Catalogue > At random

"Thank you for sending your very great film, Aeon -- it's really a great work, truly transporting, and a vision I can wish and hope that many will see, and hopefully to feel this truth of both our small place within as well as our ultimate connectedness with the vastness of being and space -- 'our connection to the stars' as Stan would have said." -- Marilyn Brakhage "In Aeon, Dominic Angerame draws parallels between the earthly and the heavenly, linking the San Francisco cityscape and city dwellers to outer space. Filmed during the Covid-19 lockdown, Aeon celebrates Angerame#s reunion with friends and responds to the new ways of interacting with the world on different levels. Using a meta-narrative and self-referential approach to storytelling, Angerame brings the (holy) spirit to life, filling the spaces he captures with energy, which is otherwise unattainable and invisible the naked eye, but significantly transforms our lives. Aeon is one of Angerame's major and most mature works to date, which demonstrates the potential of experimental filmmaking in superimposing images that are seemingly disparate, yet uncannily familiar." -- Kornelia Boczkowska, author of Lost Highways, Embodied Travels: The Road Movie in American Experimental Film and Video, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0875-9209

Dominic Angerame's works search for unfamiliar views of seemingly familiar things: cities, landscapes, faces, and bodies. The filmmaker's desire to make everyday images "strange" at the editing table, to learn to see them fresh and to estrange them from our senses, makes his films seem-in all the different social realities they contain-always distanced as well, as if they led to another world beyond the concrete, beyond time and defined space. In Angerame's films, which pay homage to films from early cinema and the classic avant garde to American underground films of the 1960s and 70s and non-narrative films of the present day, an amazingly comprehensive history of the "visionary" moving image is always present. It may be that precisely his refusal to adopt a signature style has diminished the immediate influence of Angerame's films; however, Angerame's decision to work "universally," not to be swayed by considerations of the art market, and to experiment with very different styles increases the pedagogical worth of his films. It's not surprising to learn that Angerame, born in 1949, teaches at several American schools in addition to having served as the executive director of the American avant garde distribution center Canyon Cinema from 1980 to 2012. His films testify to an encyclopedic knowledge of film-and also his desire to satisfy, with his own audio-visual offerings, the very different desires of his audience.