26.02.2016 Stop by Jeff Preiss, Ep St.Gallen, Palace St.Gallen
Jeff Preiss will screen and discuss his beautiful film 'Stop'.
1995–2012, USA, 120m, 16mm transferred to SD video, color, sound
Airplanes, holidays, tigers, funerals, friends, dogs, car crashes, dead birds, the Twin Towers, 14th Street, clouds, windshield wipers, rain, buildings, terraces, babies, kids, old people, Stan Brakhage, art, movies, Planet of the Apes, a monkey reading a newspaper, New York, Seoul, Paris, Berlin, Boston, apartments, fireworks, flags, houses, terraces, beaches, trains, cars, driftwood, billboards, Los Angeles, September 11, Ground Zero, George W. Bush, the Iraq War, chicken nuggets, French fries, pizza, döner kebab, airports, haircuts, dentists, doctors, laptops, cell phones, 23rd Street, subways, Chet Baker, SlutWalk, coffee, bagels, dresses, advertisements, skirts, ties, bathing suits, Orchard Street, traffic. This is a sampling of what enters the world of Jeff Preiss’s STOP, a film of beautiful observations and revelations, chronicling magnificent transformations and recent history with a feverish urgency.
Compiled from 2,500 rolls of film shot from 1995–2012, edited with economy and precision and clocking in squarely at 120 minutes, STOP is nothing short of a home-movie epic. Subjects and storylines weave throughout the film; some emerge from the beginning while others reveal themselves slowly, and some appear only once; others fade, gradually, away. Most striking, and a necessity of any home movie, is the story of Preiss’s child, whose process of gender self-determination serves as the film’s most resilient crux. Preiss fulfills two overlapping roles behind the camera: the essential, loving father of home movie practice, and the eternal, inquisitive experimental film artist. He never once turns the camera on himself. (excerpt from 'In Retrospect, Brooklyn Rail by Giampaolo Bianconi)