David Sherman

Earl Williams is a dreamer teenager obsessed with monsters, who fantasizes his life as if he were living in the world of the monsters of Universal Studios. Although being an excellent student, his intolerant and nasty school teacher Mrs. Perdue does not like him and punishes him for any minor fault. His supportive father Les Williams is also a dreamer, who has never been successful in life. When his father dies, his mother becomes lost with two boys, and tries to change the behavior of Earl. One day, the boy finds the "true Frankenstein" lost by a Carnival, and decides to bring the monster back to life.

Set in modern times, Alex finds King Arthur's sword Excalibur and must prove himself worthy of it.

A vehicle of consciousness navigates the vertiginous labyrinths of San Francisco. ROMAN CHARIOT was filmed over several months with a spy camera mounted on filmmaker David Sherman's son's baby carriage.

A chemical Western in 16mm whose primitive processes reveal a profound instability of language within desert landscapes. Made through the hand processing and primitive contact printing of outdated laboratory print stock, The Silver Returns examines the phenomena of "letter mountains" that proliferate the old mining towns of the American Southwest. Much of the silver mined here, became the image-bearing material of photographic film. The silver returns to find the instability of the film's emulsion mirroring the desert's toxic environmental remains.

A FLUXUS inspired performance framing of Yoko Ono daily caught on film in January of 1969, extracted sequentially from Peter Jackson’s film Get Back (2021) from footage originally directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

A charged meditation on impermanence and entropy explored through Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and early video art. Using hand processed 16mm film and analog video synthesis, DiElectric Drift asks what an artist is capable of creating in time, and what do monumental yet fleeting gestures ultimately mean.

REVOLVER incorporates diary observations, found and physically manipulated images as well as experiments of shooting through handmade pinhole lenses. This film is an attempt to come to terms with the isolation and displacement that confronts the contemporary urban dweller; a personal journey through social, physical and psychic landscapes that are both beautiful and tragic. Light motivates growth and decay. Abstractions push and pull in the passage of time toward an exceedingly anxious future.

Wasteland Utopias explores the intersection of two radically different utopian thinkers: mega-developer Del Webb and outsider psychiatrist/naturalist Wilhelm Reich. Each found his way into southern Arizona's Sonoran Desert in the late 1950s—Webb building his colossal, panoptically-planned retirement community Sun City and Reich conducting his weather manipulation experiments using Orgone Energy. Using found footage, documentary interviews, and narrative tableaux, the film interweaves contradictory narratives and critically poetic observations.

An urgent letter that will never be read. This film, the grains of memory, an unconscious faith and terror, tries to bridge the pain of a broken family communion.

"Fragments of unidentified and yet strangely familiar films, pregnant with allusion and implication, drift into one another, obscured by the haze of rephotography, electricity and the residue of (al)chemical formulae, renamed time and memory. Tuning the Sleeping Machine resurrects the cinema projected on the unconscious, a series of images defined by the gaze of an eye, the presence in an empty room, the creeping darkness that shrouds a strange face." - Brian Frye

A work inspired by the uncanny juxtaposition of the political murder of America’s 25th President during the fantastically realized 1901 World’s Fair, as filmed by Thomas Alva Edison. uncovers a hidden continuum of cinema, terrorism and spectacle.

The Graceless is a video tapestry of digital and analogue artifacts rephotographed and collaged from discarded 16mm educational films, Air Force test footage, live broadcast streams of pre-invasion television news and reality entertainment.

Assembled from the contents of 4 boxes of 50s and 60s film shot by San Francisco filmmaker Dion Vigne, spinning through a lost history, a disappearance of names and faces and works and words of the characters who comprised one of the great chapters in American Underground filmmaking. At the center of this San Francisco re-history is the unknown Beat filmmaker Dion Vigne.

A residue of a Southwest landscape.

Death in the Archive is an inquiry into forgotten films and artists’ lives, tracing a path from personal to institutional archives. The film unfolds as a historical montage and diaristic mapping of visionary Beat filmmakers of San Francisco’s North Beach, conjuring the celluloid bodies and creative metabolisms that persist amid the human and material mortality of artists, images, and fragile film stocks. Fragments of Dion Vigné, Jordan Belson, and Christopher MacLaine intertwine with personal histories and cinematic visions, constructing an archaeology of memory. Preservation of both media and life becomes an ephemeral transmission — the fragile survival of memory. Gestures, voices, and images endure, transcending time and material limits, as the film bears witness to absence, endurance, and the persistent life of creative imagination.