Rebecca Barten
Rebecca Barten is co-presenter of TOTAL MOBILE HOME/MicroCINEMA.
Human Flies
1987, 16mm., color, sound on cassette.
This film is about the dizziness which results from controlling things which cannot be controlled. I made it when I was 25 years old by recycling, among other things, some very rare and interesting found footage of aerial stunts from the estate of the Film Collagist, Stan Vanderbeek who died the year that I started making films.
YOU (be) YOU
1989, 16mm, 5 min., b&w, optical sound.
Typed directly on clear leader which had a pre-existing optical sound track from an Avon perfume commercial: "Spray on somewhere cologne mist and you're adrift on a cloud floating, floating in celestial fragrance... and where are you?...". The word YOU has the action of a perfume atomizer.
Seventeen Typewriter Films
1989, 16mm., 21 min., color, silent.
These are seventeen short films which I made in very rapid succession. I threaded various lengths of (mainly) found film through an old electric typewriter whose roller I whitened and illuminated. This became a means of responding directly with concrete language to visual systems and dynamic forcefields which I discovered as I navigated through the film. At the time, I was particularly interested in patterns which could be discovered in film shot by non-artists such as farmers and educators.
IT'S A NOTHING NOTHING GAME
1992, 15 min., B&W, silent, sound on cassette.
The setting of the film is a poodle grooming parlor in Baltimore. A small and stoic white dog is my subject.
Put Your Lovely Pie in My Eye
1992, 5 min., video.
Perhaps because of its title, this video was confiscated at the Canadian border as probable pornography. Although they returned it, my traveling companions and I were still fined 450 Canadian dollars for not declaring our baffling cargo.
700 Measured Sprays
1993, 7min., video.
A woman claims that her perfume is so concentrated that one small bottle contains "700 measured sprays". The rest of the film is a demonstration of the emptying of the contents of the atomizer.
Rebecca Barten
TOTAL MOBILE HOME microClNEMA (w/David Sherman)
51 McCoppin Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
List of Film/Videomakers
