16 mm and digital video, 30 minutes, 2002
Made with support from Kodak, Durfee Foundation, Location One, New York.
Using digital video to reference surveillance and voyeurism, and film to reference cinematic history, Letter draws on Film Noir, American dreamscapes, American desert mythology, the B-movie, oppositional cinema, and Noir’s descendent, True Crime.
The first minutes of Letter re-enact the first minutes of the Noir classic Kiss Me Deadly, reinventing its tension and gender inversions. Filmed in dreamlike settings- a lonely desert, empty prairie land- a car moves through a winding highway in the Hollywood hills. The characters are trapped in a pre-urban space- on a stretch of back road that anticipates dark city streets, the Noir streets of Los Angeles, a space of fugitive menace where social bets are settled. Letter features a hard-edged original score by Preston Swifnoff and Aleph Research.
Letter was reviewed in The New York Times, ArtForum and the Houston Press.
Letter has screened at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Hollywood, CA; Location One,New York, NY; Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX; Kunsthallle wien, Vienna, Austria; VideoTechque, ArtBasel, Basel, Switzerland; Nocturnal Video Programme, Galerie Christine Koenig, Vienna, Austria and Cinescape at The Hideout, Austin, TX.