Cathy Lee Crane

History haunts the border town of Columbus, N.M. when Mexican riders on horseback cross the line to commemorate Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid. As border dwellers and their divergent accounts of the Villa raid are introduced, the existential borderline that shapes their lives comes into focus.

This elegiac audio-visual poem narrates grief in esoteric vignettes, like lost reels from an occult early cinema. Inspired by and named after the final line in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Lament, white city mourns a personal loss during the AIDS pandemic. This grieving process takes on something more private and existential, across mysterious scenes in New York City and the Arizona desert.

A poetic adaptation of the fountain of youth fable, Adrift follows a woman who has come to Rome to die. On her journey through the city, she encounters a young girl who taunts her with visions of lost innocence. This film was staged on locations of Pasolini’s films and includes an original score by composer Ben Kamen. Adrift is a quiet opera at the center of an evolving study of the human gesture, the unconscious way in which hands hold things and the body moves. This direct encounter with the materiality of existence, the way it resides in the body is profoundly political. Pasolini wrote: "The education given to a boy by things, by objects, by physical reality—in other words, the material phenomena of his social condition—make that boy corporeally what he is and what he will be all his life. What has to be educated is his flesh as the mold of his spirit. Social condition is recognizable in the flesh of an individual."

An adaptation of the fountain of youth tale and a lyrical meditation on the quotidian gestures of strangers. These lives, captured in the streets of Rome, constitute the counter-shot for the landscape through which a fictional character wanders, adrift. After meeting a young girl in the Campo di Fiori market, a woman who has come to Rome to die, journeys through its many fountains, haunted by visions of lost innocence. Staged on locations from the Roman films of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

This elegiac essay explores the year leading up to Pier Paolo Pasolini's murder in 1975. Through staging scenes from his last, unfinished novel, to exploring his polemical essays, and his first and last film, this experimental biography documents the final words of one of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century.

Vita revisits her first attempt at filmmaking 15 years prior. Shooting a semi-autobiographical film starring her friend Dina, Vita’s eager but inexperienced approach causes the production to spiral into chaos, leading to significant disruptions and a near-fatal accident.

Water and paths of migration converge to shape the borderlands along the U.S./Mexico boundary when staging actors in a politicized landscape leads to the rupture of fiction for fact.

Tra synthesizes the narrative of Pasolini’s film Teorema (1968) by highlighting its interstitial moments. The act of running that appears throughout the film is isolated and deployed to expose the film’s subtextual currents.

A mosaic portrait of people who live along the US/Mexico border. Each of the fourteen channels represents one of the many crossing towns from Tijuana on the left to El Paso & the Rio Grande on the right.

This sensualist's dream follows Louise Brooks look-alike Rodney O'Neal Austin on his search for the Beloved. From the cabaret to opium dens and dancing graces this homage to early sound film explores a world teeming with the mysteries of longing and death. Winner Best Black-and-White Cinematography (Cork International Film Festival 1996).

This experimental documentary charts a trip around Baja California to the Tropic of Cancer line on the summer solstice. Largely photographed in-camera, the film develops its narrative drive through the rhythm of shot length and composition. Aided by an original score from Beth Custer and a wicked sound design by Jeremiah Moore that utilizes sounds form the Cassini space probe, the piece takes on a humorously sinister tone; as if the historical marker were an alien landing.

In 1915, a German saboteur comes to Manhattan. Co-opting progressive labor politics, he provokes a neutral America into World War I.

Sfuge presents fleeting glimpses of Pasolini as he walks through New York City, appropriating moments from Agnès Varda’s film Pasolini (1967).

A film adaptation of Andre Breton's surrealist novel "Nadja". This fictional memoir gives voice to the woman who, speaking from the sanitarium as World War II approaches, recounts her love affair with Breton through a matrix of archival and staged images of Paris. World Premiere: Viennale '00. Forum des Images (Paris) Permanent Collection

A collision of separate pasts, this film pieces together fragments of the director’s own images and text from the East German town of Halle with those produced by Bauhaus painter Lyonel Feininger in 1930.