Harvard Film Archive

September 26, 2004

An Evening with Robert Fenz

Having worked with veteran filmmakers including Chantal Akerman and Robert Gardner, Robert Fenz has crafted his own distinct body of work which can be characterized as both experimental and ethnographic, with a deep sensitivity for the human condition. A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan currently based in Boston, he has screened his work at The Museum of Modern Art, The Pacific Film Archive, Dia Foundation for the Arts, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives and The Cinématheque Française, as well as the Toronto, New York, Hong Kong, Rotterdam and London Film Festivals. Since 1996, he has been working on Meditations on Revolution, a series of short films that explores the definition of the word “revolution.” In 2004, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

September 26 (Sunday) 7 pm

Meditations on Revolution, Part V: Foreign City

Directed by Robert Fenz
US, 2003, b/w, 32 min.

Foreign City is the final film in Fenz’s series Meditations on Revolution. Dedicated to the director’s father, who immigrated to the United States in 1953, Foreign City studies New York as a place of immigration and displacement. Using abstract black and white images and actual city sounds which come in and out of synch, Fenz creates a magical foreign landscape in which the city is reconstructed through an imaginary plan, built on sensation. Much of the film has a timeless, anonymous quality but makes a powerful shift through the voice of artist and jazz musician Marion Brown.

Meditations on Revolution, Part lV: Greenville, MS

Directed by Robert Fenz
US, 2001, b/w, 30 min.

Shot in the Mississippi delta, Greenville, MS focuses on a boxer in training. Each separate act of his process is shown and repeated, demonstrating the exhaustive discipline required in preparing for a fight. Using in-camera editing, Fenz follows his subject’s progression from one form of exercise to another.

Vertical Air

Directed by Robert Fenz
US, 1996, b/w, silent, 28 min.

A joyous experiment in sound and image, this film combines familiar American imagery and abstractions with an innovative jazz score composed by Wadada Leo Smith.