Selected FILM & VIDEO

2019, 27 mins, Digital Film

What are the experiences that shape the long  lives of those we live among? At 92, my neighbor, Berkeley denizen and  Asian art scholar, Joseph Fischer, attempts to recount the life-changing  experience of being among the first US Naval seamen sent into Hiroshima  and Nagasaki, two weeks after the atom bombs were dropped. As an  unwitting witness to one of great catastrophes of the 20th century, we  see Fischer examining the photographs he took 75 years ago with a small  Brownie camera. As he struggles to remember what he witnessed, he is  still trying to comprehend the surreal sight of the total devastation he  encountered wandering through the remains of these cities. Fischer  scrutinizes the photographs of himself as a young man, standing in front  of the piles of rubble and flattened city-scapes in these “bizarre  tourist photos.” The film moves between the silent exploration of  Fischer’s photographs and his intimate testimony, as he attempts to come  to terms with what he came to understand later about what he saw and what  he no longer can remember.

Available from Canyon Cinema

1994, 43 mins., 16mm 

Adapted from the story Le maladie de la morte by Marguerite Duras.

Text Performed by JD Trow.

Cinematography by Nancy Schiesari 

"THE  MALADY OF DEATH is an adaptation of Marguerite Duras's story of the  same name - her text comprises the voice-over - which is a particular  reading of the story in which word and image, in a complex interplay,  explore male sexuality. The processes of reading are revealed to be  complicated, poetic and political, as an unspecified narrator names and  describes 'the malady' and tells of a man and woman's sexual encounters.  The male 'you' is multiplied, depicted by many men, each photographed  nude, variously fragmented and abstracted, studied and distanced. The  'she' the 'difference,' is literally absent from the image but present  metaphorically, 'possessed' but not known. While societal connections  between possessing sexuality, economically, and by force are explored in  relation to male sexuality, the implication of the act of looking  permeate all these discourses. The erotic depiction of the male body for  both the camera and the viewer, the displaced and disembodied  representation of the woman, and the structured alternation of image and  black - at times like an eye opening and closing, but also suggestive  of what culturally can and cannot be imagined - create a viewer who  cannot easily possess the story, but who must rather read and reread." -  Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive 

Available from Canyon Cinema

1986, 64 mins., 16mm

This film was a modest attempt to better understand a situation that my  own country's government and media have mystified and depersonalized by  reducing the representations of Nicaragua to a war zone rather than a  place where people live their lives. Using the process of making the  film as a starting point for my own engagement with my subject, a world  so different from my own, I begin with a question: As a North American,  what is my relationship to Nicaragua?

"With the camera never  settling on a solid, classical composition, Skoller conveys his personal  response to the reality of daily life in Nicaragua. ... In a  purposefully tentative and oblique visual style, using a reflexive  voice-over soundtrack, Skoller constantly questions his place as  filmmaker. ... An acute political awareness informs the act of seeing in  Skoller's film." - David Schwartz, Curator of the American Museum of  the Moving Image
Available from Canyon Cinema

1984, 37 mins, 16mm 

As in everyday life, TOPOGRAPHY/SURFACE WRITING is a series of events,  impressions, voices, ideas, sounds, images, texts and textures. In their  constant flow they become a surface upon which we always move. Like  Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," from which it is loosely adapted, the  main theme is violence: physical, psychological, and environmental.  However, the film does not give a portrait of violence in the  conventional sense of representing it as spectacle or drama and  therefore separate from the everyday, nor does it attempt to analyze or  aestheticize the problem. Rather, the film attempts to show how  integrated violence is in the very fabric of our lives. As the title  suggests, TOPOGRAPHY/SURFACE WRITING is not an essay, but rather a  mapping of new possibilities for seeing and thinking through the use of  cinema that is neither authoritarian nor passive, but rather a  challenge.

Available from Canyon Cinema

1982, 18 mins., 16mm    

MOVING IN begins as a documentary on the growing problem of homelessness  in San Francisco in the wake of Reagan-era budget cuts and ends as a  meditation on the filmmaker's own relationship to the situation. Having  moved into a "bad" area as a middle-class artist searching for  affordable living and working space, the filmmaker is confronted with  his own luxury of choice about where he places himself in the world  while surrounded by people who have no real choice.

The film uses  the filmmaker's "liberal guilt" about his own privilege to raise  questions about whether or not it is possible to represent a world that  the filmmaker has had little connection to without further exploiting,  sentimentalizing or reinforcing the dehumanization of people who are  victims of a political system that privileges greed over equality.  MOVING IN is at once a film about homelessness and a question about how  that situation is represented.   

Available from Canyon Cinema

 2007, 32 mins., Digital Video, 2007 

Using a mix of archival film materials and my own footage shot in contemporary Vietnam during the last five years, The Promise of Happiness Pt # 1,Vietnam explores the transformations currently taking place in Vietnam 30 years after liberation from centuries of colonial domination. The film explores questions about how we might think about the aftermath of protracted war. What were the ideals, hopes, and failures? How do things change over the course of war? What is left after? How did the ideals that motivated the Vietnamese to create a new kind of society fare? The film expresses the ambivalence that so permeated my own experience of Vietnam—at once feeling the excitement and energy of the new moment of Vietnam’s opening up to the new global economy, and the sense of the loss of an idealism that for me, embodied the Vietnamese struggle for a Socialist society.

The Promise of Happiness challenges us to ask if and in what ways do the idealism and aspiration of those past struggles for social justice and new forms of society still inhere in the fabric of contemporary society and in the consciousness of its people? What of this legacy, forgotten or rejected, remains latent, to be rethought in the present?

Contact me directly if interested

The Weather is Clearing Up! 4mins. Video 2006 

The Unquiet: Speaking Mauscheln* 3-1/2-hr. segments. Video,1997

Threnody for Maria Baratoff  5mins. 1997 

Gulf Crisis TV Project, Paper Tiger/ Deep Dish, Segment On U.S. Jews Opposing Gulf War 1991

Nicaraguan Video Series, Prod. With Xchange TV Collective 1986

The Whites Of Their Eyes, w/M. Wallner, 8 Mins., S/8mm Color, Sound. 1984

Historical Film Study: Bringing The Blues To Jazz, 6 Mins., 16mm, B&W, Sound. 1981

Image-Sound Film Part #3, 11 Mins., 16mm, Color, Sound. 1980

Historical Film Study: Centering, 6 Mins., 16mm, Color, Silent. 1980

Events Happen, 6 Mins., 16mm, B&W, Sound. 1979

Seven Rolls/End To End, 18 Mins., 16mm, Color, Silent. 1979

Emulsion Surface: 1905, Me, My Brother, Leon & The Lumieres A Hand Process(ed)  11 Mins. 16mm, B&W, Color. 1977

Variations On A Pan: A Rhythm 10 Mins. 16mm, Color, Silent. 1977

All of my 16mm and Digital films are available from Canyon Cinema in San Francisco:

https://canyoncinema.com/ 

Canyon Cinema Foundation
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San Francisco, CA 94124

Contact us by phone (415-626-2255)

Canyon Cinema Foundation is dedicated to educating the public about independent, non-commercial, experimental, avant-garde, and artist-made moving images. We manifest this commitment by providing access to our unrivaled collection to universities and cultural organizations worldwide, as well as cultivating scholarship and appreciation of artist-made cinema. We ensure the experience of rare film works in their original medium while also reaching new audiences through our growing digital distribution program.

Canyon Cinema’s unique collection of artist-made films – comprised of digital media, 8mm, Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm prints – traces the vital history of the experimental and avant-garde filmmaking movements from 1921 to the present.  With a strong emphasis on American West Coast and San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers, we are the access point to 3,400 ground-breaking works representing 280 artists.