Film Catalog: Online Search

James Fotopoulos

A Room (1999) 16mm, color & b/w, sound, 18 min

Genre: Experimental

"Though your films, especially shorts like Growth and A Room, do sometimes have the visceral appearance of a Patrick Bokanowski or Stan Brakhage film, the features are much more firmly grounded in a "real world" aesthetic. "TFJ

Rental: $40.00

James Fotopoulos

Back Against The Wall (2000) 16mm, black and white, sound, 94 min

Genre: Experimental

"BACK AGAINST THE WALL is the strongest Fotopoulos I've seen. Initially predicated on the filmmaker's trademark repetitive routines, it concerns a grim slab of middle-aged beef jerky (Martin Shannon) holed up in a characterless apartment furnished mainly with cardboard boxes. Lying in bed, sourly awaiting the return of his young girlfriend (Debbie Mulcahy) from work, Shannon seems like a john in his own place. Fotopoulos likes his low-rent Hopper compositions harshly lit and underscored by a persistent drone. Back Against the Wall's anonymous atmosphere, pointless conversations, and recurring set-ups hold the promise of sex (or at least violence). But the movie is all about unreleased tension. Shannon's other activities include playing chess and listening to the complaints of his no-neck friend (Ernie E. Frantz). When Mulcahy, who apparently works in a strip club, models a series of little nighties for Shannon, he scarcely looks up from his book to acknowledge her. While the viewer patiently waits to discover if the movie is Shannon's long crack-up or just a prolonged slow-burn, Fotopoulos fastidiously maps a little corner of hell—brutal depression is mocked by the wind-up clown sitting on Shannon's night table. Once Mulcahy leaves Shannon for a marginally livelier, more appropriate sleazemeister, the film's tone shifts first to the blandly inane and then the cumulatively insane. Mulcahy's new boyfriend is a would-be pornographer in hock to the mob—he gets beat up but won't tell her why. This fatal association leads to an extravagantly long scene on what could be the set of a porn film (half a dozen women making up, snorting coke, and sitting around in costume). The eventual payoff is far more grotesque. Mulcahy meets her depressing fate—or is it a happy ending?—in a No Exit motel room with Frantz." -- J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Rental: $200.00

James Fotopoulos

Breathe (2000) 16mm, black and white, silent, .5 min

Genre: Experimental

Fotopoulos also continues to make shorter works, ranging in length from 34 seconds (Breathe) to 18 minutes (the haunting A Room), which are often more identifiably avant-garde than his features

Rental: $20.00

James Fotopoulos

Christabel: The Conclusion Pt. 1 (2001) 16mm, color, sound, 7 min

Genre: Experimental

"Pindar's fine remark respecting the different effects of Music, on different characters, holds equally true of Genius - as many as are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. The beholder either recognizes it as a projected form of his own Being, that moves before him with a Glory round its head, or recoils from it as a Spectre." -- S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (1825) "The idea was that the soul of Coleridge should not be enslaved to the poem of Coleridge, even though that is what he worked on. The vision is far greater than that. With this technology, in a sort of anthropological way, you can fracture the poem, and by fracturing it you can begin taking the themes and extracting them...So I began by taking my emotional intuitions, tying that in to all the factual aspects of the poem, and then began this sort of surgery...Using these new technologies, I can go in and extract the essence of this and put it up again. And it was again difficult because the more you get into Coleridge the more complex it becomes. One way most adaptations fail is they focus on one aspect of something. But it's impossible to focus on one aspect of anything. You have to head in, and take on all the aspects. If you fail, you fail. Coleridge is a man of genius, so it just became more and more complex. I began unraveling more and more, and getting deeper and deeper, to the point where I could almost die working on it." -- J.F.

Rental: $25.00

James Fotopoulos

Consumed (2001) 16mm, color & b/w, sound, 21 min

Genre: Experimental

A five part series - Films can be rented individually: Part 1 (5min, b/w, price: 20.00); Part 2 (3min, color, price: 20.00); Part 3 (1min, color, price: 20.00); Part 4 (7min, color, price: 25.00); Part 5 (5min, b/w, price: 20.00

Rental: $50.00

James Fotopoulos

Drowning (2000) 16mm, color, sound, 3 min

Genre: Experimental

"I used video in some of the early shorts like Drowning and Escape, and Christabel." "An attempt to discover psychic energy in controlled sexuality." - JF

Rental: $20.00

James Fotopoulos

Esophagus (2004) 16mm, color, sound, 70 min

Genre: Experimental

“At 28, Chicagoan James Fotopoulos has made more than 100 films and videos, and they keep getting better, having moved from the uncomfortableness of human flesh to the more metaphysical hell of Esophagus. At its center is a typical Fotopoulos torment: six men, one sporting horns, seem imprisoned in a drab room, and a distorted female voice intones phrases such as ‘You’re born with teeth in your eyes.’ Elsewhere, scratches on the film outline and entrap women’s bodies. The opening section – showing gorgeous yet intrusive and terrible flickering light patterns accompanied by droning music – is repeated at the end, giving the work a fatalistic form that suggests the trap isn’t the walls of a room but the nature of the cosmos.” -- Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

Rental: $25.00

James Fotopoulos

Families (2002) 16mm, black and white, sound, 97 min

Genre: Experimental

“Families bears the stylistic traits of his earlier feature-length films but expands the number of characters and locations. Opening with a portentous shot of nearly motionless sheep, the black-and-white film develops in disaffected dialogue scenes interspersed with shots of dreary Midwestern exteriors. The main strain of the narrative focuses on a young man and woman and their prolonged, halting conversations, many of which revolve around death. Yet none of the violence recounted in these exchanges takes place on screen, where life is characterized by the absence of physical contact, robotic soliloquy, and a general sense of forlorn ennui. Recurring throughout the film are repeated shots of the sheep from the opening, dogs or fish in an aquarium, paradigmatically linking annals to the characters and their awkward interactions. Fotopoulos suggests that the titular familial ties refer to larger structures of kinship, and constructs a bleak parallel in the common markers of human and animal existence.” --Henriette Huldisch, Whitney Museum of American Art

Rental: $200.00

James Fotopoulos

Flight (2002) 16mm, black and white, sound, 3 min

Genre: Experimental

A look at non-human beings.

Rental: $20.00

James Fotopoulos

Growth (1999) 16mm, color & b/w, sound, 6 min

Genre: Experimental

"Though your films, especially shorts like Growth and A Room, do sometimes have the visceral appearance of a Patrick Bokanowski or Stan Brakhage film, the features are much more firmly grounded in a "real world" aesthetic. "TFJ

Rental: $25.00