James Fotopoulos

Agents Mr. Rainbow and Mr. Lamb are sent to an alien planet fighting a civil war. Their mission to destroy a perpetual motion machine is interrupted by their capture. While their interrogations proceed the two men struggle to come to terms with their suffering and pending death.

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Written in 1993, Thick Comb was James Fotopoulos’ earliest unrealized script, about a criminal porn producer hunting down the world’s greatest lover for thieving an adult film’s production budget. A couple years ago the script was resurrected and rewrote with the protagonist confessing to his lover other incomplete Fotopoulos film scenarios from the 1990s.

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Thousands of years into the future, through the eyes of an alien life form, we see the fossilized beings of Ronald Reagan and William Casey enact their relationship as if in a crude ancient play. Through an array of text, sculptures, drawings, animations and monologues, alternate interpretations of the character’s histories and myths unfold.

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An adaptation of the 1886 musical “Alice in Wonderland: A Dream Play for Children” by Henry Saville Clark and Walter Slaughter, Fotopoulos’ feature length film propels the Clark/Slaughter score into the 21st century digital age. Sculptures, drawings, text, and original music are used to explore the late 19th century’s evolution of painting, literature, and theatre into early photography and moving pictures. The piece probes the interplay of art and science and in exploring these ideas certain lives and themes are touched upon – the relationship between John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll, Ruskin’s theories on drawing, Thomas Eakins’ painting and his use of photography, the burgeoning of early cinema with Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, notions of amateurism and professionalism in art and the archetype of the condemned artist. The work is presented in two acts, remaining faithful to the musical’s original construction based upon Carroll’s narratives.

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The story of an aspiring young Hollywood actor who, while hitchhiking to see his agent, is picked-up by a lecherous, cynical Cary Grant.

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Deep blues. 30.40 is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmaker James Fotopoulos).

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Collaboration with Grandpa’s Ghost.

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The origins of the universe told through the lens of an experimental film and video sci-fi horror-show fusion: Alien women trapped in a colorfully hand-scratched film-textured hotel room, genetically mutated men slowly driven mad in a white digital prison, the high contrast landscapes of Mars, and a futuristic tribe of a giant, an elf and a witch in their decaying suicide-home.

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A low-fi, grimy, VHS, edited in-camera, apocalyptic feature finalizes the cycle of videos that began with Jerusalem (2003). Two of the actresses from the first video remain but now joined with a supporting cast of public access outcasts. Using sculptures, drawings, paintings, crude animations, puppets and heavily self-conscious performance – the final piece attempts to string a through-line from the caves of Lascaux and the Gnosis to the DNA-mishap-mutants of the future.

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Collaboration with Grandpa’s Ghost.

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Short film from James Fotopoulos

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Short film from James Fotopoulos

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Short film from James Fotopoulos

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Short film from James Fotopoulos

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A film by James Fotopoulos

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Video (color)

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2003, 5 min, color

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Two of the female characters from Jerusalem (2003) appear in a new location: a black and white minimalist apartment. With the aid of drawings to illustrate their psychological probing, the ladies perform basic physical repetitions and frozen poses while being captured on video and re-lensed through low-fi cyan solariziations. Layered stereo monologues speak of their continuing personal explorations into the science-fiction dream-symbol terrain of their private histories.

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Jerusalem is the first of four videos (followed by Sublimation [2003], Conjunction [2003] and The Pearl [2004]) exploring inter-dimensional travel. In this inaugural episode a group of young actors inhabit an empty apartment, their behavior taped and edited in-camera. An analog solarization technique captures their rituals of improvised dance, frozen poses and trimming of hair. Each cast member recounts painful personal life episodes that unfold like cheap sci-fi stories of otherworldly abductions, familial vanishings, strange dreams and reptilian passions.

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Filmed in saturated colors on out-of-date film stocks with an aggressive soundtrack, the story of The Nest is told – The marriage of two young professionals unravels after an unnamed accident physically and emotional traumatizes the wife. Government agents, shadowy investigators and transgender beings appear, trying to solve the nervous-breakdown-mystery of secret alien forces that chose the couple as their target. In-camera tricks, drawings, derelict optical printing, miniatures, puppets and prosthetic makeup effects convey the dual collapse of the protagonists’ lives and the film structure as one unified entity.

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A video by James Fotopoulos

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A video by James Fotopoulos

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Video (color)

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Part 4 of 12. 3m

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The Cypress Tree directed by James Fotopolous

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Part 8 of 12. 3m

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Part 12 of 12. 3m

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Part 6 of 12. 3m

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Part 3 of 12. 3m

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