Secondhand (Pepe) is a 24-minute experimental documentary about used clothing. Filmmakers Shell & Bertozzi weave two narratives into a visual and sonic journey. The historical memoir of a Jewish immigrant rag picker intertwines with the present-day story of "pepe" — secondhand clothing that flows from North America to Haiti. Secondhand (Pepe) animates the materiality of recycled clothes — their secret afterlives and the unspoken connections among people in an era of globalization.
Dreamlike visuals and ethereal sounds intermix the beats of Jewish klezmer and Haitian rara music. Luke Fischbeck (Lucky Dragons) has composed the soundtrack of the film with an artful and nuanced ear, emphasizing the ruptures and looped connections among diasporic cultures. Secondhand (Pepe)'s two stories converge as American castoffs travel from the Jewish memoir reader's rag factory to the Haitian shores. As pepe makes its way to Port-au-Prince, passing through an intricate network of peddlers, seamstresses and entrepreneurs, the past recycles into the present.
Produced by Fabrik Films.
Experimental sound composition by Luke Fischbeck (Lucky Dragons).
Distributed by Third World Newsreel.
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In 1890, French inventor and physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) explores the eccentricities of fish locomotion using a primitive movie camera. Inspired by the coastal climate, as well as visits to the fishing pier and the public aquarium, Marey portrays sea creatures' motion through space and time using a modified photographic apparatus. At his aquarium laboratory at his villa, he produces strips of photographic frames that mark the early history of cinema and this film captures Marey's fascination with nature and discovery of moving image making practice.
Locomotion in Water is an experimental documentary about seeing movement, doing science and filming fish in Naples, Italy. Moving between past and present, text and image, travelogue and reverie — Locomotion in Water interweaves the reflections of the nineteenth-century chronophotographer with the animating impulses of a modern-day filmmaker.
Produced by the Film Study Center at Harvard in collaboration with the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe.
Sound composition by Luke Fischbeck (Lucky Dragons)
Distributed by Fabrik Films.