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| DER TIEFE SEE/THE DEEP SEA (22:00, digital video, 2012) |
| A consideration of heimat and cultural identity through the idiosyncrasies of observation, language and memory. Clinical analyses of land and cityscape expose the tension between reality and an impossible ideal. Neutrality breaks into convulsions: a scream at midnight, the evening bells. The man in uniform has work to do. |
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| FALLEN STAR (8:00, HD video, 2012) |
| On November 15, 2011, Do Ho Suh’s artwork Fallen Star was installed on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. His most ambitious and collaborative piece to date, Fallen Star is perched atop the seventh floor of the Jacobs School of Engineering. Both a document of the event and a visual and thematic exploration of Suh’s installation, this film tells its story through the voices of those who helped make it a reality. |
| Director: Vera Brunner-Sung / Producer: Valerie Stadler / Producer: Steak House / Executive Producer: Do Ho Suh / Associate Producer: Rosemary Suh / Director of Photography: Eric S. Zimmerman / Editor: Tamara M. Maloney / Featuring: Mary L. Beebe, Mathieu Gregoire, Don Franken, John Walsh / Additional camera: Julie Kirkwood / Camera operators: Gilbert Salas, Tod Bell, Jared Washburn, Tony Giordano, Jalal Pashandi, Steve Mattson, Alan Marsala, Love Ablan, Camilo Collazos, Cameron Dozier, David McDonald, Norbert Shieh, Daniel Colmenares / 1st assistant camera A: Eric Stapelfeldt / 1st assistant camera B: Bret Suding / 2nd assistant camera: Rick Herron / Camera PA: David Adesman / Assistant Editor: Rob O’Connor / Location sound mixer: Robert Mason / Additional sound: Adam Douglass / Music: Zoe Keating / Sound mix: Suny Behar / Color Correction: Suny Behar / Assistant Media Management: Andrew Quesenberry / Production Manager: Danielle Corches / Production Accountant: Savannah Collins / Production Coordinator: Tatiana Kelly / Still Photographer: Melanie Wilbur / Catering: Kim Hosch @ Be Delish / Transportation: Dani Kelly, Maggie Habermann, Elsa Valdez / Production assistants: Mingzhao Don, Kiah Jones, Derek Nunn, Ernesto Gonzales, Matt Payte, Fletcher Alliston |
| Exhibitions 2012-2013 “Home Within Home,” 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan 2012 “Home Within Home,” Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul |
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| HOME BASE SERIES (digital c-prints, 13″ x 20″, 2011) |
| The Cold War era saw a tremendous build up of military structures and facilities, many in the style of a regional vernacular. These units — offices, terminals, inns, dorms, chapels, etc. — were often as nondescript as the suburbs that were growing up around them. Yet they were privileged spaces, bounded and secure, with an aura of vital national importance. Printed on postcards used for correspondence between families and friends, their depictions promoted a neutral and comforting façade for a vast political war machine. Considered here as documentary evidence, the images of Home Base are disrupted through rephotography, cropping and enlargement. Its visual analysis points to a discourse on landscape, society, and power. |
| Exhibitions 2011 “Telephone,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA |
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| MINONG, I SLEPT (5:00, 16mm, silent, 2010) |
| On the remote wilderness island called Minong (Isle Royale), remains of human industry are absorbed into the forest and shoreline. An inquiry into the push and pull between people and nature, land and sea, intimacy and vastness. |
| “If a body of water is an imaginary space, then any island it surrounds becomes its record. Its shoreline is a map of footprints, its pockmarked woods a museum of minor industry. Both the visitor and the dreamer know: there will still be fingerprints on the windows, even once the doors have blown in.” (Ben Russell & Ben Rivers) |
| Screenings 2012 Public Works, San Francisco 2011 “A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness,” Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival 2011 Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival 2011 “Reckon the Earth,” Artists’ Television Access, San Francisco 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival 2011 Experiments in Cinema 6.3, Albuquerque, NM 2011 Images Festival, Toronto 2011 13th Wisconsin Film Festival, Madison, WI 2010 28th Torino Film Festival, Italy |
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| COMMON GROUND (27:00, 16mm & super-8 on DV, 2008) |
| Abandonment, decay; demolish, rebuild: Common Ground follows the life cycle of land in Southern California to observe the way economics are shaping the terrain. A portrait of place and process, where perspectives shift to question our relationship with the past, designs on the future, and notions of progress in today’s world. |
| “An elderly man dedicates himself to his hobby, searching for buried objects with his metal detector. This is the beginning of a trip into Southern California, a land whose cyclical process of abandonment, decay, demolition and reconstruction is a sign of how the economy is making a mark on the land.” (Torino Film Festival) |
| Screenings 2011 Planet In Focus Environmental Film Festival Green Market, Toronto 2011 Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival, Gainesville, FL 2010 “Southern California Landscapes via Experimental Film,” 7 Dudley Cinema, Venice, CA 2010 19th Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, Hot Springs, AR 2010 12th Wisconsin Film Festival, Madison, WI 2010 Experiments in Cinema v5.1, Albuquerque, NM 2009 27th Torino Film Festival, Torino, Italy 2009 Vidéothèque du Festival International du Documentaire (FID) de Marseille, France 2009 “The Best of Sheffield Doc/Fest,” Branchage Jersey Film Festival, UK 2009 “New Ways of Seeing,” Sunset Hall, Los Angeles 2009 Antimatter Festival, Victoria, BC 2009 Los Angeles Filmforum |
| THE GARDEN CITY (13:30, 16mm, 2007) |
| To what extent can we control the lived environment, and how does this impact our lives? A letter recounts a journey from American suburbia to a foreign city, becoming a meditation on growth and development that suggests all landscapes are human. |
| “Traveling to Bangalore, India from Valencia, California, Brunner-Sung’s brief essay meditates on a quote from Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism — ‘The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development.’” (Images Festival) |
| Screenings 2011 ARTLAB+ Film Forum, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. 2010 “Southern California Landscapes via Experimental Film,” 7 Dudley Cinema, Venice, CA 2009 Last Friday Shorts at TAP, Southend-on-Sea, England 2009 “Cast Glances, New Films,” Spool Mfg, Johnson City, NY 2009 “The Underground City,” DIVUS, London, England 2009 $100 Film Festival, Calgary 2008 “My Footnote to David Askevold,” Outpost for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2008 Images Festival, Toronto 2008 Los Angeles Filmforum 2008 Urban Research at Director’s Loung, Berlin |
| HARD STARES & BROKEN MIRRORS (6:00, digital video, 2007) |
| A personal reflection on the Western genre, inspired by a road trip taken through the Mojave Desert to Sequoia National Forest. |
| Screenings 2012 “Constructing Situations and Making a Scene: Play and Performance in Non Fiction Video,” Varsity Theater, Carbondale, IL 2010 “Driven by What’s Inside,” Side Street Projects, Pasadena, CA 2007 California Institute of the Arts Bijou Festival, Valencia, CA |
| UNTITLED (PERLMAN PL.) (1:00, 16mm, 2006) |
| In Southern California, the housing boom generated a seemingly endless repetition of pastel stucco boxes. This micro-portrait draws attention to the human side of this standardized environment, revealing the intimacy of anonymity in one suburban fortress. |
| Screenings 2011 “There’s No There, There: LA Films LA,” Big City Forum & Cinema Speakeasy at the Goethe-Institut, Los Angeles 2010 ATA Film & Video Festival, San Francisco 2006 California Institute of the Arts Bijou Festival, Valencia, CA |
| LONGSHORE (4:30, super-8 on DV, 2004) |
| A tour of a midwestern neighborhood navigates the relationship between individual and community, privacy and intimacy. |
| “Affectionately, shakily shot, this flickering document serves as a memory of a memory, preserving a kind of quintessential past; the woods behind neighbors’ houses, the voices of ghosts from behind screen doors and the gentle machinations of our families recorded in light. It is easy to remember Brunner-Sung’s film even if we are only seeing it for the first time. Her actors have been kind enough to be at once themselves and also archetypes for all of the people in our lives who lived in houses with front doors, or for cats that we don’t see anymore—people who have sunk beneath the ground, or who have become bodies in our mind. The frames of life are crisp, the edges have clear names like ’1983′ or ’1992′—it is only inside the borders, Brunner-Sung reminds us, that we find this perfectly grainy thing called our lives.” (James Hilger, NY Arts Magazine) |
| Screenings 2012 “Home,” GAZE at Artists’ Television Access, San Francisco 2007 Starting from Scratch Film Festival, Amsterdam 2006 “Special Reconnaisance,” Gigantic Artspace, New York, NY 2005 Boxcar Film Series, Detroit, MI |
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