This DVD includes the following films:

Kladno (2005) Digital Video, color and black and white, sound, 20 min.

I began to think about Brakhage's opening paragraph for Metaphors on Vision and his notion of the untutored eye and although I could sympathize with sentiment, my experience with my own daughter Maddy seemed more concrete. Sometime after September 11, 2001 (having been displaced and re-settled temporarily in a furnished apartment in Maplewood, New Jersey), Maddy began reading stories from picture books. At four, she knew how to read a few words but mostly made up stories from looking at pictures. This video is my portrait of her (and more), which began in a small industrial city about twenty minutes from Prague, Kladno, early one summer in the year 2000. POW

The Fugitive Chef (2006) 16mm, and DVD, color and black and white, sound, 37 min.

The deaths of the filmmaker Bob Fleischner, my childhood friend Jeff Tenzer and my father Marc Weisman in 1989 hastened an already made decision to leave the avant-garde art community and seek respite elsewhere. This resolution didn't alter my desire to work at filmmaking or even attempt, occasionally, to alter its known forms; it simply restated it within a different context. The Fugitive Chef is a fractured and layered personal documentary (with other genres thrown in) shot mostly in Brooklyn and at the MacDowell Art Colony. Contributors to this film include filmmaker, Bob Fleischner, poet, Julia Kasdorf, painter, Sarah McCoubrey, actor, Scotty Snyder, and filmmaker/performance artist Stuart Sherman. -POW

Our Trembling Way (2012) Digital Video, color and black and white, sound, 25 min.

"Unlike one trend today in experimental film, it does not go about its work distilling or deconstructing. Rather it sets its sights on encompassing several interacting stories and visual tropes at once (including a man's trip to a hospital, and a woman's trip to the movies) and blends them in celebration of cinema from both a narrative and non-narrative point of view. Utilizing found and originally recorded footage from both film and video sources, Our Trembling Way offers it's audience an opportunity to consider, in a mildly ironic manner, what it is to be mortal on this planet, as well as what it is to be both the observer and the observed. It is a lyrical tone poem, a fictional short story and a dance of film and video light and shadow re-interpreted as a digital moving picture." - Stephen Anker, Dean, California Institute of the Arts


Our Trembling Way (A Note on the Narrative Best Described as a Poem)

A woman alone watches a film of some complexity, while a man reads from his journal describing several recent occurrences that were important to him. The intersection of their two paths is precisely circumstantial and can only be ascertained within the intellect and emotions of the viewer. However, perhaps they did actually meet (somehow, in some place, a long time ago), and perhaps even more than once, but if this is the case, surely, the singularly most meaningful moment between them could only be expressed in this way:

On the stubborn stoop he awaits
Hastened, daybreak concludes
its spectral restraint

he shivers momentarily, his path
Converging, his step weakened
by a false hip

A sorry fall is contemplated, prompted by
a punctured heart healed
the rail leveraged against his weight
Kneels

Her view is a voice from the side with
splayed fingers through its hair
It cuts and narrows, it softens
Its song

Save pavement's push,
a single syllable is lost

Phil Weisman