Cell Project Space

 

 

 

A short film 16mm-to-digital work made in homage to Chris Marker. The film reflects on an anonymous shrine discovered outside Light Industry in Brooklyn on August 26, 2016 – twenty-eight days after Marker’s death – featuring twenty Maneki-Neko figurines, a recurring motif in Marker’s oeuvre. Preiss uses these folklore icons as a visual foundation, moving from their mechanical gestures of welcome into a meditation on aviation, cinema, and apocalyptic time ruptures.

 

 

An experimental portrait of the New York gallerist and publisher Christine Burgin told through her Borgesian library of strange and visionary books by such eclectic figures as Dinshah Ghadiali, Eva Carrière, Charles Ford, Richard Shaver, and Wilhelm Reich. Seen through 16mm film, VHS tape, and 35mm slide sources – as well as the full spectrum of visible colour – The Secret World invites us into a self-contained universe of mystical, even crackpot thinking and imagining, as Burgin’s longtime friends and ‘documentarians’ Preiss and McElheny leaf through “images of lost Atlantis found in a rock, perpetual motion machines or manifested ectoplasm in historic performances.”