A NOTE ON THE TITLE OF THIS EXHIBITION

As time goes, one’s essential preoccupations begin to become more and more visible. Mine, it seems, is the preoccupation with what we still have left in our self-destructive civilization that really and essentially matters to the more subtle aspects of our souls. So I have gravitated to the personal, private aspects of life, of my own life, lives of my friends; away from the big thematic, dramatic, psychological, political and etc. and etc. events. The world’s bustle.

I think that it was this same preoccupation that made me also gravitate to the diaristic forms of film, video, literature and whatever else I do. I have to add that there is one more aspect to my preoccupation with the small and personal: I stay totally away from what I consider negative in our civilization. At the risk of being called romantic and even sentimental I exclude all violence and horror of my times – and I have seen a lot of it. I leave it to other artists who seem to prefer working with those aspects of our civilization, myself preferring moments in nature and life around me that are paradisic, full of sun that affect us in subtle poetic angelic ways and thus contribute to the existence of the invisible Paradise on earth alive.

A NOTE ON FROZEN FILM FRAMES

Now, why am I making these prints, which I usually call “frozen film frames”? Not for money, of course, since very few of them have sold. I am making them because I am obsessed with the possibilities of having two, three frames/ images together, detaching them from the context, and letting them be by themselves. I am not collaging them now, of course, they were collaged by my single frame filming technique during the moment of filming. Thus they are not calculated collagings but spontaneous collagings done during the intense moments of filming. They do one thing when they are in the film and they become completely something else when they are detached and enlarged and framed and presented in a gallery situation. The fact that these are film frames remains always present in the viewer’s mind & eye since I keep in the print the sound track and anything else that could be in the strip of the film from which the print is made.

How do these images relate to photography? I am not sure how. They are like cousins. They are between cinema and photography. In any case, it’s not my business to figure out the relationships or differences, In any case, it’s not my business to figure out the relationships or differences, I am not a photography historian. All I know is I am obsessed with making these images and it’s up to others to see where it all fits. These images, these prints are a fact and image critics will have to deal with them whether they like it or not. Especially since I have more images than most of the photographers…

A NOTE ON RILLETTES

Usually when I edit my films, when I begin to splice the various pieces together, I cut off a frame or two from the ends of each piece – they are usually damaged or otherwise unspliceable – and throw them on the floor. All filmmakers do that. But that late night in 2000 while editing AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD…I looked at the floor, at hundreds and hundreds of little ends and pieces of film and suddenly a scene from my childhood came to my memory. Before big holidays, usually before Christmas, my father and older brothers used to slaughter a pig. And it was mother who used then to cut the pig into pieces and do whatever one does with the meats – she knew that very well. But after everything was done and stored away there used to be left all kinds of miscellaneous little pieces. She used to them collect them all, put them all into a big clay pot, and place it into our own big clay oven. It baked there, slow fire, for hours and hours, sometimes days. The result was this incredible stuff that you spread on bread and, ah, it tasted heavenly! Now, the French still do that and they call it Rillettes.

So as I was contemplating and remembering all that, I suddenly thought: my mother never threw away anything, so why am I throwing away these little pieces of film? So I collected them all into a film can and put it on the shelf. A few days later I began to look at the little pieces and I decided to place them into slide covers and produce slides from them. I made some five hundred slides from these pieces and, of course, I call them Rillettes. What they are, they are related to the film but they do not really appear in the film because I cut them off. So they are something independent and different. In Avignon, at La Beaute exhibition, as the film AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY was screened, I projected all of the slides onto the walls of the auditorium- an old monastery – by way of six slide projectors. The result was of course very different from the usual, normal projection. I decided to project them by themselves – as an adventure in slide “art”…

A LETTER FROM GREENPOINT

2004 80min. Video

In February 2004, after 30 years of my life in Soho, I made a decision to leave Soho and move to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This video is about what it feels like to leave a place in which I’ve spent more time than any other place, and which was also a place of my family life, I am somewhere else now. It’s also about beginning of letting roots [grow] in a new place, new home, with new friends, new thoughts, experiences.

But this video is also about video. I will let Dominique Dubosc, my good Paris friend, talk for me, in a recent letter:

I think you finally mastered this bloody video camera that was for so long (still for most people) no more than a tape recorder. Now it is the eye-camera the Kinoks had been dreaming of. Of course, it is not only a question of mastering the camera. What is more important is the energy behind. The movement of life embracing death itself. It gave me such a push that I feel on the move again. Thank you.

What Dominique meant, and what I mean, is this: When in 1949 I began filming with my Bolex, it took me fifteen years to really master it, so that my Bolex could do for me anything I wanted. When in 1987 I got my first Sony camera I thought it would be different. But no. Only today, after working with the video camera for fifteen years, I feel like it had become an extension of my eye, my body, my first real video work.

-Jonas