Dan Barnett

Sudan, East Africa, 1980. A team of Israeli Mossad agents plans to rescue and transfer thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. To do so, and to avoid raising suspicions from the inquisitive and ruthless authorities, they establish as a cover a fake diving resort by the Red Sea.

In the near future, glacial melting has covered 98% of earth's landmass. Sharks have flourished and now dominate the planet, operating as one massive school led by a mutated alpha shark.

Joseph, a young gay male, finds himself the random target of a hate crime and is severely beaten. He retreats into his own world and loses all faith upon hearing that he has permanently lost sight in one eye. In a loving, albeit misguided attempt to help him reclaim his life, Joseph's mother Rachel and best friend Derrick present him with a very unexpected present for his birthday, a face-to-face encounter with his attacker and a chance for revenge.

Although constructed from thousands of still images of Chicago, ENDLESS maintains a complex relationship to the photographic image. Time and space seem to compress or implode into a contradictory experience - one which is fluid, yet static, sculptural, yet two-dimensional, of the present yet of the past. The images are layered vertically, 'endless' variations of time and space unable to be contained within the fixed boundaries of the film frame.

Science Without Substance follows a hapless band of the lost through a shifting landscape as they try to figure out WHAT’S GOING ON? Movie #1 in the Sweet Dreamers Trilogy.

The Chinese Typewriter is about education and language, and the way a society is shaped by them. Exemplifies the politically committed film that defies the strict rubric of avant-garde. Barnett seems less interested in challenging traditional form than in exploding his own occidental vision. -- Gregory Solman

"Untoward Ends, along with Dead End, Dead End and Endless are a kind of cross between diaries and structural films and span the main part of my career working in 16mm. These were not happy years for me and they are not happy films. They were all conceived as silent films and I was very consciously working out my ideas about visual rhythm and visual/musical form. When I had them transferred to digital I had the opportunity to see how they would work as sound films - How hard would it be to compose musical tracks for them that would complement their spirit without detracting from their purity as silent film compositions? I had lots of fun in the process and have learned a great deal from them about the interaction between the two modalities as kinds of musical expression. I will leave it to others to decide if they are successful or not." -DB

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Legendary among filmmakers who have witnessed it, White Heart is a symphonic exploration of cinematic meaning that unfolds through a multi-layered, contrapuntal audio-visual montage of numerous and disparate ingredients: images of city streets, verdant forests, and ocean waves; bits of film leader and editor’s marks; oblique footage of Barnett’s colleagues Larry Gottheim and Saul Levine; an interview with two young missionaries; the sounds of classical music, typewriters, video tone, and, most centrally, a brief passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. These elements and more emerge and re-emerge like musical motifs, continuously and meticulously altered through processes like bleaching, staining, and multiple print generation, dramatically extracting the formal particularities of the Kodachrome reversal print.

This video is about WATER WHEEL

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Third segment in the Sweet Dreamers Trilogy.

My only student film by virtue both of my having been an (extremely short lived ) graduate student, but more because I made it explicitly to learn something about perceived screen time by watching it myself over and over again to see what continued exposure would do to the sense of subjective length. –Dan Barnett

DEPARTURE is a film that was shot in 1976-77 during a year when I lost my job due to both cutbacks at the campus at which I taught and my involvement in the movement against them. I collected footage and imagined I would edit the film together the night I left. I was unable to do this and it took several years to finish it.

"This video is about some of the people of Burma" -DB.

A young girl drying her hair; a woman wringing a cloth washed in the river; a funeral in the early yellow light.

The film I made from Gary Henoch and Harlow Robinson’s footage, An Anagram is not a documentary at all, but rather a poetic essay on the impact of the sudden collapse of a belief system on a culture. It has a 17 part quasi-musical structure inspired by Dmitri Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues that at times ignores the literal meaning of certain interviews for the fragrant affect of the language and body language; that is, certain interactions are left un-translated so that the viewer is given full and unfettered access to the musical spirit that animates the arguments and quarrels caught so delicately in the sound and images. - Daniel Barnett

"Born in the 1960's. Died young." Boston and NYC, 1970.

A digitally-manipulated rumination on travel, "observed" by Dan Barnett.

The second film in the Sweet Dreamers Trilogy