David Sherman
2021
Assassination in Dreamland
David Sherman
A work inspired by the uncanny juxtaposition of the political murder of America’s 25th President during the fantastically realized 1901 World’s Fair, as filmed by Thomas Alva Edison. uncovers a hidden continuum of cinema, terrorism and spectacle.
Assassination in Dreamland
Wasteland Utopias
David Sherman
Wasteland Utopias explores the intersection of two radically different utopian thinkers: mega-developer Del Webb and outsider psychiatrist/naturalist Wilhelm Reich. Each found his way into southern Arizona's Sonoran Desert in the late 1950s—Webb building his colossal, panoptically-planned retirement community Sun City and Reich conducting his weather manipulation experiments using Orgone Energy. Using found footage, documentary interviews, and narrative tableaux, the film interweaves contradictory narratives and critically poetic observations.
Wasteland Utopias
To Re-Edit the World
David Sherman
Assembled from the contents of 4 boxes of 50s and 60s film shot by San Francisco filmmaker Dion Vigne, spinning through a lost history, a disappearance of names and faces and works and words of the characters who comprised one of the great chapters in American Underground filmmaking. At the center of this San Francisco re-history is the unknown Beat filmmaker Dion Vigne.
To Re-Edit the World
Tuning the Sleeping Machine
David Sherman
"Fragments of unidentified and yet strangely familiar films, pregnant with allusion and implication, drift into one another, obscured by the haze of rephotography, electricity and the residue of (al)chemical formulae, renamed time and memory. Tuning the Sleeping Machine resurrects the cinema projected on the unconscious, a series of images defined by the gaze of an eye, the presence in an empty room, the creeping darkness that shrouds a strange face." - Brian Frye
Tuning the Sleeping Machine
The Silver Returns
David Sherman
A chemical Western in 16mm whose primitive processes reveal a profound instability of language within desert landscapes. Made through the hand processing and primitive contact printing of outdated laboratory print stock, The Silver Returns examines the phenomena of "letter mountains" that proliferate the old mining towns of the American Southwest. Much of the silver mined here, became the image-bearing material of photographic film. The silver returns to find the instability of the film's emulsion mirroring the desert's toxic environmental remains.
The Silver Returns