Movies by John Winn

Reservoir (Seven Fragments)

Reservoir (Seven Fragments)

Set at an artificial reservoir in North Carolina, RESERVOIR (SEVEN FRAGMENTS) is a meditation on the unnatural histories of the American environment. The film approaches both the cinematic image and the landscape it captures as damaged, estranged things—things adrift in a world of irreparable discord.

out of touch (franklinia still life)

out of touch (franklinia still life)

the franklinia flower, now extinct in the wild, appears here as a printed image (a drawing from 1782) pinned against a kitchen wall. hand and figure move disjointedly. the light of day gives way to electricity, to darkness, and to morning. recorded on a video camera built in 2002: an obsolete image tracing some accidental gestures and capturing a form of life existent only in cultivation. some fragments of vermeer, general electric, and chiquita brands international.

Seven Images of Disappearance

Seven Images of Disappearance

Seven images, each staging their own disappearance.

Ode to R.G. Springsteen

Ode to R.G. Springsteen

Daily dedications to a minor artisan of the classical Hollywood western. Each segment was originally a kind of letter, a private correspondence, sent in fragments to a friend over a few weeks—an ode to R.G. but also to B.C. (an ode to cinema, to everyday life, and to the cinephilic fantasy of their becoming indistinguishable).

Ray's Place

Ray's Place

An oblique remake of Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951), Ray’s Place follows Ray from his haunts in New York City to Binghamton where, exiled from Hollywood, he taught alongside members of the American avant-garde. Participating in both Hollywood’s golden age and the experimental cinema of the 1970s yet at home in neither, what is Ray’s place?

Landskip

Landskip

"Every single entity contains an adumbration or landskip of the whole Universe" (Jan Baptist van Helmont, 1650).

weak signal

weak signal

Images of something like nature struggling to endure against the noise of an entropic electronic signal.