truth. Everyone played their part exceedingly honestly and well, and left something on the film I was myself surprised to find there.

Brakhage has called her the muse, perhaps because she appears only to those who hold a strip of film in their own hands. But here she appears – if only for a moment – to all those who care to look for her. "Let us speak plainly: The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful; indeed, nothing but the marvelous is beautiful." – Andre Breton

".. and yet of that living breathing throng, not one will be encased in a material frame. A company of ghosts, playing to spectral music. So may the luminous larvae of the Elysian fields have rehearsed ...

A home-processed, handmade work, revises Charlie Chaplin’s screen test of his adolescent soon-to-be spouse (Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill), broken up by irregular interruptions of black emulsion. Frye creates a continuously shifting exchange of glances between her image and the audience: «A surpassingly intense meditation on viewing and being viewed».

A film by Brian L. Frye

In 1997, while attending the San Francisco Art Institute, I made a 1 hour video of myself reading from John-Paul Sartre's book Nausea while drinking an entire fifth of Jack Daniels. My prediction came true, in spades. -Brian L. Frye

Sometime in the 1960s, a chiropractor from Kansas City made a short film called "A Portrait of Fear." The film consisted of several tableau shots of amateur actors standing in a field at night reciting painfully overwrought dialogue, apparently lit by the headlights of a car. I assume the cinematographer used an Auricon, as the sound was recorded directly on the B&W reversal original. In 1998, he sold me the outtakes, strung together just like you see them.