ART CITIES:Amsterdam-Jeff Preiss
During the ’80s Jeff Preiss became involved in the production of experimental cinema. Work from this time was included in “Big as Life, a History of 8mm” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Through much of the eighties he was co-director of the pioneering Lower East Side Film series “Films Charas” and a board member of The Collective For Living Cinema. In 1984 he traveled to Berlin to shoot the Rosa Von Praunheim produced Vampire Film, “Der Bis”.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Archive
Jeff Preiss is active in a wide spectrum of cinematic genres. His work is marked by an emphasis on the physical qualities of film and masterful narrative editing. Beyond his creative work with film, he has organized several artist-run spaces, including ORCHARD and Films Charas in New York’s East Village and Lower East Side. In the exhibition “More Than I Looked For”, the Stedelijk Museum showcases an installation that combines Jeff Preiss’ masterpiece “STOP” (1995-2012) and never before been shown in Europe “14 STANDARD 8mm REELS 1981-1988” (2019). Compiled from 2,500 rolls of film shot from 1995–2012, edited with economy and precision and clocking in squarely at 120 minutes, “STOP” is nothing short of a home-movie epic. Subjects and storylines weave throughout the film; some emerge from the beginning while others reveal themselves slowly, and some appear only once; others fade, gradually, away. Most striking, and a necessity of any home movie, is the story of Preiss’s child, whose process of gender self-determination serves as the film’s most resilient crux. Preiss fulfills two overlapping roles behind the camera: the essential, loving father of home movie practice, and the eternal, inquisitive experimental film artist. He never once turns the camera on himself. Numbers are important here, but not in a stiffly intellectual manner. Preiss numbered the film in reference to the 15-minute processed reels of footage the lab made out of his raw, 3-minute reels. The film’s running length references a standard Hollywood feature, and further subdivisions, into four 30-minute segments, reference the typical length of episodic television. Preiss’s most recent work, “14 STANDARD 8mm REELS 1981–1988” (2018), edits together standard 8mm film that was originally shot in the 1980s and recently preserved by Anthology Film Archives and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Each reel is dedicated to a friend with whom the filmmaker was in conversation during this period and who remains important to him today. Rather than functioning as literal portraits, each film reel is structured as an intimate conversation with the person to whom it is dedicated, using their past interactions and personal proclivities as a kind of conceptual magnetism to organize the images. As with “STOP”, “4 STANDARD 8mm REELS” unfurls through its hypnotic editing and provocative pacing towards a personal conception of montage and the poetics of visual language.
Info: Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, Duration: 5/10/19-5/1/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-22:00, www.stedelijk.nl
