Something Shiny

HD, color, sound, 21:40, 2018/24

Documentary portrait of the 30th Annual World Championship Crystal Dig, Mount Ida, Arkansas, USA.

That day, the first digging day, is so hot, the red earth pouring off the heat right back into the cloudless blue sky and back down again in an irredeemable October loop. Sheryl and another guy keep coming up the hillside with heavy buckets full of ice with water bottles. We drink them like they’re nothing. I eat a package of gummy bears and continue digging and don’t pee all day.

A film by Jenny Perlin

Produced by Jenny Perlin and A. S. Hamrah

HD, color, sound, 92 minutes, US, 2021

Streaming on Mubi, Metrograph-at-Home, Projectr.tv and Amazon.com

Educational distribution:Grasshopper Film

Trailer and stills here

Bunker investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, and follows the process of building and selling these structures to the wealthy and not-so-wealthy alike.

More and more American men are deciding to live alone in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, even as an upscale industry begins to cater to “preppers,” people who fear the imminent breakdown of society and the destruction of the United States. In Bunker, filmmaker Jenny Perlin journeys by herself into the middle of America to meet such men, and the builders and salesmen who cater to them. The film, shot in verité and slow cinema style, follows a uniquely American path, going from undisclosed location to undisclosed location, from the headquarters of a bunker construction firm to the homes of men who have cut themselves off from society, and then to a newly constructed isolated retreat and an upscale nuclear missile silo where developers claim they can re-create New York City life hundreds of feet underground. Investigating toxic American myths, including self-reliance, masculinity, home safety and security, and family life in a time of climate crisis, economic upheaval, and political strife, Bunker reveals pathological inner workings of a American phenomenon on the rise.

Director Bio:

Jenny Perlin makes 16mm films, videos, and animations. Her films work with and against the documentary tradition, incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history. Her projects look closely at ways in which social machinations are reflected in the fragments of daily life. Perlin’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and film festivals, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, and others.

Producer Bio:

A. S. Hamrah is the author of the book The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018 (n+1 books), which was named one of 2018’s ten best books by New York Magazine. He is the film critic at The Baffler. Previous to that he was the film critic for n+1 and the editor of the magazine’s film review supplement. His writing appears frequently in a number of publications including Bookforum and Harper’s. He has worked as a movie theater projectionist, a semiotic brand analyst for the television industry, a football cinematographer, and for the film director Raúl Ruiz. In 2020 he won the Lotos Foundation Prize in Non-Fiction Writing.

Premiere: Indie Memphis, 2021. Opening film MoMA: Doc Fortnight, 2022, Museum of the Moving Image: First Look, 2022

HD color sound 6:25

Sunspots is a film that emerges from my conversations with people who live in bunkers throughout the American Midwest. The film is an expansion of themes in my documentary Bunker (2021). Many of the bunker-dwellers stay underground for fear of sunspots and solar flares or other extra-terestrial forces that they see as active threats.

Sunspots is a hand drawn animation. The film combines hand-drawn images of sunspots recorded in the 17th century by rival scientists Christoph Scheiner and Galileo Galilei. The film brings in bright and evocative images of ground-dwelling creatures. The story of the film follows Aesop's fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. Photographic images of solar projections allude to contemporary concerns about climate change.

This film was created in January 2021 during a residency at BoxoPROJECTS in Joshua Tree, California and was made with support of BoxoPROJECTS and Sky's the Limit observatory in 29 Palms.

music: Caroline Shaw, 'Limestone and Felt,' from the album "Orange," 2019

Performed by the Attacca Quartet

16mm hand-processed high contrast film, b/w, sound, 5:13, 2020

The great whirlpool arrives and sucks everything into its center, spitting out only fragments and noises. The shoreline is in view, but unreachable. The maelstrom pulls us under.

This 16mm hand-processed high contrast experimental film is covered in scratches and scrapes, giving the impression it's been retrieved after many years from the bottom of the sea.

Texts: Poe (1841), Melville (1851), Oxford English Dictionary (2020)

Image sources: Debes (1784), DaVinci (1517), Galileo (1612), Magnus (1539), Seaborn/Symmes (1820), R and E (2019)

Music: Morton Feldman,Structures For String Quartet (1951).

Performers: Seymour Barab, violoncello; Matthew Raimondi, violin; Joseph Rabushka, violin; Walter Trampler, viola

From the album John Cage / Morton Feldman ‎– Music For Keyboard 1935-1948 / The Early Years New World Records, 2007

HD, b/w, sound, 2:00, 2020

Testament extracts the magical and poetic from a brief scene from Jean Cocteau's magical and poetic film, The Testament of Orpheus (1960), in which Orpheus, reaching the end of his life, travels through surreal spaces and meets magical characters, before he disappears. This film was created using a black marker on more than 2700 sheets of plain paper. Its shaky lines are a testament to the film, to Cocteau, and to the persistence of the filmmaker herself. This film can be shown as an installation or in a theatrical context. In its first exhibition in Beijing, China, it was shown as a single screen installation.

HD, color, sound, 17:10, 2021

A portrait of Fortitude Ranch West Virginia, one of a chain of "prepper time-shares" designed to keep paying members safe in dark times. A bunker under construction provides a site onto which impending pandemics and election unrest coalesce. Steven Rene, Chief Operating officer is our guide. Filmed in November 2019, a year prior to the impending election in the U.S.A.

DOUBLEWIDE is a look at a Texas-based company that sells, constructs, and installs custom-made, secure steel subterranean hideouts for wealthy clients. A trip to one of their newly completed massive underground bunkers in Michigan reveals a fortified underground world for the wealthy to retreat from global crises.

Camera, sound, edit: Jenny Perlin , Assistant edit, color: Jonah Greenstein, Sound mix: Adam Boese

World Premiere: 2020 Berlin Film Festival: Forum Expanded

HD, color, sound, 17:30, 2020

It is a hot day at the end of June. Milton Torres has just left his ex-wife and 12 year old daughter in Chicago and is spending his first full day in his new home, a 1940s munitions bunker on ranch land in rural South Dakota. He is the only full-time inhabitant of VivosX. VivosX is offering 99-year subleases to people who want to have bunkers to keep themselves safe during apocalyptic times. This film is a portrait of Milton as he begins his new life, alone, in the country.

HD, color, sound, 20:25, 2020

A portrait of Edward Peden, founder and sole inhabitant of Subterra Castle, a 14,000 square foot former missile silo in Eskridge, Kansas. Ed has lived at Subterra for over two decades, making a space 20 feet underground into a home and sanctuary. Three years ago Ed had a stroke and he will probably have to sell Subterra and move aboveground. His wife Dianna, with whom he built the space, moved back to Topeka a few years ago, but Ed chose to stay behind in his castle.

Premiere: Kassel Documentary Film Festival, Germany, 2020

Jenny Perlin

HD, color, silent, 3 minutes, 2019

Hand-drawn stop-motion animation inspired by each of Piranesi's fourteen "Imaginary Prisons" etchings from 1745-50. To quote Margaret Yourcenar, the etchings represent a “negation of time, incoherence of space, suggested levitation, intoxication of the impossible reconciled or transcended."

Hand-drawn animation, color, sound, 3:56, 2019
This hand-drawn animation is a companion piece to the video portrait "Milton of Vivos." The film is comprised of background colors from my time spent with Milton Torres at the bunker complex VivosX in South Dakota and images of mining tools and technologies from the first major printed publication on mining techniques, De Re Metallica (On the Nature of Metals), written by Georgius Agricola (Georg Bauer) and published in 1556. This film is part of the Long Sleepers series of films.

Music: Moriz Rosenthal performing Franz Liszt, Liebestraum no. 3, 1929/30

Hand-drawn animation, 4 minutes, sound, 2019

This short animation contains all the colors and flora from Herman Melville's 1856 short story "The Piazza." The story is about a man who idealizes a place in the mountains he sees in the distance. He then travels to the place and finds an unhappy young woman who, in turn, idealizes the place she sees across the valley. He does not tell her it is his home and returns to his lonely abode with a changed perspective on idealism.
Music: Frederic Chopin, Berecuse in D flat, 1843, performed by Moriz Rosenthal in 1930.

16mm/HD, color and b/w, sound, 27:40, 2018
USA/Germany
a film by Jenny Perlin
REMIX 20180713

This experimental film takes a walk through an underground cavern exploring ancient legends and origins of Washington Irving's famous story Rip van Winkle and other subterranean tales. It is a preface to a forthcoming feature about people who live in underground spaces in the contemporary U.S.A.

“In the village the women and children stood in their doorways and stared at him as he passed. All were strangers to him. He noticed that some of them stroked their chins and laughed; and without thinking much about it, he put his hand to his own chin. What was his surprise to find that he had a beard more than a foot long!”
--from Peter Klaus the Goatherd, German folktale, collected by Johan Nachtigal and published in 1800.

The legends persist, they grow like trailing vines; they shape-shift to fit circumstance; they echo like answers to a centuries-long game of telephone--and even when they don’t make sense it doesn’t matter because no one remembers the questions anyway.

Since 2014 I have made four experimental films about “long sleeper narratives.” Long Sleepers are people who are outsiders in their society, who fall asleep in a cavern or mountainside and wake up 20, 50, or 100 years later.

The works I’ve done are in experimental documentary, essay, animation, drawing, and film-performance. In previous films I have explored the devastating environmental phenomena of sinkholes, the formation and development of caverns and cave tourism, mining mysteries from a novel by Jules Verne.

With this newest experimental documentary film, the plagiarized origin of the Rip van Winkle story and its transposition into early American legend.

This ongoing series of films gathers stories of figures like Washington Irving’s famous American character Rip van Winkle; those who fall asleep underground and wake up 20, 50, or hundreds of years later. When awake, these individuals can take on a range of roles in society. In narratives they usually function as prophets, fools, or refuseniks. These films have been exhibited widely in the gallery, museum, and theatrical context.

This film is a preface to the feature-length experimental documentary of the same name which will investigate 21st century "long sleepers," people who live in bunkers, missile silos, and other underground spaces in the United States in the year 2018.

16mm, b/w, sound, 8:30, 2013/18

In the summer of 2001 I was in Kosovo making a documentary about life after the war there. I visited a small town where a traveling theater company had come to perform 'Little Red Riding Hood in Danger,' a play written to teach kids about land mines in the fields and roads surrounding the town.

While I was there I met a young girl and interviewed her about life in the town. After the play, I tried to find her again but she had disappeared.

This film started with the memory of this moment.

HD, b/w, live sound, 3:00, 2017

318 drawings, graphite on paper, each 3”x4,” 2017

Animated variations on stones sourced at Sea Ranch, California in a residency with Albatross Reach.

Presented with live improvised music at Sea Ranch, December 2017.

The Blooming Colors, a collaborative piece created by Jenny Perlin and Adam Marks, weaves together material from distinct sources to create an echo of the color organ against the backdrop of a recent sunset filmed from the Whitney Museum’s third floor performance space.

The color organ was an instrument designed to emit color corresponding with musical notes. 18th, 19th, and 20th century inventors attempted to build the device and many succeeded, but none of the instruments achieved widespread success.

The Blooming Colors’ text derives from Alexander Wallace Rimington’s 1912 book “Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Colour.” The piece’s musical material is drawn from Rimington’s vibrant descriptions and from retranslating colors of Perlin’s film Twilight Arc back into musical notation using color organ scales from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

The Blooming Colors concludes with Claude Debussy’s famous composition “Clair de Lune,” composed at the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries. This segment of the performance makes reference to the color organ work of Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, a pianist, engineer, and performer who worked to illuminate music using unique scores and instruments of her own invention.

Twilight Arc Transcription

Whitney Performance and Description

Jenny Perlin (b. 1970, Williamstown, Massachusetts) currently lives and works in Brooklyn)

Adam Marks (b. 1978, Cupertino, California, d. 2021, New York)

Sound piece, 12 hours, stereo, 2016

Exhibitions: Dreamlands, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, The Sound of Colour, Auge & Welt Gallery, Aachen, Germany, 2022

This sound work takes its inspiration from the description by Alexander Scriabin of one part of his unfinished massive multimedia project he called the Mysterium. For Mysterium, Scriabin envisioned “bells hung from clouds” heralding a week-long performance that was to take place in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.

The Mysterium was meant to involve a cast of thousands: singers, dancers, musicians, lights, smells, mists, stones, and weather. Scriabin’s goal was to create a “totalizing experience” that would result in the annihilation of the world in order to bring a new, more perfect one into being. Scriabin only completed notes for the Mysterium he called the "Prefatory Action," prior to his death. The composer Alexander Nemtin spent nearly three decades reassembling the work into a three hour composition of the same title.

Canopy is a 12 hour sound work comprised of recordings of Eastern Orthodox bellpeals played at 15 minute intervals interspersed with room tone similar to the sound of the gallery’s air ventilation system.

The room tone of the gallery space is utilized to create a bubble-like audio space that keeps the audio space in a state of suspension. While viewers may not be consciously aware of the change in the sound in the gallery, their physical experience will be transformed and quieted as the ventilation system hum track prevents other sounds from entering the gallery.

Like a belltower chiming the quarter-hour, these sounds call visitors into the space in which the film Twilight Arc is looping. The bells also jolt viewers out of any cinematic reverie that the film loop has created, making them newly aware of their surroundings.

I have chosen Eastern Orthodox bells for this work both because of Scriabin’s heritage (his compositions are clearly indebted to these sounds) but also because these bell works, dating from the early Middle Ages, are syncopated, exciting and dynamic. They bring a new conception of history into the space, one that does not distinguish between “primitive” and “advanced” but which exhibits these sounds in their own right, as complex works that contain both spiritual and practical functions.

Twilight Arc

16mm color film (Desmet tinted black and white film printed on color stock), silent, 12 minutes, 2016

Twilight Arc is a 12 minute 16mm film tinted using a lab process called the Desmet method. The film is by Jenny Perlin and the tinting is performed by color timers Chris Hughes and Laura Major at Colorlab, Maryland.

The film is tinted according to the musical scale given colors in the late 18th century by the mathematician and Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel. Laura and Chris have agreed to tint the print using the colors ascribed to the scale. From that scale, the lab technicians have absolute freedom to choose which colors when and the duration of the color on different sections of the film.

The Castel color scale is from 1734, invented by Louis Bertrand Castel, whose efforts to create the first color organ gained him notoriety but no working device.

Other scales not used in the Desmet process but described in the content of the film include the Rimington color scale dates from 1893, according to Alexander Rimington’s “Colour Music” and his (successful) color organ. Alexander Scriabin’s color scale dates from 1911 and was applied and performed in his work “Prometheus: Poem of Fire.”

Other elements referred to in the film are the texts "Colour Music" by Alexander Rimington, Bainbridge Bishop's 1893 book "A Souvenir of the Color Organ, with Some Suggestions in Regard to the Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light."

A section of the film is devoted to the unsung work of the Philadelphia-based inventor and pianist Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, who also invented a unique way of presenting color, light and music. In addition to her work promoting the art of Nourathar (color music) and her instrument the Sarabet (a color organ named for her late mother, Sara Tabet), Hallock-Greenewalt studied to be an electrical engineer and received twelve patents for her inventions. Her color organ was designed to have a direct response to the feelings and emotions of the performer herself, rather than necessarily adhere to a fixed color scale.

There were many other color organ inventors whose work is not part of the film, for example, Thomas Wilfred, whose invention of the new art form he called "Lumia," was celebrated. From the 1920s through the 2000s, Wilfred came as close as anyone to bringing his invention called the Clavilux into the mainstream. Claude Bragdon, an American architect and theater designer, also celebrated the new art form in his work and his 1918 book Harnessing the Rainbow. Another inventor, Zdenek Pesanek, explored color organs, neon, and sculpture to inform his work and to find a new kind of art that responded to the quickly changing technological landscape of the early 20th century.

As part of this project, I researched the archives of Mary Hallock-Greenewalt at the Historical Society of Philadelphia, and conducted extensive research into the histories of the other inventions in the film. Another area of research was into the life and work of pianist and composer Alexander Scriabin, whose intense investment in the relationship between color and music brought him to the composition of "Prometheus: Poem of Fire," in 1910 which has a part for color organ written into the score. "Prometheus" was premiered in 1911 without color organ and with a "Chromola" in New York at Carnegie Hall in March 1915, one month before the composer's untimely death.

The dreams of these inventors were carried forward into the experimental films of the 20th centuries (eg. Whitney Brothers, Stan Vanderbeek, etc) the computer art and light shows for musical performance (see the current show of computer films from the 1960s on view at the Museum of the Moving Image), to blockbuster films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1976), to radical experiments in theatrical lighting like Laterna Magica in Prague, and even into the technologies of screen savers and light-response audio speakers available widely. While not understood as the inventors had hoped as a separate art form, the color music is part of our everyday life.

The Long Sleepers is a body of work in film, video, and drawing.

The Long Sleepers drawings are a series of 450 4”x6” ink drawings based on film frames from a 3-minute film 16mm I made called The Crystal King (2016). That film portrayed a tour through a show cave called Ohio Caverns, outside Columbus. Ohio Caverns has been leading people through winding underground paths ever since the late 19th century, when a farmhand fell into a sinkhole on a summer day and discovered the untouched rooms clustered with ancient stalactites and stalagmites. Later that same year the cavern was open for paying tourists to come gawk at the underground wonders.

I made the film and then begin drawing. As the film played, I paused whenever a frame appeared that looked intriguing. Then I tried to draw what I saw in simple silver and cyan ink. So there is a pattern in the way these drawings repeat, but no fixed system that they follow. The drawings reflect a subjective path worn through a landscape of repetition. The pieces you see here are a small grouping of the over 450 drawings in the series.

Installation images on this page are of two films and three ice sculptures that are also part of The Long Sleepers projects. The films pictured are Those Are Stars and The Crystal King. Installation at Simon Preston Gallery, New York, 2017.

16mm film loop, color, silent, 3 minutes, 2017

Those Are Stars was a simply rendered graphite line animation that strove to represent a chapter called “A Sunrise,” from the Jules Verne novel The Child of the Cavern.

The Child of the Cavern tells a ten-year adventure story of mysteries occurring in the mines of Aberfoyle, Scotland. Though the mine has been closed for years, one family has stayed, making its home deep inside the earth. They continually explore the mine, eventually discovering a vast new vein of coal, enabling industry to start again. Their persistence brings the underground world to its most advanced state and allows generations to live and work below the earth without ever ascending to its surface.

The characters in The Underground City praise the merits of life beneath the ground. Young Nell, an orphan who our hero Harry rescues from a mineshaft, is granted one day above ground so she can witness a sunrise and choose if she wants to live above or below. Satisfied with her brief encounter with sun, mountains, wind, and weather, she pledges herself to a future with Harry in the caverns beneath the earth’s surface.

The heroes in Verne’s fantastical story are the ones who never desire to come up to the surface of the earth, who are happy to live where the there’s plenty of work, lots of technology, no weather to speak of, and where the air is fresher than in the coal-haunted skies of 19th century cities.

The Crystal King

16mm film loop, color, silent, 3:00, 2016

The Crystal King is a simple film loop depicting a tour through a show cave called Ohio Caverns, outside Columbus. Ohio Caverns has been leading people through winding underground paths ever since the late 19th century, when a farmhand fell into a sinkhole on a summer day and discovered the untouched rooms clustered with ancient stalactites and stalagmites. Later that same year the cavern was open for paying tourists to come gawk at the underground wonders.

09_2016
J. Perlin

Secret messages are right there--in the receipts you hold in your wallet right now. But codes can’t be cracked.

Infrared is a light wave past the visible spectrum, just after red, invisible to the human eye. In 1800, physicist and astronomer Sir William Herschel accidentally discovered infrared while conducting experiments with a prism and a thermometer.

Hands describing, constructing, arranging. Spontaneous creations, untranslatable texts. These hands see what is invisible to me.

16mm/HD, color, sound, 24 minutes, 2016

The Refractionist is a speculative fiction about a man who disappears into a cavern through the process of self-refraction. It was delivered as a performance-film as part of the conference "What History Could Have Been," a joint project between The New School and Princeton University, February 2016

16mm/HD, color, sound, 46 minutes, film for performance by Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin, 2015

Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin retrace the journey of two 18th-century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. From the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel, The Measures explores the metric system’s origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution. Along the way, Goss and Perlin consider the intertwining of political and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration.

The Measures is most often performed with live voice-over by the two directors of the film but is being presented here with voice-over as part of the video.

100 Sinkholes

Installation including 16mm film loop, ink drawings on watercolor paper.

Film is 16mm, b/w, silent, 14:10, 2014

The full work of 100 Sinkholes also comprises one hundred ink drawings of abstracted, miniaturized, colorful sinkholes arranged in a grid on the freestanding wall, behind which a film loop of the same images hand-animated in black and white 16mm graphic animation runs incessantly.

In the film 100 Sinkholes, I methodically and systematically catalogued one hundred individual sinkholes, sourced from online data. The film renders these images in graphite, each insistently filling the emptiness of the void. As a sinkhole emerges, it quickly disappears into the unsteady rhythm of the animation.

The film scholar Joshua Guilford recently wrote about 100 Sinkholes: “The film, which is thrown onto the rear surface of the wall separating these spaces, presents images of the same sinkholes rendered in graphite and arranged in a linear sequence. Each drawing emerges in steps through a process of single-frame animation, then holds momentarily as an image before giving way to the next. The runtime of the film is just over 14 minutes, but the print is joined end to end, with no title card to designate a beginning or conclusion. One after another, a hundred sinkholes cycle in an unbroken loop, surfacing relentlessly but accumulating nothing, emerging to collapse, emerging in collapsing. Through circularity, the film’s time is made to fold, returning by extending forward, progressing to return. Each new image becomes an echo and the gallery itself a sort of eddy that echoes the swirl of celluloid atop the projector. Between the viewing space and the images onscreen, a resonance arises: time as a blot suspended in the white cube.”[1]

 This work was exhibited at Simon Preston Gallery, New York, in 2015 and acquired by the Museum of Modern Art that year.

[1] Joshua Guilford, “One Hundred and One Sinkholes: Notes on the Film Loop,”  http://www.flowjournal.org/2016/09/one-hundred-and-one-sinkholes/ (September 19 2016)

16mm, color & b/w, silent, 12:00, 2012

A Thousand Sentences is derived from the work of Caleb Gattegno (1911-1988), an Egyptian-born mathematician and educator who pioneered a systematic and synaesthetic method for teaching foreign languages and arithmetic. The film begins with Perlin's hand-painted animated color fields, each corresponding to a vowel or consonant sound of the English language, as developed by Gattegno. The second part of the film, in black and white, animates an excerpt from Gattegno's 1974 book 'A Thousand Sentences.' The book was written to function as a primer for English learners to practice reading simple texts, yet in its selection of phrases, all written by Gattegno, it also represents the author's philosophical tract and worldview.   Gattegno's work represents a belief that the world can be learned solely through experience and intuition. A combination of the esoteric and the systematic; his writings suggest that all things are interconnected but are not distant from us; they are already known and can be systematically unpacked and interpreted.

Three part film installation comprised of 16mm color film, silent, 3:00, 16mm b/w, film transferred to video, sound, 26:00, HD video, color, sound, 12:00, 9 drawings from animated film, 2012

Funes is based on Jorge Luis Borges short story about a young man who gains an infallible memory from being thrown by a horse. The installation consists of a short animated 16mm film alongside two larger-scale video projections, which together elaborate the artist's longstanding interest in sharing the experience of reading. Funes works to fully expand the original text through animation, narration, musical soundtrack and the labor of copying as a means to deeper comprehension. A short 16mm film isolates specific visual elements from the story, i.e. a cigarette or flower, and animates them in their most basic form. The entire
text, copied by hand, is accompanied by narration in the original Spanish, read by the artists Bibi Calderaro and Luis Camnitzer. In addition, a single musical element is extracted from a short composition by Igor Stravinsky and played in turn by three bassoonists.
Funes' involuntary and incessant memory is a torment to him. Borges reflects that to think is to forget differences, generalize, and make abstractions. These themes extend Perlin's interest in detail, detritus, and language. The converging elements inFunes become a reflection on the structure of memory itself.

16mm, b/w and color, sound, 53 minutes, 2012

The Perlin Papers  is a series of eight short films revealing stories of domestic espionage during the Cold War period in the United States. The films focus on overlooked, incomplete and banal documents from the 1940s and 1950s , unpacking history and connecting it to the present. The title refers to a 250,000-page archive located at Columbia University containing many of the FBI documents related to the investigation, trial and 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, US citizens who were convicted of conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act of 1917. For nearly two decades after the execution, the FBI tracked hundreds of people tangentially connected to the case. The archive is named for a distant relative of the artist, Marshall “Mike” Perlin, a civil liberties lawyer whose work with the Rosenberg children, Michael and Robert Meeropol, resulted in the declassification of the documents. The first six films in Jenny Perlin’s striking and elegant cycle are direct representations of documents in the Perlin Papers archive. The last two films are, respectively, a fiction and an observation.
The Perlin Papers films are conceived as a modular project and can be presented individually in any combination or as an hour-long single-channel screening.

16mm/HD, color, sound, 13:00, 2011

The Object of Society Is results from a year's research on the writings of Eleanor Roosevelt. Perlin’s work explores intersections between personal and social histories, and investigates the documentation and representation of cultural and social values. The film is informed by a multitude of sources, among them the thousands of “My Day” newspaper columns Roosevelt wrote between 1935 and 1962, which reveal the mingling of her personal and political ideologies; John Milton’s 1655 poem “On His Blindness” and the 1908 play The Blue Bird, which Roosevelt referred to as inspirations throughout her life; and the copious annotations Roosevelt made to drafts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this exhibition, literary parables and early film combine with political rhetoric and Roosevelt’s biography to comment on the ways in which a wide array of images and texts shape political discourse in America.

16mm, b/w, sound, 4:30, 2010

Series of 28 b/w silver gelatin prints.

Notes taken upon reading Henri Bergson’s book of essays The Creative Mind reveal an elaborate and complex series of metaphors. Over and over, Bergson attempted to represent concepts of duration by describing other phenomena such as fans, sugar dissolving in water, rivers, and cinematographic film. The soundtrack is marked by the simple act of striking a tuning fork and lettings its vibrations dissipate completely into the air.

Source: Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (essays, 1903-1923, 1946)

16mm, color, sound, 20:50, 2010

Mimeograph is part of The Perlin Papers series.

Mimeograph is a fictional representation of a day in the life of two anonymous women whose hard-working hands were responsible for typing up FBI documents in which regular citizens reported on each other. I am fascinated with the work of these women who performed innumerable hours of labor to produce the Perlin Papers between the 1940s and the 1970s. I wonder if they read the documents as they typed them, and how they felt about the proceedings, spying, wiretaps, and covert operations taking place. This film is a link between the anonymity of archival documents and the human aspect of the effects of policies on individual lives.

16mm,b/w, sound, 55 seconds, 2010

Division is part of The Perlin Papers series.

Numerous pages in the Perlin Papers archive list names, addresses, and phone numbers of people across the United States, and the texts command FBI agents in different geographic divisions to find out specific information and send it back to headquarters.

16mm, b/w , sound, 6:10, 2009

Leads is part of The Perlin Papers series.

This 16mm film replicates information the FBI wrote in surveillance notebooks about the daily life of a woman, Olga Pravdina, living in New York in the late 1940s. Up to five FBI agents were required to observe and follow her as she went about her daily activities, and to write down every single thing she did from morning to night. The notebooks are filled with descriptions such as “bought stockings, 97 cents,” and “went to movies, sat in front row.” It is fascinating to me that men were hired to move their bodies through the city connected to this woman, experiencing her days so intimately. It is unknown if Pravdina or the many other women described in the files ever learned about these notes of their daily lives.

16mm transferred to DVD, color and b/w, sound, 6:45, 2009

The musical work Dust of Snow, from 1942, is by Elliott Carter, a well-known composer. The piece, originally for voice and piano, uses the text of a 1923  poem by Robert Frost, one of the most famous U.S. poets. Frost lived most of his life in the countryside of the East Coast of the United States and used the landscape pictured in the film as an inspiration for his work.
The poem presents a moment in time in which a chance event can become a transformative experience. The simple, clear language incorporating a natural theme is characteristic of Frost’s poetry.
The colored rods were developed in the 1920s by Georges Cuisenaire, a Belgian schoolteacher who first used them to teach music and mathematics.
In the film, the animations represent every possible variation of the composition Dust of Snow. The timing of the animated frames are the same as the beats of music, creating varied rhythms. The voice demonstrating and describing the use of the Cuisenare rods is of Robert Lee, a professor at Miami University, Ohio (USA). Professor Lee performs basic series and the rhythms of the Carter composition.
Each of these artists was inspired by the passage of time and the rhythms of everyday life. Elliot Carter, who turned 100 years old in 2008 and is still an active composer, taught physics and loved math, language, and poetry. Robert Frost believed poetry should use simple, everyday language. Georges Cuisenaire wanted to represent music and math with basic tools to help his students develop a physical relationship to abstract concepts.
Cinematography and editing: Jenny Perlin
Performance: Adam Marks
Voice: Robert Lee, Music Department, Miami University, Ohio
Composition: Elliot Carter, Dust of Snow (1942), Associated Music Publishers, Inc., 1947
Poem: Robert Frost, Dust of Snow, from New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1923
Dust of Snow drawings
20 drawings (10 diptychs), colored pencil on paper, each drawing 24.5"x8.5," 2009
These drawings represent variations of the rhythms of the musical composition Dust of Snow from 1942 by Elliott Carter (with text by Robert Frost). The colored squares are representations of variations created by using the Cuisenaire Rods, a music and math teaching tool developed in the 1920s by Belgian schoolteacher Georges Cuisenaire.

16mm, color, sound, 4:40, 2008

Storage is part of The Perlin Papers series.

The next installment of the Perlin Papers series. A large bright yellow building announcing itself as STORAGE: PRIVATE ROOMS: BROTHERS STORAGE dominates the frame and inspires speculation.

Music: Piano Sonata by Aaron Copland (Movement II, Vivace), performed by Raymond Clarke.  Special thanks to Adam Marks.

16mm, b/w, sound, 56 seconds, 2010

Letter is part of The Perlin Papers series.

Letters of varying emotional tone feature prominently in the Perlin Papers archive. The FBI read, translated, copied, stored and replied to these letters throughout the 1940s and into the 1970s. U.S. citizens wrote letters to turn in their neighbors, retract petition signatures, express outrage, and beg for forgiveness. The single re-animated letter in this film reflects the climate of fear and condemnation that imbued U.S. culture in the 1950s. This short film serves as an introduction to the terms and themes of the Perlin Papers series.

16mm, b/w, silent, 3:20, 2006

Harry Gold, codename “GOOSE,” was convicted in 1951 for passing secrets of the atom bomb from physicist and spy Klaus Fuchs to Soviet agents. The animations in this film are copies of Gold’s absentminded drawings, scribbled over drafts of his resume and cover letter to the Atlantic Refining Company, Personnel Department, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948.

DV, color, sound, 9:30, 2007

Series of three C-prints, 2007

“But the fact is that each increase of stimulation is taken up into the preceding stimulations, and that the whole produces on us the effect of a musical phrase which is constantly on the point of ending and constantly altered in its totality by the addition of some new note.”  Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896)
Fifteen singers are arranged in an 18th century room. A small pipe organ stands behind them. After a short warmup, the choir takes a collective breath and sings the first note of a Bach chorale. But it doesn’t continue. Instead, the music changes to a wall of dissonant tones. Each singer has been asked to hold the individual note until he or she runs completely out of air. Only then can the next note be started. The singers are getting tired. They seem to fall into a kind of trance, listening and singing intently as their air runs out again and again. At the very end, the two last singers complete the music, breathlessly. After a stunned silence, laughter, coughing, surprise. Ending and Altered draws inspiration from several sources, John Cage’s ASLSP (As Slow As Possible (1985/1987)), writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art, specifically Sentence #29: “The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.”  Cage’s famous piece is currently being performed in Halberstadt, Germany, as ASLSP/Organ2, by a programmed organ that intends to perform the work over a 639-year period. The mechanical expectations of the machine in the Cage performance is in direct contrast to the limits of a singer’s physical body in this work. The complex relationships between individual and collective (the choir), mechanical and organic, experiential and measured, and conceptual/chance methods of creative production are also part of this work.

16mm, b/w, silent, 2:25, 2007

This short, hand-drawn animated film begins with a quote by Ryan C. Crocker, the current U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. In July, 2007, the New York Times quoted Crocker as comparing the current war in Iraq to a three or five-reel movie, depending on where one is living. In contrast to this quote, a list of the top-ten grossing films at the U.S. box office from the same day presents itself onscreen, along with other animated panels of related drawings that function as an associative commentary.

Box Office Drawings from the film
Six drawings, colored pencil on newsprint, 30”x50”, 2007
The drawings are made in the process of animating the short, hand-drawn animated film, Box Office (2007). The film begins with a quote by current U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker. In July, 2007, the New York Times quoted Crocker as comparing the current war in Iraq to a three or five-reel movie, depending on where one is living. In contrast to this quote, a list of the top-ten grossing films at the U.S. box office from the same day presents itself onscreen, along with other animated panels of related drawings.

16mm, b/w, silent, 5:00, 2007

Series of 16 drawings, graphite on paper, each 20”x 30”, 2007

Flight reveals the non-spaces of airports through transcriptions of receipts of every purchase from 2005 until the end of 2006. Details emerge and open up questions: Srisathi serves espressos at the Zurich Airport’s Center Bar. Herr Rupankthan works at Düsseldorf Flughafen. Exhortations to exercise are printed out by Sbarro’s pizza. Most receipts wish you “a nice flight.” Language hovers between an international English and the language of the country in which the airport is located. Minimal purchases--an espresso here, a newspaper there, a bottle of water--are mute testaments to a traveler traveling through for unstated purposes.

16mm, b/w, sound, 12:25, 2006

Filmed at my neighborhood corner store, a former Associated supermarket, from opening to closing on July 4, 2004 (Independence Day, U.S.). One roll of 16mm film shot every two hours or so reveals little except the unchanging patterns of the 14 hour workday.  Interview with owner Charles Leem reflects on the history of his store and his favorite musicians.

16mm film loop, b/w, silent, 5:00, 2005

A 16mm stop motion animation, combining the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the verb “amend” with the index pages of a 1927 book titled The Invert, and lists of sodomy laws recently stricken from the books of numerous U.S. states.
The film was created for the exhibition Log Cabin (Artists Space | New York, NY | January 18 - February 26, 2005).
Log Cabin Exhibition Info
January 18 - February 26, 2005 | Artists Space, New York, NY
Log Cabin features diverse artistic strategies that examine the impact of neo-conservatism on queer representations in America. Through explorations of alienation and social ghettoization, to neo-conservative tendencies within the queer community, Log Cabin stimulates dialogue about the shift in queer vernaculars provoked by the current political climate.
Artists include: Monica Abend, Andy Alexander, Cass Bird, Nayland Blake, Gregg Bordowitz, AA Bronson, DaveBurns, Jimmie Durham, Ken Gonzales-Day, Glen Fogel, Christy Gast, K8 Hardy, Jonathan Horowitz, Matt Keegan, Benjamin Kress, Terrence Koh, Glenn Ligon, Matt Lipps, Lovett/Codagnone, Monica Majoli, Wardell Milan, Slava Mogutin, Jenny Perlin, Paul Pfeiffer, Dean Sameshima, Matt Saunders, Julia Scher, Allison Smith, Marc Swanson, Scott Treleaven, Mark Verabioff, Kelley Walker, and Fritz Welch.
Curated by Jeffrey Uslip as part of the Emerging Curators Series.

16mm, b/w, silent, 10:45, 2004

Possible Models begins by outlining a news story about John Ashcroft’s announcement in June, 2004 that a Somali immigrant to Columbus Ohio (my home state), was charged with plotting to blow up a mall. The Somali, Nuradin Abdi, was arrested in November, 2003, and held for more than 6 months before being formally charged. The film continues with three parts detailing the history of shopping malls, the construction of mega-malls in Dubai, and the hyper-capitalist project, The Freedom Ship, a floating mile-long home for the wealthy, before returning to the story of Abdi and what might await him in the U.S. justice system.

3 channel video installation, color, sound, 7:00, 2004

A three channel video projection depicting three professional pianists attempting to perform a piece of music that they have never seen before. Each pianist is shown in a separate projection, and each starts the piece at the same time. They then continue playing at their natural speed. The work, Robert Schumann’s piano concerto in A minor, is challenging, and the pianists make mistakes. After a mistake, the pianist’s screen goes dark for five seconds, and their music stops, while the other pianists continue uninterrupted. Then the projection resumes, and the pianist continues playing.
The more challenging the piece becomes, the more mistakes the players make, and the more the three projections turn off. In this piece, the editing itself becomes the taskmaster; the act of cutting determines a player’s presence as performer. The players struggle through the work, attempting to perform perfectly.
Sight Reading is instantaneous performance, engaging brain, eyes, hands, and the entire body. The installation heightens the intensity of this activity by focusing on its failures.

16mm, b/w, silent, 3:00, 2003

Menus and lists of foods culled from research describe the “typical All-American Dinner.” The lists range from the banal to the elite to what might be called “the extremely unappetizing.” Ironies appear in the use of non-American terms, and the repetition of a surprising number of foods reworked from their “foreign” roots and presented as “typically American.” The film points at the way “All-American” reinforces the stereotype of the U.S. as a mono-cultural entity. The film is a humorous and pointed look at one so-called “classic” trait of American culture.

16mm, color, silent, 3:00, 2003

The United States in a Chaotic World takes as its starting point the title of a 1950 history book and uses it to begin a series of stuttering black and white animated panels, accumulating meaning by association. The film presents images of oil derricks, territorial acquisitions in the US, restricted trees, oxygen tanks, and recently coined American terms, such as “freedom fries” in place of “French fries.” These images allude to aspects of the history and of the present mindset governing the United States today.

16mm, b/w and color, sound, 14:00, 2003

Perseverance & How to Develop It takes the viewer on a journey through obsession, the drive for success, 1915 self-help tricks, and strikes at the Ford Motor Company. The film explores how the growth of industry in the 20th century relied on self-help to instill a drive for success in young workers. Perseverance & How to Develop It was a book published in 1915. Its concluding chapter, "Practical Exercises," outlined five tasks to be practiced on a daily basis. Untangling yarn, counting grains of rice, measuring oneself against a watch--these tasks made for success, by disciplining the mind and body. These exercises bear a striking resemblance to movements along an assembly line.
Perseverance’s publication came at the same time as the perfection of the Ford Motor Company assembly line. In the same period, Sigmund Freud wrote "On Mourning and Melancholia," describing a phenomenon which we now call depression. The appearance of these texts--at the height of American industrialization and World War I--was not a coincidence. To become a productive member of society, whether working in the city or preparing for war, a young man needed to manage his moods and develop self-control. The same issues come into play today. Workaholism, the widespread use of psycho-pharmaceutical drugs, self-help books, and an insatiable quest for happiness all resonate with Perseverance, written nearly 100 years ago. The cycle of work, success, depression, and back to work, continues to this very day.
Cast: Pablo Helguera, Tami Jantzi, Terry Perlin, Suzanne Wasserman

16mm, b/w, silent, 7 minutes, 2002

Schumann uses the piano concerto in A minor by Robert Schumann as a structuring element. Schumann suffered greatly in his life from nervous breakdowns, obsessions, and manias. The music in visual form is used also as punctuation for the various moods in the film.
The film begins with a series of lists of phobias, fears, statistics and drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge. The second half of the film presents information from numerous websites about how to control anxieties, and images of trees cut or tied down to train their growth. The last image in Schumann is the only live-action section, showing two shots of the changed Lower Manhattan skyline with the Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground. This reflects the time, space, and sensibility in which the film was created.

16mm film loop, b/w, silent, 0:10, 2002

Washing is a 16mm film loop depicting the apparently simple image of a hand cleaning a window.  Beyond the window in the background, a foggy landscape is visible. It is the landscape of Lower Manhattan, in the year 2002, the Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground, and the gap in the skyline in the background where the World Trade Center once stood. As the film runs through the projector, it becomes dirtier and dirtier, acquiring scratches and dust. The hand continues its simple, repetitive gesture, trying to clean a landscape--and a collective memory--of trauma. The gesture is essential, though the task inevitably futile. The original presentation of Washing was as a site-specific installation; it was projected on 16mm film between the windows from which it was originally filmed.

16mm/DV, color, sound, 22:00, 2002

What kind of violence is exile? There is the exile by choice, and the one who is forced from home. There is the refugee who later becomes an exile. There is the visitor whose country dissolves in his wake. There are families and individuals, separated by space, by politics; by history. An exile lives a double life, here and not-here. Who speaks in this film? Teachers, workers, students, parents, long-term residents, asylum-seekers, people with families and with friends.
Songs from Kosovo resound loudly in a Geneva community center; a call from Sierra Leone transforms a refugee center classroom; landscapes blur into daydreams of home— these images contrast with the difficult issues of discrimination, incessant bureaucracy, and threats of deportation.
Migration, intolerance, and violence have been seen as inevitable consequences of global culture. View from Elsewhere reminds us that border closings, forced deportations, and travel restrictions have real, tangible effects on peoples’ lives.

16mm, b/w, silent, 7:00, 2002

Rorschach is a 16mm black and white animated film which uses a laborious and intensive process of drawing to create a cyclical narrative of images and texts motivated by considerations of exile and displacement. A Rorschach test, judged poorly, can have terrible results, affecting a psychological assessment and the course someone's life might take. The banalities of an immigration document can mean whether or not a person can stay or leave a country that has become a new home. And even the most banal of texts, a fortune cookie, could be a motivation for someone to make life-changing decisions.
Rorschach ends with a fanfare of fortunes, followed by a sequence of receipt animations, documents of a specific life in a specific place between the now-historic months of September 2001 and December 2001, the end of a year we wish had not occurred, which imposed such drastic changes on mobility and civil liberties throughout the world.

Rorschach Drawings
Charcoal, graphite and ink on paper, 2002

16mm, color, sound, 6:00, 2001

Capsules is a portrait of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, home of time capsules buried there for the 1939 and 1964 Worlds' Fairs. Interviews with visitors to the park about what they would put in a present-day time capsule are juxtaposed with the decaying relics of the fairs.
Commissioned by the Queens Museum of Art, Crossing the Line exhibition, and Omar Lopez-Chahoud.

16mm, b/w, silent, 8:00, 2001

Working from Walter Benjamin's maxim on the usefulness of copying texts as opposed to reading them, which he relates to walking through a field as opposed to flying over it, Perseverance closely examines cultural detritus by copying, animating, and observing it. Perseverance links the U.S.'s 21st century purchasing power and its promises of happiness with the maxims of early 20th century self-improvement.
The 16mm black-and-white animations are generated by writing the texts letter by letter in a laborious and flawed calligraphy. The title comes from Perseverance and How to Develop It, a 1915 self-help book which instructed young men how to discipline themselves to achieve a better life.

16mm, b/w, silent, 30:00, 1999

Seventeen C-prints on transparency film, each 8x10”

Dear Jim and Dick is a text-film created in conjunction with an installation of the same name. The film describes narrative permutations of a 1970s correspondence found in the garbage in San Francisco in the mid-90s. Speculations, fiction and fantasy are structured as postcards, between strangers, Jim and Dick, and myself, reading them at a distance of 30 years.

16mm, color, sound, 3:00, 1999

Lost Treasures is an elegy to three teachers, each of whom recently passed away. The film uses hand-processed high-contrast film, whose surface has been damaged by stains of unwashed chemistry, in its effort to express the disorientation produced by loss.

16mm, b/w, sound, 18:00, 1999

Co-directed with Sarah Jane Lapp
Happy are the Happy traces a journey into humor, guided by the survivors of not-so-funny lives. How does one generation of survivors communicate with the next? Can humor function as a shared language for disparate communities of displaced people-specifically, a difficult diaspora of Bosnian, Jewish, and Romany refugees? And could you tell us your best joke, please? Of its participants and its viewers, this experimental, non-fiction film asks these questions and others relating to the matrix of memory, survival, and comic impulse of everyday life-in Prague and beyond.

16mm, color, sound, 17:00, 1998

I decided to find the town where my great-grandmother was born. Family rumors claimed that she lived next door to Freud. I found the town, Pribor, and went there, determined to locate my heritage. After three days of wandering around the decrepit village I finally found someone who recognized my great-grandmother's maiden name. Elated, I took the next train back to Prague and called my mother, who told me I had been asking about the wrong name the whole time. By using humor and contradiction, The Whole History of That questions the reliability of memory. The film uses complex editing rhythms, sync-sound interviews and non-traditional documentary footage to describe the narrative journey The Whole History of That leaves the viewer to ponder the fragments of an imagined history, now turned to dust under my lens.

Video, color, sound, 22:00, 1994

In 1992 I was in Czechoslovakia at the same time that the country ceased to exist. One year later, I returned to the newly divided country, to interview residents living on the new border between the new Czech Republic and Slovakia. This video not only documents the changes in everyday lives wrought by the so-called “Velvet Divorce” of 1992, but also reveals my status as an outsider, attempting to comprehend changes viewed as ‘sad but inevitable.’ Ten years after finishing this video, both Czech Republic and Slovakia have joined the EU. Little reference is now made to the once-united country, brought together not by the Soviet Union, but by Thomas Masaryk’s hopeful appeal for unification. In the 21st century, this story of the silent breakup of one nation should not be forgotten.