Mark Street

A walk after 9/11 allows the filmmaker's children to reflect on what just happened.

Triptych is a spirited conversation with three screens. Sometimes the interaction seems downright civil, at other times the mood is more contentious. The screens pause for each other’s outbursts, play off one another’s riffs, or else prattle on in their own fashion, oblivious.

A smattering of repeated performances culled from old porno films and hand painted. A man bends over a body, but what we really notice is the texture of the wall behind him. A woman stares back at the viewer with annoyance. On the soundtrack Anais Nin declares: “but while I’m doing this I feel I’m not living.”

A wabi sabi summer in Japan: Observing that which is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete produces a series of visual haiku in teeming street life; Bodies in emotion, and leafprints in the mud.

Using hundreds of transparent photographic stills animated on a lightbox and abstract Super 8 footage, the film meditates on the illusory nature of the passage of time.

Hand painting and bleaching a 35mm Dutch/French thriller reveals another layer of psychological complexity.

An homage and reimagining of Norman McLaren’s 1971 film.

WINTERWHEAT was made by bleaching, scratching and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about the farming cycle. I wanted to manipulate the found footage to create lulling, hypnotic visuals while also suggesting an apocalyptic narrative. Though the images can be viewed purely for their graphic idiosyncrasy, a quiet but persistent theme of destruction winds its way through the film.

Mark Street’s portrait of the late-night bustle of the historic Fulton Fish Market, filmed two years before its closing in 2005, shows a world not usually considered when people speak of “New York nightlife.” The textures of the gutted fish and trays of ice under the fluorescent light are complemented by Street’s hand-painted celluloid abstractions throughout the film. (Screened 2/17/22 at MoMA as part of Millennium Film Workshop: “Nighttime” NYC event).

The X Y Chromosome Project is the creation of artists Lynne Sachs and Mark Street. In addition to our two daughters, we make films and performances that use the split screen to cleave the primordial and the mediated. After returning from an inspiring week long artist retreat at the Experimental Television Center, Lynne asked Mark to collaborate with her on the creation of a piece in which they would each ruminate on the other's visual, reacting in a visceral way to what the other had hurled on the screen. Lynne would edit; Mark would edit. Back and forth and always forward. No regrets or over-thinking. In this way, the diptych structure is sometime's a boxing match and other times a pas de deux. Newsreel footage of Ronald Reagan's assassination attempt is brushed up against hand painted film, domestic spaces, and Christmas movie trailers. Together, we move from surface to depth and back again without even feeling the bends.

A pandemic diary filmed mostly in NYC, incorporating Super 8 and digital video recorded with Street's unique experimental eye. "From the uncertain first months when every foray felt perilous to various re openings, outings are recorded and reflections shared. Stills punctuate abstract and documentary footage, offering a collage of mediums in the face of the unknowable. "Sorties" is a military term-- a mission launched from a defensive position. That's sort of what a walk felt like in March 2020 in NYC. And then of course things changed; cases went up and down, the science evolved, fear waxed and waned. Of course, the pandemic continues; but I had to limit myself in making the film; March 2020-August 2021."

Fragments and minor moments coalesce and argue in this paean to overlooked and forgotten sketches. Recorded over five years in New York City, Berlin, Barcelona, Athens, New Orleans, Rome, Paris, Havana, Madrid, Budapest and Marseille. A shadow dances, a kite dives into the ground, a smoker exhales in a public market: this is a song about looking when you're not at all sure what you’re looking for. And a testament to the ethos of always carrying a camera even when you don’t know why.

An homage to two ramshackle cities, made up of footage shot while wandering. I meander city streets with a camera, looking to be haunted by unfamiliar vistas. I find solace in the forgotten landscapes, odd voices on a ham radio, shimmering water in a desolate harbor. Later I attack the film, moving it this way and that, trying to squeeze it against its will, wrest strangeness from the everyday.

Based on Barbara Hammer’s 1973–85 correspondence with Jane Brakhage, as well as outtakes from her 1974 film "Jane Brakhage".

Mark Street collaged and mixed hand-processed 16mm film, stills, found footage, and digital video to create this shimmering document of physical work in New York City’s Brooklyn Navy Yard.

An episodic journey across Belfast, chronicling a city reeling from sectarian violence, and doing it in a distinctly cinematic manner: through the lens of a high grain Super 8 camera.

An observational documentary made in Peru’s capital. The film begins with the legions of street sweepers who attack the sidewalks with a balletic intensity, and moves on to consider other urban vignettes in this powerful, dense city. The protagonists of the film quixotically and optimistically chip away at the dirt of this locale through a series of repeated gestures.

A skewed take on film detritus: 35mm movie trailers rescued from the trash and affected by hand and digitally, holding up a funhouse mirror to the industry of expectations.

A day like any other: Brooklyn beckons so they dart out into it. Daughter and father traipse from playground to subway and back home again. The 18-month-old cackles and the 32-year-old tries his best to keep up. They stumble upon a fruit vendor, a street preacher and a wall of city sound. Negative and positive hand-manipulated images collide and shimmer as they walk and talk their way through spring in the city. Maya babbles but her father is mostly silent: he can’t believe that he’ll never meander quite this way again.

Hasta Nunca follows MARIO LIGHETTI, an aging hipster DJ who produces an underground radio show in Montevideo, Uruguay. He invites listeners to share their intimate thoughts with him and a live radio audience, in real time. Mario re-negotiates his public and private personas during the course of the film and enters into an extra marital affair with JULIA, a divorcee searching for a new artistic spark.