Movies: Tessa Hughes-Freeland

In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of thei...

A film exploring the nature of sex and gender roles. Nymph, a fairy, walks and dances through a woodland before being pursued by Pan, an evil spirit....

1983 short by Tessa Hughes-Freeland...

Playboy is made from bits of vintage porno films, boxing films, westerns, and adventure and horror films....

A short film to accompany the reissue of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album Kicking Against the Pricks (originally released in 1986). The result is a determinedly human portrait of the unique body of work produced by the band over the last 25 years, tol...

A short film to accompany the reissue of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album From Her to Eternity (originally released in 1984). The result is a determinedly human portrait of the unique body of work produced by the band over the last 25 years, told thro...

Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s “Baby Doll” is a tiny slice of cinéma vérité from 1982 about the girls working the now defunct Baby Doll Lounge on Church and White St. in downtown Manhattan. It captures a moment before NYC got sanitized....

A short film to accompany the reissue of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album The Good Son (originally released in 1990). The result is a determinedly human portrait of the unique body of work produced by the band over the last 25 years, told through thos...

This film was made for an exhibition entitled "My Icon" Jumping off the springboard of the popular religious iconography of mother and child, as a mother I took my child as the subject....

Watch Out! is a lighthearted poetic comment which addresses concepts of male voyeurism. Exploring clichés to the point of saturation, these combinations present different ways of learning to look and looking to learn....

Document of the experimental Butoh group Poppo...

Inspired by and loosely based on the introduction to Blue Of Noon by Georges Bataille, the title was taken from the name of the main character. It is a short portrayal of one person's descent into a state of degradation. In spite of her affluence, Di...

A no-holds-barred portrait of addiction, RAT TRAP is an unflinching portrayal of a junkie injecting heroin cut with footage of (already expired) rodents being tortured and maimed, all underscored by a fiery guitar rock solo, painting a grim picture o...

short music-driven video by Tess Hughes-Freeland...

Originally one side of a live multiple projection, INSTINCT mixes irrationally convergent imagery. An iconography of the intangible and intuitive, time lapses as elemental aspects of the female psyche. Psychedelic disorder and repetition, visual coll...

A surrealistic narrative is created which collapses different realities into one, by means of both similarities and juxtapositions. There is a certain irony in creating such a narrative which revels in the popular romanticism of a sleep state, as a m...

Documenting graffiti culture around East Village in 1983...

A document of a performance by the Butthole Surfers in the 1980s...

This film was made for an exhibition entitled "Ghosts of the Catskills". The history of the Catskills had made an impression on me was that of the alchemy of landscape and the influence of Woodstock hippie culture....

Inspired by a dream, it is a reflection on the sentiment of loss. Working with film material directly, by combining handmade film, slides made from found plants and animals, and original ethereal imagery it considers abstract concepts within a romant...