James Otis

"James Otis" is not yet a pseudonym employed by a coalition of passionate dilettantes. He remains a real person, an amalgam of spirit and flesh. He loves dark chocolate, the prose of Samuel Johnson and the music of Shostakovich. He cannot abide flavored coffees, Hemingway or Richard Strauss. Acutely aware of binocular vision, at the age of seven he undertook a program of eye exercises to strengthen the facility. At eleven, meditating on numbers, he succeeded in visualizing 23 distinct points. While a teenager, Otis blindfolded himself, seeing not a photon for nine days. Shortly thereafter he began making movies.

"One of the best film artists I know." - Stan Brakhage

"I love the Otis mind and its changing manifestations in cinema. There's no telling what form it will next take. I often watch his work chin in hand, head rocking side to side and thinking, 'How unexpected. How right. And how classy.' The man's a central terminal of radical departures. He doesn't make a move without first returning to the very core of possibility. He's also one of the great post-screening speakers. Wild wit. Knowing and candid; astonishing elocution, somehow he pronounces the punctuation of his extemporaneous flights. One sees commas, semi-colons, and even asterisks indicating footnotes, dropping into place all a'glisten like perfectly machined parts. Audiences are agog, fascinated, amused, they eat him up. "Up with Otis! My kind of filmartist." - Ken Jacobs