Complete Filmography: Short Films
2019 ‘Eat the Dust’
2017 ‘Crime Scene’
2016 ‘Footnote’
2014 ‘A Woman Returns From a Journey’
2013 ‘The New World’
2010 ‘Radio’
2008 ‘Alibi’
2008 ‘Road Trip (Rue Isolette)’
2007 ‘Nowhere Having Found It’s Way’ (11') 2007 ‘Phoneo’
2006 ‘Tribe’ (In progress)
2004 ‘Sense’
2004 'Exquisite Corpse' (with Julia Dogra-Brazell)
2003 ‘Episode’
2003 ‘Easy Listening’
2002 ‘Island’ (installation)
2002 ‘Trailer’
2001 ‘Trilogy 45’
2001 ‘Red Sea, Heatless Night’ (installation)
2001 ‘Surfin’ (installation)
2000 ‘All Kinds Of Red’ (installation)
2000 ‘Series 1 & 2’
1999 ‘Legacy’
1999 'Drive She Said'
1998 '50 50'
1998 'Incommunicado'
1997 'Death By English' (installation)
1995 'Cactus Babylon'
1994 'Philosopher Queen'
1993 'Talk Israel'
1992 'Cheap Philosophy'
1990 'Rootless Cosmopolitans'
1986 'Tea Leaf'
1984 ‘Yellow Toast’
Film Highlights
'Eat The Dust' 2019
Eat the Dust features dancers Rahel Vonmoos, Roni Katz, editor, Daniella Shreir, and artist Zsuzsi Flohr in a dance across Europe in troubled times, a detective story that isn’t one, and a queer film noir with a weary voiceover. Shot in Berlin, London, Naples, Rome and Vienna, Eat the Dust imagines a world where borders might dissolve and women are the bearers of meaning.
'Crime Scene' 2017
Set in Jaffa/Tel Aviv artist Michal Heiman contemplates time and cigarettes, while writer Yehouda Shenhav discusses Arabic poetry. A mix of detective story and personal narrative 'Crime Scene' departs from the dense collage of earlier works to contemplate narrative dead ends that nonetheless evoke deeper meanings. Tel Aviv streets, Palestinian women taking selfies, the writing of 20th century poet Zelda, a turbulent sea and bleak petrol stations tell a story of the occupation and its resistance.
'Footnote' 2016
Three women respond to questions of love, one with a John Wieners' poem about abjection and poverty, another's commentary charts the mysticism of romance, and another chooses friendship over passion. 'Footnote' is a landscape, each ‘character’ expounds her theory on an open space, Chris Kraus on the streets of Hibbing, Minnesota, Eileen Myles under a tree in Knole Park, England, and Salit Krac in Tempelhof field Berlin; a writer reads a poem, a poet expounds in the shadow of Vita Sackville-West's ancestral home, an Israeli artist in a disused, transformed Nazi airfield...
'A Woman Returns From A Journey' 2014
A short novella in form, 'A Woman Returns' is the sister film of 'The New World'; shorter, sadder and more wistful. A mother’s suicide, a daughter’s abandonment, the death of a lover, form the trajectory of the ‘journey’ taken. Thinking women, their reveries, their memories, their sorrows collide in a collage of moments fused by a voiceover that tells an inconclusive story.
'The New World' 2013
Mixing Super 8 and phone footage 'The New World' expands the short format of previous works in a sinuous narrative of 23 minutes. Its longhand structure explores the nature of thought and reflection, trauma and memory through performance and storytelling. Yet the story is a series of dead ends and inconclusive musings, part film noir and part fairy tale its optimism is cut with a deep nostalgia that views the 20th century from the vantage point of the 21st . "She..all the waitresses, all the smoking women looking out windows. Just a slippery history full of the broken puppetry of her narrators" – Eileen Myles
'Radio' 2011
(5 Films with a text by Chris Kraus) DVD
Conceived as a filmic version of a 70s singer/songwriter album, Radio collates five short films, linked by themes of love and loss. Some of the films are collaged mash-ups, mixing found footage and live action with an emphasis on film noir. Some are remixes, reworking image and music with narrative voiceover. ‘Episode’ and ‘Sense’ are shot on mini-dv and ‘Phoneo’, 'Alibi’ and ‘Radio’ are shot on a phone camera, they’re low-res, dense and disturbing and their subjectivity collapses into pure noir, their voice hard-boiled and fragmented.
'Radio' (2011) Mixing archive images from the filmmaker's diaries, recent live action and found footage. Radio the ’title track' is a dense bricolage that is an hommage to memory and dreams, a world of blue skies, trees, desire and connection. Citing Pedro Costa’s O Sangre among other films, and shot in New York, Paris and London the films eschews narrative voiceover and instead mixes musical fragments to articulate a dreamlike optimism.
'Alibi' (2010) - Quoting Maya Deren’s ‘At Land’, ‘The Savage Eye’ ‘Marnie’ ‘The Battle of Algiers’ ‘Naked Youth’ ‘The Buddha Collapsed out of Shame’ among other films, and a number of texts including Poe’s Israfel, Alibi is a nightmare journey into paranoia and sorrow, riffing on noirish dystopias and mashing up pop songs and poetry, sushi bars and the streets of Istanbul to create a bricolage of chaos and confusion, evoking psychological crime scenes and tortured thought. Shot on a phone Alibi mixes citation and documentation to create an oneiric emotional pessimism that is at once noir and cinephilic, akin to a audio-visual panic attack.
'Phoneo' (2008) – Made on a phone, a low-res Nokia, explores the grain of pixellation in a dark poem about doppelgängers and subterfuge. The narrative voice binds together a story that has flashes of guns, of dresses, of faces and streets yet reaches no conclusion, its restlessness is its rhythm.
'Sense' (2005) – From dark road movie to urban screen print, the aesthetics of Sense are a mish-mash, its text a melancholic dreamscape where ‘nothing makes sense’ and its narrator jumps in time from one place to another. Venice, New York and the Boston coast seen from a plane, and fragments of Bob Dylan and Maria Callas collide in a place where subjectivity is a torch song on the margins of a restless life, its narrator a hapless wanderer.
'Episode' 2004 – Shifting from London streets to the alps, from Brooklyn to Massachusetts, from roads to bars, Episode tells a fragmented aphoristic story of lost opportunities and pointless truisms, told in the narrators ennui-laden drawl, its ironic tone is emphasised by leaps in time and space from Americana to European angst.
'Tea Leaf', 1985
“Ruth Novaczek’s first film takes the form of a confession to the filmmaker’s new lover. It was originally shot super 8 and re-filmed from two projectors to create various superimpositions. For Novaczek, this is a film about what she terms “the typical Jewish London woman of (her) generation”, who grew up in the 1960s, denying her culture and sexuality, only to try to come to terms with it during the tumultuous Thatcherite 1980s.” – BFI