Ken Kobland

The Wooster Group's production of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, translated by Paul Schmidt and directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, with performances from Kate Valk, Peyton Smith, Scott Shepherd, Ari Fliakos, Anna Kohler, Beatrice Roth, Ron Vawter, and Willem Dafoe. This presentation of the 2003 production of BRACE UP!, designed by Ken Kobland and LeCompte, incorporates close-up recordings of the performers simultaneously with continuous wide-angle footage.

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Now one of the world’s most celebrated artists, Yayoi Kusama broke free of the rigid society in which she was raised, and overcame sexism, racism, and mental illness to bring her artistic vision to the world stage. At 88 she lives in a mental hospital and continues to create art.

White Homeland Commando takes the familiar terrain of network action drama and tilts the playing field. Reminiscent of today's popular reality-based cop shows, White Homeland Commando offers a straightforward story: four members of a special police unit investigate and infiltrate a New York-based white supremacist organization. But that is where the commonplace ends. The teleplay is shot and edited in a highly textured visual style, the colors are subdued yet somehow garish, and the sound is deliberately just out of sync with the speaker's lips. Occasional static combines with jumps in the plot — the editing is reminiscent of a television viewer flipping channels.

A look at blood's role in everything from theology to history, medicine, vampire lore and mythology, literature, and the movie 'Blade' (1998).

A documentary charting the adaptation and filmmaking process behind Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000)

A journey inside the world of a legend of modern art and an icon of feminism. Onscreen, the nonagenarian Louise Bourgeois is magnetic, mercurial and emotionally raw-an uncompromising artist whose life and work are imbued with her ongoing obsession with the mysteries of childhood. Her process is on full display in this intimate documentary, which features the artist in her studio and with her installations, shedding light on her intentions and inspirations. Louise Bourgeois has for six decades been at the forefront of successive new developments, but always on her own powerfully inventive and disquieting terms. In 1982, at the age of 71, she became the first woman to be honored with a major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the decades since, she has created her most powerful and persuasive work, including her series of massive spider structures that have been installed around the world.

A video reconstruction of the 1977 Wooster Group production Rumstick Road, an experimental theater performance created by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte after the suicide of Gray's mother. Archival recordings are combined with photographs, slides, and other materials to recreate the original production.

The makeup, stunts, special effects, and production design of 'Blade' (1998) are discussed.

The dog in dreamland? Or at least one of us is…

...a meditation on a familiar New York city space in which memories, fantasies and the maniacial interwine.

This compelling documentary portrait is a quiet ode to a woman whose approach to form and material are unmatched in the art world. Working primarily in cedar, von Rydingsvard creates monumental sculptures that play with texture and shape in ways that evoke surprising emotion. Born in Germany to Ukrainian-Polish parents, von Rydingsvard’s family was detained for five years in a post-WWII refugee camp before moving to America. The pain and trauma of this experience, coupled with the anger born from an abusive childhood, left indelible marks on Ursula. But her ability to channel this into her work and practice undoubtedly birthed an artist of singular determination and talent.

2-Parts: One, a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Petersboro, New Hampshire with the seasons passing ... Two, an experiment with green-screen chroma-key and a play between 2-D and 3-D space.

Periodic ruminations, reflections on photography, memory, aging, the woods and the homeland.

Drawing from Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony, his letters, travel journals, and biography, this video layers fantasy, sexual obsession, morbidity, Romanticism, and boredom alongside the ghostliness of empty hotel rooms, aural atmosphere, and an homage to surrealist and horror films.

A 17-image exercise using freeze frames of a tenement hallway.

"It's a letter to Berlin; a graveyard meditation (with The Wall as its marker). I spent eight months in Berlin (West) as a DAAD fellow; a true guest worker, in 1986-87. I wanted to respond in some way to this strange place. I wanted to describe the landscape of Cold War Berlin, which immediately means dichotomy and invoking the imaginary; the landscape that isn't there as well as the one that is. The only spoken text in the tape are a segment of the John F. Kennedy 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech, given at the Berlin Wall in 1962, and fragments of radio news reports, from both DDR and Bundesrepublik broadcasts."

The fluctuation between indexical/symbolic images along with everyday small talk and gestures is at the center of this episode. The location is Dealey Plaza where JFK was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963.

Library is a one shot take looking down at the lobby of the New York University Library at Washington Square in New York City. Shot in 1977, re-edited 2019.

...a "mordantly nostalgic" sojourn across America. A landscape of mute streets, empty rooms and serene fields; the remains of a civilization which has momentarily disappeared.