Marco Brambilla

In 1996, brash L.A. detective John Spartan and maniac killer Simon Phoenix are both sentenced to decades in a cryogenic prison as punishment for a rescue mission gone wrong. When Phoenix escapes 36 years later to wreak havoc on the future, Spartan is awakened to capture his nemesis the old-fashioned way.

After a plane crash, two opposing half-brothers find themselves on an amazing lost island where enlightened pacifist humans and intelligent talking dinosaurs have created a utopian medieval society. But imminent disaster approaches.

After a plane crash strands two brothers on a lost continent where dinosaurs and humans live together in harmony, they disagree over escape plans. (Condensed cut of original mini-series to be a feature length as seen on Peacock).

A rich brat fakes her own kidnapping, but in the process ends up locked in the trunk of a car that gets stolen.

A compilation of erotic films intended to illuminate the points where art meets sexuality.

A meditation on the female body as a source of both power and pain that focuses on the tragic figure of renowned American-Greek opera singer Maria Callas (1923-77), whose stunning soprano voice captivated audiences around the world in the mid-20th century while her life was wracked by scandal and personal suffering.

Frank Scott, a wealthy American, crashes his plane into the Caribbean. His two teenaged sons, Karl and David, survive, only to find themselves castaways on Dinotopia. Karl and David are constantly at odds, even as they struggle to adjust to life in their strange new world where talking dinosaurs live side by side in an uneasy alliance with humans.

The work follows Greek philosopher Galen’s classification of four personality dispositions—sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic. In the film, Blanchett is seen playing four characters, each representing one of the temperaments. Denoted by color, we see the actor’s face appear on the screen bathed in yellow portraying sanguine, red for choleric, blue as melancholic, and green for phlegmatic. As Blanchett’s personalities are displayed in a series of synchronized images, she begins establishing each distinguished character.

The history of humankind is illustrated as a vast side-scrolling video mural depicting the spectacle of human conflict across time through the lens of cinema.

3-channel high-definition video installation

Inspired by Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), Superstar was commissioned by Creative Time to be presented on the Jumbotron screen in Times Square, New York City. The subject appears perpetually frozen in time while the document of the moment itself slowly descends. Filmed in a pre-Matrix era, the performance in Superstar was captured with 180 cameras mounted in a 360 degree ring that show a 1/500 second wedge of time.

'Sync' is made up of sampled images from sex scenes in mainstream and adult films. The formulaic and often derivative nature of the way this subject is interpreted in cinema is emphasised, creating a strong subliminal impression which gradually builds to a state of sensory overload. 'Sync' uses samples as short as single frames edited together to create the impression of motion. The original continuity and narrative in the source material is eliminated, and a new visual choreography emerges.

Set against a stark, monochromatic background with a hairless Poly as the centerpiece, the video gives you an unsettling feeling that something disturbing is stirring beneath her initial placidity. Poly then takes us through a range of emotions of what can only be described as a carthartic episode before ending on the same unnerving note it began with. Brambilla composes the video brilliantly, creating mesh-like layers of Poly’s face that scatter and converge as he explores the idea of mulitplicity within the human psyche.

In the carnival act “Wall of Death,” first performed in the 1930s, a motorcyclist rides around the inside of a wooden drum, maintaining a delicate state of equilibrium between centrifugal force and gravity. The video is made up of a series of motion loops that become progressively shorter, creating the illusion of continuous motion: The rider is caught in a never-ending, never decelerating circle. The editing technique, inspired by the Kinetoscope films popular during the time the act was widely performed.

Cathedral was filmed at the Toronto Eaton Centre mega mall during the Christmas shopping season. Here is consumerism as spectacle: Throngs of shoppers circulate in slow motion, in superimposed and multi-layered images that transform the mall into a kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory space. The cyclical montage is inspired by the time and motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth, which date from the American industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century. The video is installed in a mirrored box, bringing the video into three dimensions and further multiplying the images.

In this computer-generated “time-lapse study” of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, the Eagle spacecraft and the American flag planted alongside are shown as they slowly disintegrate. Beginning with the original image transmitted on television, the video compresses years into seconds, until nothing remains but a pile of rubble—a cynical commentary on the decay of American idealism from the ’60s to the present day. The sound is taken from recorded radio transmissions between mission control and the lunar base, but the dialogue has been removed; all that remains are the beeping radio carrier signals, static, and interference.

Civilization is a multi-layered tableau of interconnecting images that illustrates a contemporary, satirical take on the concepts of eternal punishment and celestial reward. More than 300 individual channels of looped video are blended into an expansive landscape that continuously scrolls upward, from the depths of hell to the gates of heaven.

FLashback deals with the collective subconscious and memory using film iconography, the work is presented in a thirty-six block video matrix spanning six distinct phrases. Mirroring the arc of life, each phrase evokes specific psychological responses depending on the associations each individual makes between the video loops.

Film footage of Sylvester Stallone in Brambilla's 1993 debut feature-film, Demolition Man, is re-photographed through the gate of a 35mm projector and presented as the Sequel. The movement of the film gradually begins to slow until the light from the projector lamp begins to disintegrate the celluloid film.

Filmed at John F. Kennedy Airport, Approach catches passengers arriving from long-haul flights as they enter the terminal looking for contact with someone familiar. The footage was shot on camcorders equipped with telephoto lenses and the footage is slowed down to emphasize the moment of transition that each subject experiences as they arrive. The installation consists of 4 screens, with a 1-second delay between the identical images in each screen.