Movies: Juan Downey

Photographed entirely in color, Four Stars was projected in its complete length of nearly 25 hours (allowing for projection overlap of the 35-minute reels) only once, at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque in the basement of the now-demolished Wurlitzer Bu...

Las Meninas is a brilliant essay on illusionism, mirrors and perception in art, life and video, articulated by Downey as a subjective interpretation of Velasquez's eponymous Baroque masterpiece. Through a theatrical reenactment of the painting's pict...

Featuring a vehicle equipped with tanks of oxygen, Fresh Air was an interactive performance that allowed people on the streets of New York to breathe clean air free of charge. This guerilla act, done under the pseudonym George Smudge, was a co...

Ondine is a gay man attempting to re-adjust his sexuality via various encounters with different women. After trying his luck with three women, Ondine becomes a background character in a sequence in which a group of Latin American men, calling themsel...

The Motherland is an ironic parable of Downey's native Chile. Returning to Santiago, he finds a society in the grips of the military dictatorship of General August Pinochet. In a scenario that suggests the "magic realism" of Latin American fiction, D...

In "Bachdisc", Downey constructs a sophisticated fusion of the classical and the technological, merging the labyrinthine technology of the interactive laserdisc with the intricate, delicately intertwined structure of a Bach fugue and his own nonlinea...

Information Withheld is a complex investigation of signs and symbols in Western culture. Applying linguistic, semiotic and iconographic analysis as systems of interpretation, Downey decodes signs from everyday traffic signals to Michelangelo's painti...

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Essay film about surfaces....

Downey examines meanings and interpretations of signs, symbols and systems of representation in Western cultural history in the third part of The Thinking Eye series. Employing linguistic and semiotic analyses as interpretative systems, Downey weaves...

Resonating with a melancholy poetry, J.S. Bach is a subjective essay that merges a reflection on identity and the creative process with a lyrical documentary on the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. Shot in the wintry landscapes of Bach's native East Ge...

Much of Juan Downey’s pioneering video work critiques the purported objectivity of ethnographic observation and documentation. To produce The Circle of Fires, the artist lived with his wife and stepdaughter among the Yanomami indigenous group in the ...

Merging the subjective and the objective, the autobiographical and the anthropological, The Laughing Alligator is a highly personal observation of an indigenous South American culture. Recorded while he and his family were living among the Yanomami o...