saam gabbay

Jem and I met because I was wearing a mustache at a MoCA opening.  A year later we co-directed her music video together.  It’s a photofilm made from 25,632 photograhs.

My friend Magdalena stopped by the studio after a very sad day.  We talked and made a photofilm.  Music is by Arvo Pärt.

A photofilm of Rosalie, Charlie and Emily.  A perfect day in Los Angeles.

A little film made for my good friend Patrick’s well behaved birthday party in Venice.

This is the trailer of an HD yoga film I made with Oliver Reinsch.  Dave Hodge and I scored it. You can download the full course here.  The DVD is in Japanese and English.

My friend Lux stopped in on her way to Joshua Tree. I told her how obsessed I had been with Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and how I had tracked down dozens of covers of the song by everyone from Bono to Jose Gonzalez. I asked her if she would sing.  We bought a week’s worth of groceries and went to work, finishing on new year’s eve.

Lux D’Coda on lyrics. I played the instruments and produced/arranged the track.

A photofilm of director and puppeteer Genevieve Anderson, made when she visited the studio in 2005.  Music was redone in 2008.

This was my attempt to show how you can do laundry using an old Land Rover Defender 90. No- seriously, a friend of mine had turned me on to the band Beauty Pill- and I had coincidentally purchased a camera clamp so I decided to make a film that “investigates all the different places you can clamp a camera while doing errands.” Nothing more. Cameos by my friend John Beug. Shot on a tiny Canon PowerShot SD400 camera in Venice, CA.

This is a film by New York City artist Katy Schimert and staring Josh Lucas. It’s the 4th film I made with Katy and the first which did not have Oliver Reinsch as its star.

It was originally screened at David Zwirner Gallery in New York.

The film is about Icarus (in this case a stock trader) who suffers the same fate as the original only this time he’s flying over the World Trade Center. The film was fantastic to make for many reasons- one was that I was strapped to Josh Lucas’s chest parasailing over the Hudson River for the aerial scenes. The latter is that I can say I made a film about the World Trade Center. Buildings that I always loved and miss.

As always, working with Katy Schimert is among the most fulfilling projects of my life. She is my teacher and mentor.

Oedipus was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art Bienalle as well as the Berkeley Art Museum and various galleries/museums in the US and Europe.

My 3rd film with New York City artist Katy Schimert, it was also most perilous!  Katy called and said “you need to get scuba certified” for a new film. The film would be shot in the American Virgin Islands (St. John) and would once again star Oliver Reinsch. Later on I would find out that 90% of the production budget was spent flying Oliver from Japan to St. John in order to work on the film.

It was money well spent. Oliver is the only person on earth that could endure the punishment that would ensue. He was asked to essentially drown and play dead take after take, weighed down by a ceramic chest plate and hearts that Katy had beautifully sculpted. His costume was not able to accommodate any spare air, so an off-camera diver would swim over to him at the end of every take and save his life.

20+ feet down. Over and over and over. For 4 days. One of my favorite projects with Katy.  There is a short excerpt of Katy speaking at the museum in 1999 with the film playing behind her.

TDF was a dance act project featuring Climie and Eric Clapton, with Clapton working under the name of x-sample. Mark Jeremias and I co-directed this music video for Reprise Records in 1997.  This is the uncut version.

Screened at the AC Project Room and later at Los Angeles MoCA, this was my second film with Katy Schimert and probably my favorite.

The film stars Oliver Reinsch and was shot on frozen Lake Erie where Katy grew up.  She had fashioned a hand-made astronaut suit with a sculpted ceramic chest plate for Oliver. We shot in varied terrain sometimes a quarter mile away from Oliver in -20 degree weather.

This project was pure magic, from Katy’s vision to Oliver’s grace over very slick ice and our combined subverbal communication throughout the project. Especially fun was sneaking off at night while Katy slept and bowling in Buffalo, NY with the astronaut suit… in slow motion, as if on the moon. Fantastic!