Phillip Warnell
2021Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies
Phillip Warnell
Jean-Luc Nancy
Philosopher and heart transplant recipient Jean-Luc Nancy meditates on the history and integrity of bodies in a number of visual and literary passages exploring his onscreen presence, a surgical organ in search of a body and an unaccounted for, displaced invertebrate at sea. Outlandish is a journey between shores and environments, the touching of and proximity between bodies, the vanishing and appearance of crew, dimensions of form and, above all, our relations with strange foreign bodies.
Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies
Intimate Distances
Phillip Warnell
Martha Wollner
Martha Wollner, legendary casting director, roams the streets in search of an actor to play the role of a criminal. Through the random encounters that Martha undertakes with passers-by found in the New York district of Queens, the film reveals the growing intimacy between strangers with extreme finesse.
Intimate Distances
Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air
Phillip Warnell
Antoine Yates, Rajiv
Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air is an only-in-New-York account of Ming, Al, and Antoine Yates, who cohabited in a high-rise social housing apartment at Drew-Hamilton complex in Harlem for several years until 2003, when news of their dwelling caused a public outcry and collective outpouring of disbelief. On the discovery that Ming was a 500-pound pound Tiger and Al a seven-foot alligator, their story took on an astonishing dimension. The film frames Yates’s recollections with a poetic study of Ming and Al, the predators’ presence combined with a text by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, reimagining the circumstances of the wild inside, animal names, strange territories, and human-animal relations.
Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air
I First Saw the Light
Phillip Warnell
I First Saw the Light channels the vestige of Joseph Carey Merrick’s surviving output. Better known as The Elephant Man, he produced a little noticed two-page autobiography, sold to those attending a freak show in which he was displayed, opposite the royal London hospital in London's Whitechapel High Street. There is one surviving copy of the pamphlet. Its text is coupled with starkly filmed sequences of a model church he also constructed, now hermetically sealed within a glass and ebony container, together forming the basis for this poignant, silent film. A reminder of Merrick’s profound humanity in the face of extreme adversity, it also serves as an auto-biographical footnote and reminder of David Lynch’s eponymous feature film on Merrick, in which the model is a central motif and metaphor for his psychological and emotional fluctuations.
I First Saw the Light
