Directing
I Was a Jewish Sex Worker is a humorous, no-holds-barred autobiographical film about the director’s former career as a sex worker and his relationship with his Jewish family. From graphic, erotic massages to a revealing interview with his grandmother, Roth tells a unique tale and explores themes of sexual wellness, connection and self-realization. Featuring guest appearances by German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim and sexologist/performer Annie Sprinkle.
A short film by the painter Yvonne Jacquette.
A film about a future dinosaur, a species that might be headed for extinction, even though it seems to be thriving now. Not the human race, which in spite of everything may continue to suffer for many years, but the automobile. The filmmaker was fortunate enough to reside at the meeting of two great expressways and a tunnel, and from his roof and kitchen window was able to observe closely these machines in their natural habitat (55 miles per hour). It is also a film about visual effects, the camera lens and the human eye, and the difference between the things that they both see.
An ironic New York City thriller involving a mafioso and a restless, witty lawyer.
Shot at the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY and Fishbach Gallery, New York City. The dancers talk about spinning as a dance form.
In the 1930's Sara Spencer Washington was a black woman millionaire who parlayed her line of hair and beauty products into international cosmetology schools which gave thousands of black women financial independence by owning their own salons.
1999-2008, 6.5 min, 16mm-to-digital.
A greedy landlord wants to evict a bicycle shop from his property and replace it with a high-rent-paying art gallery. The environment-conscious owner of the bike shop outwits the avaricious landlord in a high-speed bike chase.
A graceful cat in a leopard print jacket who lived fast and died slow, Frankie dances, prances, and jives into your heart – only to fall prey to the ills of stardom and nose-dive into the cruel world of drugs and obscurity, leaving several wives to battle over his estate. — Anthology Film Archives
"…such varied delights as noted film critic and theoretician Laleen Jayamanne performing a Sri Lankian ritual dance on a tenement rooftop after polishing off a 32-oz. beer in 'Yaknetuma From the Lower East Side'…" -- Bruce Bennett, the New York Sun
A sightseeing portrait of New York, with lively narration taking the viewer aboard the New York elevated and subway trains. Then the view from the windows becomes slightly abstracted, the voice of the commentator becomes uncertain. Featuring Joseph Cotten (credited 'Cotton') Virginia Nicholson Welles, John Becker and Edwin Denby.
The film travels through the urban canyons, parking decks and rooftops of New York, where choreographer Yoshiko Chuma and actor John Nesci explore the textures and architecture of the city through engagement with movement and objects. Finally, the journey leads to the natural landscape of Maine where Jacob Burckhardt’s camera captures the movements of leaves, water, light, and a raft floating in the fog.
Night on the streets of New York. "Dawn enters the sunk city". A sonnet by Edwin Denby, who reads it and appears briefly in the distance. "old sixth ... the lunge of headlights ... the alive, the dead, answer, ask ..." — The Film-Makers' Cooperative
When honor howls no sylph can resist
2022, 4 min, digital.
Cuckolded king Louis the Fourteenth Street vows vengeance on his murderous second wife Mary Antionette. A beautiful princess imprisoned in a dungeon, a lusty wet nurse, a charming Greenish Blonde Prince, a bleeding royal ghost, and a voracious guillotine round out the cast of this experimental, color-saturated, digital, scary fairy tale of a featurette.
2014-19, 8 min, digital.
The crumbling beauty of a soon-to-be-demolished, impoverished Red Hook neighborhood in the mid-1970s is revealed to us moment by moment, structure by forgotten structure. The circuslike brass music suggests a public face of “a city in progress” while the addicts, thieves, and other lonely people are shown to us as the human cost: those who will be left out of that development.
SSS is composed from footage of movement improvised on the streets of pre-gentrified East Village by Sally Silvers, Pooh Kaye, Harry Shepperd, Lee Katz, Kumiko Kimoto, David Zambrano, Ginger Gillespie, Mark Dendy, and others, painstaking synched to music previously improvised for the project at Noise New York by Tom Cora (cello), Christian Marclay (turntables), and Zeena Parkins (harp). Beauty emerging from rubble. (Henry Hills)
1975, 19.5 min, 16mm-to-digital.
