Dominic Angerame
Short Biography
Artistic Statement
Films for Rent or Sale:
Contact
Short Biography
Dominic Angerame has been the Executive Director of Canyon Cinema, one
of the world's renowned distributor of avant garde and experimental films
and videotapes. He has been teaching filmmaking and cinema studies since
1984 and currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley Extension,
and is a guest artist at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has also taught
film production at the New College of Californian well as the Graduate School
of Theology in Berkeley.
Since 1969, Dominic Angerame has made more than 25 films that have been
shown and won awards in Film Festival around the world, too numerous to
mention here. He has been awarded film productions grants from The Illinois
Arts Council, 1976; Samuel B. Mayer Foundation, 1981; AFI Western Regional
Fellowship, 1987; AFI Western Regional Fellowship, 1989 and a Film Arts
Foundation Grant, 1993.
Artistic Statement
My latest films are a series of five works that I call "A City Symphony".
The "City Symphony", is a collection of five separate and distinct
films that I have made since 1987. The subject matter centers around the
city environment in a constant state of change. My work is influenced by
the avant garde filmmakers of the 1920's and 1930's and this symphony is
an homage to those persons who believe that through their actions in the
world, they can affect a change towards a positive end. "City Symphony"
focuses upon rich black and white images of construction and destruction
of modern structures in the urban environment. They with ritualization of
manual labor, construction activities, the human cycle of building, tearing
down, replacing with rebuilding, and maintenance of structures as seen in
the contemporary urban world.
CONTINUUM (87) centers on the people performing hard manual labor, such
as tarring roofs, digging up streets, etc. and the visual aesthetics are
explored in rich details. DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT (90) shows how in the modern
methods of construction activities men and women have seem to have become
insignificant behind mammoth tools of destruction. The machines have taken
over and the persons running the equipment are no more minor players in
the arena. The third part of this quartet is PREMONITION (1995) in which
the concrete world of the American infra-structure and its demise are made
strangely poetic in this expressionist documentary which shows the vacant
San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway after it has outlived its usefulness,
before its destruction. In an atmosphere of daylight, mystery, I reveal
how the past is encircled by the future. Lyrical, ominous, comic, PREMONITION
works on the attentive viewer like a remembrance of something that is yet
to happen, a silent, telling daydream. IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS (1997)
centers its visuals on the demolition of the Embarcedero Freeway which,
was structurally damaged during the 1989 earthquake. Line of Fire (97) the
last piece of the "City Symphony" is an visual footnote to these
previous four titles. All of the above films rely heavily on the technique
of montage that is at times seemingly random, yet most deliberate. The sequencing
of images that work on the viewer's sensibility, elicit powerful feelings
and ideas about the contemporary society in which we live. A conventional
narrative style, aural or visual, will not be found in these films. Truly
experimental, yet far from arbitrary, and possessed of an intensely individual
aesthetic, the "City Symphony" packs a punch that reveals an underpinning
of consistent social and political awareness, and a driving poetic vision
lifted from the self out to the world beyond the self. In all of his work,
one can see a painterly delight in the creation of the visual mix, and a
painterly style in the execution of the celluloid artwork.
Films for Rent or Sale
The following film titles are for rent and available for sale on videotape
by contacting:
Canyon Cinema, Inc.
2325 Third St #338
San Francisco, CA 94107
415-626-2255
Voyeuristic Tendencies
"VOYEURISTIC TENDENCIES is not so much a film about voyeurism as it
is about our tendency to be voyeuristic. That tendency, nurtured by the
filmmaker's carefully crafted succession of visual teases and exploited
by the camera's ability to become our eyes, becomes increasingly evident
as the film progresses. The camera teases the viewer, in this case, co-voyeur,
not with sexual or erotic innuendo, but rather with graphic and aesthetic
challenges. The partially opened window of a woman's dressing room forces
us to realize our urge to see more. That urge comes not so much from a longing
for exposed breasts, but as a need to make the picture whole, and to know
more about these hidden worlds. This type of cinematically-induced self-realization
makes VOYEURISTIC TENDENCIES a powerfully human film.
"Most of the people we view appear to be merely going through the
motions. Their actions seem hauntingly void of emotion or thought. By temporarily
becoming voyeurs, we were hoping for bigger and better things, e.g., passion...melodrama,
but are left with only a secretary nervously tapping her nails."--Roger
Nieboer
"...a perfect sex film for the '80s. We are teased, cajoled, lured
and finally snubbed as we learn one possible answer to what has happened
to sex; it has been subsumed in our society's current confusion between
artifice and reality." --James Irwin
1984, 16mm, b&w/so, 17m, $45 Available for sale on videotape.
Continuum
"... CONTINUUM, though a film only 15 minutes in length, is one
of the more remarkable works within recent cinematic history. In it, the
world, the workers within the world, and the labor of making the film itself
are equated through montage and a brilliantly concentrated filmic `painterliness'.
The result is an experimental film which is at the same time a document
of propaganda in the sense that, at its conclusion, one finds oneself closer
to the science of the motion of society in its monumentality, with streets,
buildings, the building of them, and the workers and their instruments (drills,
tar) creating a constructivist poetry within the eyes.
"Without sloganeering, the filmmaker has nevertheless organized
harmonies and dissonances of people and objects to the extent that aethestics
leads to the threshold of revolutionary consciousness, so that CONTINUUM
is a film that can be received with enthusiasm in both union hall and cinematheque.
And that is no mean achievement in a time when sophisticated cultural forms
are often so removed from the real needs of the populace, hiding behind
masks of liberty that do not get out of the prison of the tyrannies of individuality,
and therefore opportunism. 
"The Filmmaker's work...everywhere is informed by a collective sensing
that takes hold of the ordinary and makes it mighty in perception...for
his latest film is a major event."--Jack Hirschman
"...the images of CONTINUUM certainly haunt me: there was the softest
continual casualness of editing (beseeming "casualness", I should
say; for I certainly DO know how difficult this is to accomplish), and a
steadiness of rhythm, always moving/moving but never as anything ominous
to me, or inexorable--something more like very heavy water lapping. Then
the blacks and whites, evolving from some gray 'cloud' into the stark sharp
glistens of 'stars' in the deep black of 'tar'--for the 'tar' too seemed
more night that what you'd photographed. It was amazing to me how little
evidence there was in the film of the Time in which it was made, or even
the location: I found myself tending to forget that these were city-chores,
that this was rooftop work, soforth: just the labor, the continuity of labor,
timeless, and ongoing, withOUT inexorable. Bravo."--Stan Brakhage
"In a superb manner, CONTINUUM builds from the bottom up a complex
and finely woven picture of a day-in-the-life of labor, or a work, in progress,
and without end, microcosmically reflecting a history of any labor and many
an art.
"Through elegantly overlaid, constructionist windows of geometric
form, we see into the turgid furnace of man's multifarious tasks, and, as
in a vision, behold the ballet of his tools and accouterments: steaming
tar, turning pulleys, swishing mops, changing lights and sewer-plates, acetylene
torches and sandblasting serpents, snorting sting of jackhammers and gleaming
jewels amid grime where undinal heat makes the atmosphere buckle.
"And in the midst of it all--the streets, the bridges, the roads,
the roofs, the endless river of communication cables and the windowed monoliths
of jutting superstructure--there stands man, that somewhat Sisyphian, but
irrepressible beast; not so much brawny as dauntless, to wit, wired for
the thing-at-hand, welded to the task made a titan in collective will.
"The film is like a dream you can't put your finger on and can't
forget, because the very truth of it is so evasive, suggestive, labyrinthine.
And then it dawns on you, or rather circumnavigates you: the very fact of
life is heroic, makes heroes of each of us, every man, woman, and child,
from the carpenter unto the architect, and the whole of it is so thoroughly
interdependent, so very closely interwoven." --Ronald Sauer
1987, 16mm, b&w/si, 15m, $45
Available for sale on videotape.
Deconstruction Sight
"A somber, gong-like tone opens DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT: the first
image is a small light in darkness, a delicate flicker that grows to become
a welder's torch. We are led into the film by a suggestive imagistic shorthand:
'the rise of man' is attended by the building of structures, and cities,
a montage of the emblems of civilization. The end of the film brings a series
of unnerving images--one reminiscent of an eerie jack-o-lantern from childhood
memory: a skyscraper looming in the night, a bank of windows lit up like
its gaping mouth. As fog and clouds rush in fast frame across the sky for
a dizzying, synesthetic effect, Kevin Barnard's soundtrack pounds an urgent
wail to the rhythm of climax spending itself in question, in philosophical
ambiguity, not release. An almost palpable centrifugal force seems to move
the final moments of the film into a spinout.
"This is history without narrative, an abstract summation of what
happens when human beings move stuff around and make something of it, grow
tired of what they've made and demolish it using other things they've made,
and then start all over again. What we build, what we destroy, what we find
useful to do both, how we let our interaction with them describe what we
call human--these are some of the ideas Angerame's DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT
suggests." --excerpted from an essay by Barbara Jaspersen Voorhees,
1990
1990, 16mm, b&w/so, 13m, $45 Available for sale on videotape
PREMONITION
Directed, Filmed and Edited by Dominic Angerame; Sound Design by Amy
Leigh Hunter; Music by Ray Guillet and Kevin Barnard; Vocals by Barbara
Jaspersen.
"And when the illusion disappears, that is to say when we see the
being or fact as it really exists outside ourselves, we experience a strange
feeling, complicated half with regret for the vanquished phantom, half with
agreeable surprise for the novelty, for the actual fact."--Charles
Baudelaire
"There's an exquisite despair and a dooming ambiguity suspended
in the cool morning clarity of Dominic Angerame's new film, Premonition.
It's short and bittersweet, like a prelude by Debussy, and promises a broad
integration of the aesthetic elements of his work, now full-fledged and
ascendant. But with the widening view and depth of field and new heights,
there's also a painful consciousness of the vanity of all things human and
of their transcience...Transfixed if not much further along the road, we
feel like those wide-eyed and well-intended Akkadian stargazers teetering
on the edge of a vast new knowledge hovering over us...revealing...revealing...what?
"Premonition, despite its sadness, does not judge modernity and
its Gargantuan feats of engineering, but, on the contrary, admires them,
in the fullest aesthetic sense of the word, like a traveler turning a bend
in the road whereby an enormity of landscape is revealed, overwhelming his
ego, freeing him up toward a larger question while simultaneously diminishing
his particularity in the very grandeur of it all...Angerame even loves the
works of man, as he loves work itself, but there's something awestruck before
these very works that recalls the child's wonder before the suddenness of
natural disaster, like a five year old staring into a friend's gaping wound...
"Modernity, what happened to your highway? You tower over us, then
you disappear. The arch and ribs of the guardrails seemed so very real to
us, like the backbone of a stegosaurus. Gone. The casually defiant smoked
cigarettes upon you. The sincerely healthy played tennis in your shadows.
You were close to our places of work downtown. The seagulls' cries echoed
in your ribcage. Gone. Submerged in the rising waters of time. One more
Atlantean vanity.
"The illusion looms high, but passes like the ships you could see
from those heights...The frozen freighter at anchor beneath the endlessly
(?) spanning bridge, is haunted, and somehow recalls the ghostship from
Nosferatu, even in its perfect otherwordly calm. The film hides its meaning,
comes in like the tide but still disappears...A fragment of a circle, abstracted.
Near the bridge. The highway snakes along. Adolescents tagged it. A jogger
like a flea on its back. And emptied of cars it's its own worst indictment:
now that we're not busy with it, what can it mean?
"The staunch Ferry Building, the swift ferry and its charms, the
blimp, the helicopter.--All of them toys when it cast its cool morning shadow
their way. We were heading out toward our favorite cafe, unknowing it would
come down, like rain...
"Premonition is not just about a defunct highway to have done with,
it's the painful inventory of a desired and questionable relationship gone
down."--Ronald F. Sauer
"The concrete world of the American infra-structure and its demise
are made strangely poetic in this expressionist documentary which shows
the vacant San Francisco Embarcedero Freeway after it has outlived its usefulness,
before its destruction. In an atmosphere of daylight, mystery, Angerame
sows inklings and reveals the past encircled by the future. Lyrical, ominous,
comic, PREMONITION works on the attentive viewer like a remembrance of something
that is yet to happen, silent, telling daydream."-- Barbara Jaspersen
Voorhees.
Exhibited at the San Francisco International Film Festival, 1995; Pacific
Film Archives, 1995.
1995 16mm black and white, sound, 11 minutes $45
In The Course of Human Events
(1997)
23 min black and white sound
Part Four of a "City Symphony"
Filmed, Directed and Edited by Dominic Angerame
Sound by Kevin Barnard, Ray Guillet, and Kyle Newhall
Sound Design By Amy Leigh Hunter
This is a film of the tearing down of the San Francisco Embarcadero
Freeway that was damaged in the 1989 earthquake. Considered unsafe for
use, city officials determined that the freeway was to be torn down.
This film is the sequel to PREMONITION (Part Three of a "City Symphony)
1995.
".…an exquisite black and white surrealist depiction of the
Embarcadero
Freeway demolition, in which dinosaurlike tractors gnash at an organic
tangle of steel reinforcements. Like a moving gallery installation, the
23 minute piece is composed of individual shots so precise and
emotionally evocative that each could stand on its own as testimony to
Angerame's astounding talent."-Silke Tudor, SF Weekly
"Beautifully textured, architecturally rich, subtly montaged, with
double and at times triple exposures, and with a superb feeling for the
miracles of light and shadow and the rhythms of nature, this last film
in the quartet of a City Symphony is framed in deconstructed irony by
its very title, In the Course of Human Events, the first line of the
American Declaration of Independence, and which goes on: 'when it
becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that
have connected them to another and to assume among the powers of the
earth…the separate'…but undeclared prerogatives of invisible enormity.
"This film subtly trembles with an unflinching pessimism and indictment
of fin-de-siecle industrialism, with its shameless and dehumanized
functionalism. The Bauhaus that had been a democratically streamlined
reaction to the cakey excesses of the Wilhelminian baroque here becomes
now a standard mask of decultured international business interests and
their impenetrable surfaces…Read between the lines and marvel at the
guts of its monumental vacuities. There's no bottom to its appetite for
the spaghetti of its reinforcements, these cement-and-steel eating
monsters that clear the fields for what new poppies of financial
futures? Insects devouring yesterday's corpse. Gargantuan resolves and a
rain of cement dust within which you can scarcely see the anonymous and
classless worker, now a mere shadow, a cellular functionary of a
prosthetic Shiva, with a thousand wills and arms circling like an
unidentifiable vulture. The tangled wires are the confusion and wonder
of the public mind, the clouds of dust our sentimentality about national
origins. All is transience. All is perishable, disposable, digestible in
its maw. The San Francisco Ferry Building with its Doric columns and
clock seem marginalized despite their size…Just a nano second boys,
are
those really cars and people down there? How quaint! And we took them
all for bugs of a sort. Is this actually progress, or the continuity of
the insensate, imperial enormities of Mussolini and Hitler disguised.
Rimbaud saw it coming. After work they retire to the country, 'the
"Country"', that fills the eternal west with forests and prodigious
plantations where gentleman savages hunt their news by the light they
have invented."-Ronal F. Sauer
EXHIBITIONS FOR IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS
Victoria Theatre, San Francisco, May, 1997
Pittsburgh Filmmakers, April, 1997
Berks Filmmakers, Reading, PA, March, 1997
Millenium Film Workshop, New York, March, 1997
San Francisco Cinematheque, March, 1997
Line of Fire (1997)
Black and White silent 6.5 minutes
Filmed, Directed and Edited by Dominic Angerame
Sound Design By Amy Leigh Hunter
In November of 1993 I was diagnosed as having coronary arterial disease.
A subsequent angiogram revealed that open heart surgery was necessary
and duly performed. This angiogram was filmed originally on 35mm motion
picture film. In March of 1995 my apartment burnt down in the early
morning hours and my girlfriend and I escaped with our neighbor down the
rear fire escape as lethal smoke was enveloping us. I was able to
return to the scene the next day in order to film the aftermath. This
film is a blend of footage from these two episodes and explores the
temporal nature of the lives we live.
EXHIBITIONS FOR LINE OF FIRE
San Francisco International Film Festival, May, 1997
Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, CA, May, 1997
Pittsburgh Filmmakers, April, 1997
Berks Filmmakers, Reading, PA, March, 1997
Millenium Film Workshop, New York, March, 1997
San Francisco Cinematheque, March, 1997
Contact Dominic at: filmmaker@eburbo.com
"VOYEURISTIC TENDENCIES is not so much a film about voyeurism as it
is about our tendency to be voyeuristic. That tendency, nurtured by the
filmmaker's carefully crafted succession of visual teases and exploited
by the camera's ability to become our eyes, becomes increasingly evident
as the film progresses. The camera teases the viewer, in this case, co-voyeur,
not with sexual or erotic innuendo, but rather with graphic and aesthetic
challenges. The partially opened window of a woman's dressing room forces
us to realize our urge to see more. That urge comes not so much from a longing
for exposed breasts, but as a need to make the picture whole, and to know
more about these hidden worlds. This type of cinematically-induced self-realization
makes VOYEURISTIC TENDENCIES a powerfully human film.
