Michael Gitlin

Scan Platform Problems

Michael Gitlin, Jacqueline Goss

The most beautiful planet deconstructed, played with, and put back together again.

Eastern District Terminal

Michael Gitlin, Michael Gitlin

Eastern District Terminal documents a particular lost time and place: the Brooklyn waterfront after the end of its use as an industrial and shipping site, but before it became the front lawn for the shiny apartment towers to come. In that in-between moment, the space functioned as a “temporary autonomous zone.” Shot using a homemade 3D rig, the film wanders and turns through the zone and, along the way, encounters three of its denizens.

Berenice

Michael Gitlin

Edith Meeks, Beatrice Roth

Berenice is a meditation on a dream of lost plenitude, and its inversion into decay. The events depicted in the film concern the formation and dissolution of a utopian community in 1832, and the psychic and physical disintegration of two members of that community. In an allusion to the interiority of the main character, Berenice, whose flashbacks form the film’s narrating consciousness, the oblique and inward-turning fictive structure gives itself over to delirious visual asides. The film is partially adapted from the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. Additional primary sources used in constructing the film include texts by the 19th-century French utopian Charles Fourier and the collected letters from Brook Farm.

The Birdpeople

Michael Gitlin, Michael Gitlin

"One of the many disturbing portents of environmental catastrophe to emerge in recent years has been the massive die-off of North American birds: scientists now calculate that the continent’s population has plummeted by nearly 3 billion in only half a century." - Light Industry