Stom Sogo

"Try was originally shot on Super-8mm film and then re-shot on video. The idea was to have the image of young kids kissing forever. Ecstasy here is so wasted." (Stom Sogo)

COLOUR, DVD

21-year-old film student Kim Hiorthøy wonders if it is possible to live in the moment, and if the way to find out is to make a kind of verity movie about it - as if he was in Paris in the 60s and not in New York in 1994.

In Guided By Voices, Sogo constructs a film version of Dennis Cooper's novel Guide. The highly abstracted, colored digital video (shot on video and Super-8) evokes a psychedelic experience. As Sogo recalls: "It was 5:45 AM; [I was] crashing at a friend's house, deep in Brooklyn, where I was dealing with a final point in the movie. Then, I crashed with a seizure, all my memories flashed before me. I fell off the stairs, and the film finished itself."

"Bracing, cryptic, and unsettling, this piece shows an advance in both decisiveness and risk. The soundscape is terrifyingly beautiful. The images take us on strange country roads, into the thick of drug deals, and suspicious fires ravished and abandoned love and unidentifiable turbulence. Whiplash edits prevail over vérité moments that eventually become unmoored by dreamlike intrusions. Some cuts have the power of pulmonary arrest and others are non-abrasive but startling in their disjunctions of time and place." (Mark McElhatten)

A Super-8 / video double projection by Stom Sogo.

A Super-8 film by Stom Sogo.

"I think I should think more hard when I'm making films to record images, instead of just going out and shoot, but I like people smiling without thinking why they are smiling. I think these faces are so funny." (SS)

Film by Stom Sogo. 13 min, video.

Re-edit of earlier Super8 home movies with a melancholic soundtrack. One of Stom's last completed works prior to his death.

Short film by Stom Sogo.

Video by Stom Sogo.

"It's all coming out of Mexico. Surreal gets so real. And invader from England, France or Spain found the taste of cactus cocktail. That makes this movie sweat, ha?" (Stom Sogo)

Film by Stom Sogo. Color, sound.

"Her again??? But, well, it's out of my body like no heroin for a year. And their inner lights fade into TV monitor with no signal at all. And my ep spins endless." (Stom Sogo, 2002 NYUFF program notes)

"A Mixtape for Stom" is an intimate documentary portrait of Japanese experimental filmmaker Stom Sogo (1975–2012), whose frenetic Super-8mm works became emblematic of New York’s underground cinema at the turn of the millennium. A close friend, filmmaker Adrian Goycoolea reflects on Sogo’s life and legacy, framing the film as a reply to the final email he received from him. Drawing from personal archives, interviews, and memory, the film assembles a collage of Sogo’s art and presence: radiant, restless, and unresolved. Contributors include Jonas Mekas, Bruce McClure, Raha Raissnia, Julius Ziz, Ed Halter, Andy Lampert, and members of Sogo’s family, offering perspectives on his talent, struggles, and influence. Scored by Joe Watson of Stereolab, "A Mixtape for Stom" is at once an elegy and an act of remembrance; a meditation on friendship and grief, and a testament to an underground legacy that continues to reverberate.

Film by Stom Sogo.

"Lika is a glimpse into the mesmerizing world of Stom Sogo: a lush kaleidoscope of manipulated video fragments set to an entrancing electronic score. Lika subverts common signifying processes as it weaves rhythmic variations of radiant textures into a captivating immersive experience, equally mysterious and seductive in its masterful play with degrees of abstraction." (Tomonari Nishikawa)

Sogo’s massive 9-reel, nearly 300 minute cycle of Super-8 diary films, which he titled I HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING YET. Dated 1995 but likely spanning a few years, this series contains footage shot while still a student at SVA, images captured on the streets, and at home featuring friends and strangers in the flow of life. Sogo rarely screened his intricately detailed, exquisitely photographed diaries in public, but when he did they left a lasting impression on all those who saw them. Dizzying in their breakneck speed, these works demonstrate Sogo’s incredible eye and preternatural ability to compose in-camera. (Anthology Film Archives)

"A film that I'd made in New York at the end, it was four years ago and super snowing there, I showed the movie and left the US the next day" (Stom Sogo)