April 5 (Thursday) 7 pm
Osgood Hooker Professor on Visual
Arts, Alfred Guzzetti is a gifted maker of documentary and experimental
work in both film and video. His feature-length Family Portrait Sittings
(1975), in which his parents sat before camera and microphone for their
portraits, epitomizes his lifelong interest in the personal documentary—an
approach which takes the artist’s own experience as a starting point. In
the mid-1980s, distressed by U.S. opposition to the Nicaraguan revolution,
he joined with two friends, Richard Rogers and Susan Meiselas, in making
Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family and the award-winning
feature Pictures from a Revolution. Skeptical for many years of
small-format video—thinking it an inferior substitute for film and put
off by its bleeding, unstable colors and small, poorly resolved images—Guzzetti
delayed until the mid-1990s working in the medium. Shooting at first in
Hi8 and then in digital video, Guzzetti has created an impressive cycle of
short videotapes that focus on "the daily experience of contem-porary
life, its assaults on us in public places, in television, our ineffectual
refuge in the private and the distant." In recent works like A
Tropical Story and The Tower of Industrial Life, Guzzetti captures the
multivoiced and multilayered nature of experience, the distinctive way in
which the "things that we see and hear daily mix with the conscious
and unconscious stream of our thoughts, fears, and memories." His
tapes have been screened at the New York Video Festival and featured in
the recent Digital Room program in Copenhagen.
Harvard Film Archive is a division of Fine Arts Library of the Harvard College Library.
Copyright © 2006 President and Fellows of Harvard College.