Bill Brand

Bill Brand

Bill Brand is a multi-disciplinary artist whose films, public artwork, installations, paintings and works-on-paper have exhibited worldwide in museums, galleries microcinemas and on television. His 1980 Masstransiscope, an animated mural installed in the New York City subway, is in the MTA Arts and Design permanent collection. Bill Brand’s artwork has been featured at Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Anthology Film Archive and Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. He is represented by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris and Court Tree Gallery, Brooklyn. His films have been presented at major film festivals including the Berlin Film Festival, New Directors/ New Films Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and Rotterdam Film Festival. His films are discussed in histories of cinema including the books Experimental Filmmaking: Break the Machine (2015) by Kathryn Ramey; Results You Can’t Refuse: Celebrating 30 Years of BB Optics, (2006) edited by Andrew Lampert, Documentary, A History of the Non-Fiction Film, (1992) by Erik Barnouw; and Allegories of Cinema, (1990) by David James. Brand’s work has also been written about in news and journal articles by Janet Maslin, Jonas Mekas, J. Hoberman, B. Ruby Rich, Ian Christie, Noel Carroll and Randy Kennedy among others. Bill Brand is Professor Emeritus at Hampshire College and teaches Film Preservation at New York University's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation graduate program. He is co-owner of BB Optics, Inc., a company that specializes in archival film preservation and post-production services. Bill Brand founded the showcase and workshop Chicago Filmmakers in 1973, and served on the Board of Directors of the Collective for Living Cinema until 1991 in New York City. He co-founded Parabola Arts in 1981 and is currently an artistic director. He served on the board of trustees for The Flaherty (2008-15) and is an advisor to the Orphan Film Symposium and Mono No Aware. Bill Brand lives in New York City with his wife, the artist Katy Martin.

  • Title: Bill Brand
  • Popularity: 0.19
  • Known For: Directing
  • Birthday: 1949-03-27
  • Place of Birth: Rochester, New York, USA
  • Homepage: https://www.billbrand.net/
  • Also Known As: BB
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Bill Brand Movies

  • 1985
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    Home Movies 1971-81

    Home Movies 1971-81

    1 1985 HD

    Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

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  • 1979
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    Split Decision

    Split Decision

    10 1979 HD

    This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life of artists in Lower Manhattan and at the same time dramatizes...

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  • 1980
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    Masstransiscope

    Masstransiscope

    10 1980 HD

    Consisting of a 300-foot-long painting made on reflective material, Masstransiscope is a public artwork visible from the subway tunnels of the...

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  • 1979
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    Split Decision

    Split Decision

    10 1979 HD

    This film is a scrambled narrative that illustrates, in soap opera fashion, life of artists in Lower Manhattan and at the same time dramatizes...

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  • 2011
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    Susie's Ghost

    Susie's Ghost

    10 2011 HD

    Susie's Ghost is about the mystery of the marks we make and leave behind. The “Susie” in the title refers to a sibling but the "ghost"...

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  • 2002
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    Skinside Out

    Skinside Out

    10 2002 HD

    Skinside Out features paint on skin, carried out in an expressionist mode on both of the filmmakers' bodies. The emphasis is on the pleasure of...

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  • 1974
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    Cartoons: The Central Finger

    Cartoons: The Central Finger

    10 1974 HD

    The Central Finger (16mm, silent, 5 1/2 minutes, 1974).

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  • 1974
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    Cartoons: An Angry Dog

    Cartoons: An Angry Dog

    10 1974 HD

    An Angry Dog is a hand-held animation made from a Cracker Jack toy.

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  • 2005
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    Swan’s Island

    Swan’s Island

    10 2005 HD

    Katy Martin paints directly on her skin, and uses her whole body to make marks with the paint. Bill Brand frames the action and its trace, in the...

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  • 1974
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    Cartoons: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

    Cartoons: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

    10 1974 HD

    Flickering flames viewed through air vents of a wood burning pot belly stove resemble the shutter of a film projector.

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  • 1974
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    Cartoons: It Dawn Down

    Cartoons: It Dawn Down

    10 1974 HD

    In It Dawn Down an ordinary take-up reel spins to make colorful and delicate patterns even though the film is black and white.

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  • 1972
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    Rate of Change

    Rate of Change

    8.8 1972 HD

    This film has no literal subject, no frames, only slow continuously shifting colours, cycling around the perimeter of the spectrum. The changes are...

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  • 1972
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    Rate of Change

    Rate of Change

    8.8 1972 HD

    This film has no literal subject, no frames, only slow continuously shifting colours, cycling around the perimeter of the spectrum. The changes are...

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  • 1972
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    Moment

    Moment

    1 1972 HD

    In a 2.5 minute sequence, a simple series of ordinary gas station events is seen intermittently through the opening display. This sequence is then...

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  • 1972
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    Moment

    Moment

    1 1972 HD

    In a 2.5 minute sequence, a simple series of ordinary gas station events is seen intermittently through the opening display. This sequence is then...

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  • 1973
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    Demolition of a Wall

    Demolition of a Wall

    1 1973 HD

    DEMOLITION OF A WALL takes six frames of the falling wall from the 1896 Lumiere film and reorders these six frames in all their permutations. With a...

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  • 1973
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    Demolition of a Wall

    Demolition of a Wall

    1 1973 HD

    DEMOLITION OF A WALL takes six frames of the falling wall from the 1896 Lumiere film and reorders these six frames in all their permutations. With a...

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  • 1974
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    Cartoons: Before the Fact

    Cartoons: Before the Fact

    10 1974 HD

    Made at S.U.N.Y. at Binghamton as a class exercise, filmmaker Saul Levine performs with students who each try to mimic his previously recorded phrase...

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  • 2018
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    Huevos a la mexicana

    Huevos a la mexicana

    7.5 2018 HD

    This is my digital/analog contribution to “Xochimilco Treasure Hunting” in Mexico City on the final day of "HAZLO TU MISMO,"...

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  • 1973
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    Angular Momentum

    Angular Momentum

    10 1973 HD

    Nearly continuous colour changes rotating around a spectrum, occurring at varying speeds of rotation and in varying values of light. Colours are seen...

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  • 1974
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    Circles of Confusion

    Circles of Confusion

    10 1974 HD

    In this film, circles of colored light (red, green, blue) pulsate and flicker as they move around the frame. Where they intersect, they display a...

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  • 2019
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    August Garden

    August Garden

    10 2019 HD

    Scattered in seemingly random order, on the screen, we see the light that traverses the kinetic fields of Bill Brand’s latest film August...

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  • 2003
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    Interior Outpost

    Interior Outpost

    1 2003 HD

    Here, my body is explicitly a screen on which I project my father’s photographs of the family to articulate my position of difference within...

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  • 1991
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    Home Less Home

    Home Less Home

    1 1991 HD

    People who are homeless reveal homelessness from their own experiences dispelling common misconceptions and prejudices. Told as a personal journey,...

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  • 1972
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    Sound Strip/Film Strip

    Sound Strip/Film Strip

    1 1972 HD

    Sound Strip / Film Strip is Paul Sharits' first "Locational" work, made in collaboration with Bill Brand. The piece was commissioned for the 1972...

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  • 1982
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    Chuck's Will's Widow

    Chuck's Will's Widow

    1 1982 HD

    Chuck's Will's Widow is a eulogy for my father and mother whose ashes are spread in the Adirondack mountain woods where the film is shot. Visualized...

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  • 1971
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    Always Open Never Closed

    Always Open Never Closed

    1 1971 HD

    A woman wakes up, gets dressed, makes breakfast and walks down the street. This daily ritual becomes extraordinary seen in a trance-like structure of...

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  • 1975
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    Cartoons: New York State Primaries

    Cartoons: New York State Primaries

    10 1975 HD

    New York State Primaries shows stenciled lettering that dissolve between the words, “red,” “blue,” and “green”...

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  • 1984
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    Coalfields

    Coalfields

    10 1984 HD

    West Virginia industrial landscapes are collaged on an optical printer through a series of jagged shapes that transform the photographed scenes into...

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  • 1975
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    Cartoons: Still at Work

    Cartoons: Still at Work

    10 1975 HD

    Still at Work, a self-portrait of the artist in his places of work: the studio in Lower Manhattan and Sarah Lawrence College, the school where he...

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  • 1972
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    Zip-Tone-Cat-Tune

    Zip-Tone-Cat-Tune

    1 1972 HD

    A simple home movie of a cat is reprocessed through a 'Zip-a-tone' dot pattern making a complex of layers. In combination with freeze frames,...

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