Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren - Short Films

Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren - Short Films 1976-1983

1. Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren - Bertha’s Children (1976)

My great aunt Bertha had seven children who are now between fifty and sixty-five years old. They all grew up in New York City and, even after they became adults and had their own families, lived in the same geographic region. When I visited New York one winter, I asked each of them to be in a film and all of them agreed. When I returned the following winter, however, only David, Marty, Aaron, Bernie and Thelma would do it. Frieda, concerned about the crazy people who might see the film and then write her nasty anonymous letters, refused, and Sylvia was in Florida at the time. --R. F.

2.Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren - Murray and Max Talk About Money (1979)

We are always interested in constructing ways of evoking the pleasures of cinema without implicitly accepting an ideology—of passivity, manipulation, and repressed violence—that we would explicitly reject. Can there be films that remain cinematic without indulging in one form of pornography or another? Murray and Max... is, in part, a proposal, a blueprint, for such a form of cinema.

3.Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren - Future Perfect (1980)

Perpetually unfinished, this film looks forward to a future when it (and everything else) will be perfect. “Future Perfect” is based on a series of algorithmic rules stating how a set of marks, e.g. rectangles, arcs, dots, would be placed on the film. Each algorithm describes a decreasing mathematical series which determined where in time the specific marks occurred. E.g. “A rectangle will have been drawn around some frames. The number of frames between drawings decreases according to a Fibonacci series.” The camera moves in the various shapes called for by the algorithms around a gloomy studio, and after development, the marks are inscribed on the film in ink by hand. An experience of the film incorporates past, present and future: we look through the frame back to the time when it was shot, where we see notes that look forward to a future in which certain marks will have been added to the image, while those marks indicate the presence of the film material as a surface.

4.Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren.- Cheap Imitations Part V/VI; Terms of Analysis (1982)

Initially the subject of this film was the multiple threats constantly implicit in cinema ... especially in the perceptual acts of unifying with which we respond to the discontinuities of editing. So the basic images were knives and salamis. But as the music was reworked, highly charged objects began to appear and reappear; instinctual navigation took over, as always, in the editing room ... and the film seemed to adopt another subject entirely. As in all our work, many issues are in uneasy balance, and the film refuses to find a center. Words in the film refer to its own intertextuality. Who is speaking here? And who is addressed?

5.Roberta Friedman & Grahame Weinbren - Grafittied Cars from "The Erl King" (with Z’ev) (1983)

(Extracted from The Erl King interactive cinema work and reworked for DVD in 2003). 

During the early 1980s New York City's East River bank was the dumping ground for hundreds of abandoned cars, especially at the south end of Manhattan in the shadow of Wall Street. Word was that they were stolen vehicles dumped after joy rides, which may be urban myth, but in any case the city was a rough place back then, when the Highline and the South Street Seaport shopping mall, not to mention the Hudson Yards gourmet food mall, were mere twinkles in developers' eyes. With the help of musician, sculptor and performance artist Z'ev, we painted Goethe's poem "The Erl King" line by line on the orphaned vehicles, translated from the High German for us by film scholar Noll Brinckmann. Freud's unforgettable description of the Burning Child dream forms a counterpoint, and it is all set to Liszt's piano arrangement of the young Schubert's "Erlkönig" lied. A deliberate confusion of the High and the Low.

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The collaborative projects of Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren represent pioneering experiments with form, authorship, and ideology within the independent cinema of the 1970s and early ’80s. Over roughly ten years, the pair produced an extensive filmography of conceptually rich, exploratory works.

Friedman and Weinbren’s collaborations collectively comprise a range of filmic test cases and aesthetic-conceptual investigations, realized as experiments with dense thickets of artistic association, which often suggest underlying patterns in their construction, though they do not always reveal their generative organizational systems in upfront or obvious ways. Instead, these works depend upon a hybrid mode of authorship that blends labor-intensive organizational practices with other less controlled structures, such as the incorporation of live, improvised performance, arbitrary patterning, or organizational strategies determined by chance. In addition to their use of opaque, sometimes seemingly paradoxical artistic techniques, these films often utilize other methodologies that further complicate their analysis, including significant, yet partially occluded elements of ideological critique, documentary contingency, and conceptual humor.

Throughout the mid-to-late 1970s in Los Angeles, Friedman and Weinbren collaborated on some of their most accomplished freestanding film works, including Bertha’s Children (1976), a technical marvel of split-screen optical printing about Friedman’s extended family; Future Perfect (1978), an elaborate image/sound experiment in algorithmic and mathematical structures that demonstrated the marked influence of avant-garde musical composition; Murray and Max Talk About Money (1979), a virtuosic study of sync-sound cinema, Cagean organizational strategies, and montage; and Margaret and Marion Talk About Working (1980), a transitional production in geographic terms, having been shot in New York and completed in Los Angeles.
The multi-part Cheap Imitations series was a playful group of films based on flawed descriptions and intentionally imperfect imitations of other movies, which they began towards the end of their Southern California residency. The cycle ends with Cheap Imitations VI: Terms of Analysis (1982–1983), which Friedman and Weinbren made in New York City after the couple permanently relocated there in 1981.
The artists’ last major collaboration of those years was a different sort of project: a massive, pioneering multimedia experiment in interactive art, The Erl King (1983–85), which straddled an array of media forms including film, video, and computer technologies.2 The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art presented the interactive installation of The Erl King as part of the exhibition, “The Temporary Contemporary” from 1986–87, and the Whitney Museum in New York included it in its Biennial of 1987.

- Juan Carlos Kase