Film director Jeanne Liotta: biography, career, and where to

Path of Totality

Jeanne Liotta

Projector performance for 16 mm film loop, invented lenses and objects, inspired by the total solar eclipse of August 2017 yet contains no photographic images whatsoever. Simple objects both concrete and transparent are physically handled producing an expansive projection environment beyond the frame. Visual concepts of light latency, peripheral vision, and the cosmic imagination are activated and propulsive. Unsatisfied with photography’s ability to render the ineffable light conditions of the solar eclipse, I replace the solar with the projection system, deliberately creating a work that is not a picture of the physical world, but could not exist without it. Sounds by the band of poets: Eric Baus, Phil Cordelli, and Oren Silverman, originally performed live at Georgia Art Space, Denver Colorado.

Path of Totality

2026

Window

Jeanne Liotta

'Window' is a lo-fi, trance-inducing trigger into other realms. A static, formal elegance masks the teeming energy coursing through its electronic heart.

Window

2001

Property

Jeanne Liotta

A few simple techniques of the cinema--a direct quotation, a framed location, an actress in costume, a few cuts to the quick--conspire in a compact couple of minutes to produce an image replete with historical and geographic visibility, to wit: an implied and uncontainable expanse of a landscape bought, sold and inhabited. An anti-landscape film and a one-two punch.

Property

2013

Dervish Machine

Jeanne Liotta, Bradley Eros

Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin's Dreammachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenuousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.

Dervish Machine

1992

Eclipse

Jeanne Liotta

This lunar eclipse event of November 2003 is observed, documented, and translated by eye and hand via the light-sensitive medium of Kodachrome film. In the 4th c BCE Aristotle founded The Lyceum, a school for the study of all natural phenomena pursued without the aid of mathematics, which was considered too perfect for application on this imperfect terrestrial sphere. This film then, in the spirit of...

Eclipse

2005

США, документальный

Sweet Dreams

Jeanne Liotta

Shot on location in Second Life, at "Beneath the Tree That Died" by AM Radio. Featuring Sunshine Hernandoz, BillyBob Mahoney, and Astra Thorne as themselves. Commisioned for the Artists Karaoke Throwdown at PDX Festival May 2009, Portland OR. "it is the possible we place before us" Gilles Deleuze, on the virtual

Sweet Dreams

2010

Observando el cielo

Jeanne Liotta

Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth.

Observando el cielo

2007

Muktikara

Jeanne Liotta

From the Sanskrit, ‘gentle gazing brings liberation’, the title is also the name of the particular body of water which is the image-subject of the film. Landscape as inscape, not inertly present but beckoning an active perception; a seeing and a seeing into.

Muktikara

2000

What Makes Day and Night

Jeanne Liotta

This 1940’s artifact is coupled with music by Nino Rota to expose the existential skeleton in the closet: our perilous journey on the planet Earth. A readymade film with the barest of interventions.

What Makes Day and Night

1998

Loretta

Jeanne Liotta

An abstract moving rayogram in the form of a woman or an aria. Living in time experienced as high drama, dissolving into the infinite. A dialectical manifestation of phenomena in flux, like any other movie.

Loretta

2003

Ceci N'est Pas

Jeanne Liotta

Hand-developed and unedited, this roll lived in my camera from March to May 1995: A trip to New Orleans, a train ride, the death of a dear friend and artist. This film is the author of itself; its trace function leaves me behind.

Ceci N'est Pas

1997

Haiku (for Onizuka)

Jeanne Liotta

"On January 28, 1986 the Challenger Mission 51-dash- L set out to observe Halley's Comet from space but exploded a minute into the launch killing everyone on board. A monument to Challenger astronaut Ellison J Onizuka stands in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, from which I made a graphite rubbing of the text onto a sheet of plain paper, and noticed it was nearly a perfect haiku. Then re filmed to emphasize poetic structure / disaster duration."

Haiku (for Onizuka)

2007

Sutro

Jeanne Liotta

Animated glitch portrait of the eponymous television tower on the hill, guardian of fog and electronic signals in that earthshaking city by the Bay... sounds by Scanner, from Lauwarm Instrumentals

Sutro

2010

Manifesto aka Struck by the Hand

Jeanne Liotta

A guerilla action performed on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum by Italo Zamboni, the last painter of the 20th century. Edited in residence at the late lamented Experimental Televison Center in Owego NY.

Manifesto aka Struck by the Hand

2021

Blue Moon

Jeanne Liotta

Erratic, erotic, arrhythmic lunar trauma. Strong poetic textures of female psycho-sexual experience, altering the film’s surface through selective bleaching and scratching, and uncanny percussive editing.

Blue Moon

1988

США, документальный

Maria Movie

Jeanne Liotta

Departing from Les Baxter's score to the Mario Bava film Black Sunday, Maria Movie is an overwrought melodrama set in New York City among the grit and shards of cinemas past and present. Chemistry and horror, dirge and dream, with Catherine Deneuve as The Black Maria herself, leading the procession on the via negativa.

Maria Movie

2001