Stephen Dwoskin

The first three of a series of intriguingly personal and erotic engagements seen in the privacy of darkness and transformed by the iridescence of the night light.

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Short strip by Stephen Dwoskin.

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More like sketches Phone Portrait and Phone Strip explore the moving image through the uniqueness of the most modern of technologies – the cellphone – that, though being modern, produces a near primitive and raw image reminiscent of the very first moving images.

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A summer in Beechdale Road. A meditation on the passage of time, the time in between things and the time spent together - and apart. The film was made to be screened in a loop, without credits.

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Seeking in the archives of Robert Kramer, a detective, Keja Ho is looking for her deceased father. His ghostly presence haunts her search and motivates the singular dialogue between her family memories and friends.

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Tranquil video reveries by veteran Dwoskin surrounding visits to his house.

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Lost dreams is made out of those little remnants of images, from a single glance to a detailed moment, of those women from youth’s love and young dreams. They are woven together, like fragments of the mind, from the ends of the film to the corners of the frame.

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An ode to Stephen Dwoskin's father. The film blends found family footage of the young and the ageing father. It takes the tiny gestures of daily life and turns them into the monumental moments of tenderness and respect. Part of trilogy of memoirs of loved ones.

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“Suddenly and sadly my dear friend Frances died. At that moment of loss I needed to hold on to her. The film is just that.” – Stephen Dwoskin.

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“My grandfather was a charming artist, and he would have acted if he had had an audience. In this film, taken from family images, it is a simple pear that is the object of his panache.” -Stephen Dwoskin

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A short and lyrical film about looking, and how that look shapes the relationship between those people whom we call friends; some gone, some found, but all apart.

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A film about a man, an invisible man, perhaps immobile or displaced, trapped in solitude filling the intervals of reflection and desire. He resides in the tension of a modest and secluded space fixed with memories of another time, with other people passing by, some invading, and with women who neither stay nor leave. In this space, the margins separating what is from what was overlap. Time melts into a silence that is not a silence at all, but the question is "am I here?"

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Intoxicated by My Illness (in which images photographed by several people are extensively superimposed) loosely and dreamily tracks a phase in Dwoskin's recent life that took him from medical examination to intensive care.

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The film is just this kind wandering through the personal ways and whys of different kinds of pain in different kinds of people. The film searches through the many levels of pain and finds it in its unique position between disaster and pleasure. Pain is..thus plunges us instantly into the midst of controversy and the unknown.

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In this unique approach to the autobiographical film format, director Stephen Dwoskin pieces together home movies shot by his parents in New York City, a video letter recorded during the 1990 Gulf War by filmmaker Robert Kramer, and raw footage filmed by Dwoskin himself. A veteran of the New York independent film scene of the 1960s, Dwoskin constructs a film poem in which the strong sentiment of his personal story—he was stricken by polio and eventually confined to a wheelchair—never overwhelms the beauty of the film’s distinct form.

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"Hi Steve" and "Dear Robert" exchanged between two filmmakers: Robert Kramer and Stephen Dwoskin. "The Videoletters strip away the formalities that had littered our work and thinking. Through the making of the 'video letters' we started to relearn and re-look.". The Videoletters provide the benefits of reflection -- a lubricant for thought made out of very basic stuff -- the reduction of complexity -- and they cemented a brotherhood. Sadly, Robert's untimely death prevented the continuation of the "video letters" and they remain unfinished and unedited. (S.D.)

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A richly conceived essay about the evolving image of disability. Dwoskin begins with the declaration that the historically distorted images of people with disabilities constitute a “negation of selfhood”. He then traces this concerted effort through two thousand years of Western culture, beginning with the Greek notion of the idealized body and its opposite, the fabulous races. Using contemporary films clips, literary quotations, performance, and pictorial records, Face Of Our Fear looks at the Court’s infatuation with “monsters” during the Middle Ages, the “charity cripples” of the Enlightenment, the freakshows of the nineteenth century, each a resort to oppressive stigmatization.

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"Either in its natural state or with its embellishments of makeup, jewels, and hairdos, nothing can restrain the imagination from the most forms of speculation. All the senses are concentrated in this one head: eyes, ears, nose, lips, tongue and the skin which covers all with its network of vibrating nerves. One imagines the senses, the counterpart of our own, ready to respond with all the various moods, suggestions and agreements. Through the eyes alone, when placed in contact with our own, a visual dialogue and interplay is embarked upon. And when the lips, two bodies fitting together in perfect harmony, break into a smile, they invite further exploration. Then, with the engagement of time, this dialogue shifts from speculation to realization. The face transforms from its abstract suggestiveness to the singular projection of seduction. It is no longer anyones face; it is the face of one particular person" (Stephen Dwoskin)

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A film about the writing of Brendan Behan realised through three performers wandering through Dublin reciting extracts from his work. Together it tells of Behan's life and also prison, about executions,about the fear that sometimes penetrates the soul and of the disgrace of day to day life in jail. Their Irish accents strengthen and empower the words during the unrolling of the 30 minute film immediately grabbing the harshness, force and cry of Behan's world. "The Irish dislike those of their kind who think", said Behan, who wrote a lot, lived a lot, and drank a lot.

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An old man remembers the troubled relationship he had with his mother, the erotic games, and the phantasms in which she managed to attract him. The main line gives but a small idea of the film, of its erotic style, its choreographic dimension, its strange fragmentation. The film drifts along an ever-renewed invention, intertwining lavish dances, mask games, musical comedy, parodies, permanent repression of the body offering itself as an object of desire to the viewer who is literally seduced.’

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Stephen Dwoskin brings together members of the Ballet Negres dance company, founded in London in 1946.

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Born in 1904, Brandt was a shy and enigmatic man who dominated British photography for decades. His early studies of class-divided Britain were followed by the postwar series of "distorted nudes", shot on beaches and inside rooms. The film is a fitting final portrait of Brandt (it was completed in the year he died), and recomposes his work in cinematic terms. The camera moves through an apartment where the pictures were taken, to reveal photographs scattered 'in situ'. These are panned to show the surrounding space, the angle of vision and a model who reconstructs Brandt's original image. Dwoskin emphasises visual atmosphere through the language of the eye.

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A personal film by experimental director Stephen Dwoskin.

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Avant-garde appeal on behalf of and made by the adventurous leftist London cinema, The Other Cinema, using the facilities provided by the BBC community programme unit.

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'The Silent Cry is a fictionalised narrative film, based on documentary facts and extracts of one English girl's memories and thoughts, all surrounded, and directed towards her particular dilemma. This dilemma can be summarized as her basic inability to have relationships, especially sustained relationships, and particularly with men. This is the total of her statement and the film. The construction and flow of the film follows the way she thinks - it is her point of view that is followed in the film. So all things are the way she remembers and dwells on them, and which are important to her.' - S.D.

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A group of strangers explore their fantasies over a period of five days.

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The film questions the possible viewing positions with the girl; in other words, who and what is looking at whom? and is the girl alone or with another – or is the camera position that of voyeur or protagonist? The only way to figure it out is to spend some time with her! – S.D.

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This amusing short features a real life Labour party canvasser who comes looking for Dwoskin (never realizing that he's the camera man), and instead is treated to the provocations and manipulations of the housemates.

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Stephen Dwoskin's personal impression of West Berlin before the Berlin Wall went down.

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