Dani ReStack

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion

Sheilah ReStack, Dani ReStack

Dani ReStack, Sheilah ReStack

SOTD was birthed out of a desire to privilege and amplify the strange and banal quality of daily life, to see what it can yield as an entrance to larger concerns, such as the environment, representation of motherhood, queer desire, the domestic as site of radicality.

Cinetracts '20

Želimir Žilnik, Sheilah ReStack

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.

Recitation

Dani ReStack

The Grandmother recites the Mourners' Kaddish over her granddaughter.

Peeper Palace

Dani ReStack

16mm to video. Five 16mm black and white silent films transferred to video and projected onto eighteen foot long vellum banners. A fan blows the vellum which makes the projections spill onto the walls and floor. There is one unifying sound track of peeper frogs (Pseudacris crucifer) singing their mating call.

17 New Dam Rd.

Dani ReStack

In Dani’s Leventhal’s latest video we are invited along on a house visit with a familial group. There’s trash in the garden, guns on the sofa, and martial arts in the living room. A photo session records a young woman throwing punches at a man, playacting for the camera, but sweating anyway.

Draft 9

Dani ReStack

The craft of montage is alive and well in Leventhal’s work. Delicate and harrowing juxtapositions of skinned animals, the tattooed arm of a Holocaust survivor eating bagels in a coffee shop, and neon flowers on a disco floor. In her work emerges something that is extraordinarily immediate, both fresh and painful, hard to watch and yet impossible not to watch. - Genevieve Yue

She Left Before I Was Ready

Dani ReStack

A film by Dani Restack

Tin Pressed

Dani ReStack

Opening with jarring violence, Dani Leventhal’s Tin Pressed proceeds to negotiate a balancing act between the bewildering tonal variances of daily life—with all of its unnamable and enchantingly fragmented specifics—and the gravitational urge to construct both private and shared narratives. The world discovered through these images revolves around multiple centers. The camera’s odd equanimity feels both generous and dangerous. Leventhal’s deft oscillation between elision and inclusion reveals a brief but vast taxonomy of beauty, peace, longing, and terror.—Jeremy Hoevenaar

54 Days this Winter 36 Days this Spring for 18 Minutes

Dani ReStack

Material is presented as short scenes: documentation of the quotidian, interviews, on-camera monologues, and performative or expressive shots that are constructed. So the material, while mostly generated as a diary, is heterogeneous enough to include just about any kind of footage. At one point, a baby cries inconsolably, in another, a boy in a baseball uniform is playing Bach while his mother sits next to him putting on mascara. The 18 minute video montage of impressions has a cumulative effect, accessed and read differently depending on the mental connections the viewer makes.

Future From Inside

Sheilah ReStack, Dani ReStack

Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Tova Carlin

The third part of a trilogy regarding "feral domesticity," following "Strangely Ordinary This Devotion" (2017) and "Come Coyote" (2019). "Future from Inside" is a meditation on the environment, domestic space, queer desire, and magic.

Hearts Are Trump Again

Dani ReStack

"By way of lush formal and associative shifts, Hearts Are Trump Again evokes the ever-present tension between seemingly polarized states of experience. Desire and repulsion; freedom and constraint; pain and pleasure all find articulation in images of ferocious dogs and mock conversations about childbearing. Tonally complex and viscerally rich, Hearts Are Trump Again is a lyrical exploration of emotional weather." --Brett Price

Music at Night

Dani ReStack, Steve Reinke

A five-minute video collaboration between Dani Leventhal and Steve Reinke.

Litau

Dani ReStack

A tapestry of images and sounds. Tango dancing. A conversation about heaven and hell, with illustrations. Horses nuzzle. A woman reclines. Silent soccer. Street entertainers play classical music. Travel is mysterious and sometimes fraught.

Sister City

Dani ReStack

Sister City channels moments of paradoxical experience--of being a superhero or being for sale--into reverberant conduits, articulating a nature divided by panes of glass or suspended in watery solitudes. Each shift begets a kind of origin story: one encounter traces the specific azure of a James Turrell installation to a pet shop jellyfish, in another, a modern-day putto purifies a horrific tale by blowing bubbles in a tub. Sister City, like water, seeks its own level; cresting and displacing continuous bursts of life spiritualized, succulent, and ultimately alone. -Deirtra Thompson

Shayne's Rectangle

Dani ReStack

In Shayne's Rectangle, Dani Leventhal's moving and mysterious prayer for healing, a horse farm and a casual poolside dissection are the nodes between which a series of patiently taken sharp turns maneuver through moods both intimate and detached. The camera pursues, observes, offers, reflects, and is reflected. Things clear and things indistinct interact rhythmically, resonantly, producing a volatile and haunting visual prosody. -- Jeremy Hoevenaar

Show & Tell in the land of Milk & Honey

Dani ReStack

In this piece Dani Restack recounts to camera her experiences of living and working in Israel, the fabled land of milk and honey of childhood lessons. With time spent in a metal factory and a battery farm for chickens, her harrowing tale includes stories of sexual harassment and sick birds. Against this background, there are idyllic images of bees and flowers, cows and calves, intimate caresses, dead birds. Every thing is worthy of Dani's gaze, and is transformed by the encounter, becoming more human or sacred, and we are closer to the pain and beauty of being alive.