Katherine Enos

A Piece of Skin (1989)

A black-and-white 16mm film about vulnerability and the body that includes a soundtrack assemblage thick with sound effects and readings from theory and prose. Arousing controversy within the San Francisco State graduate film department, this film was described as "disturbing" by a graduate instructor in film production and was only only advanced into the selection of films for San Francisco State University's Student Film Finals that year because of the staunch support of San Francisco's Film Arts Foundation (FAF), a great non-profit film organization that is sadly now defunct. FAF's then film programmer Bob Hawk — who described A Piece of Skin as "confrontational" — helped the film to find an audience, even showing it to a scout from the Berlin Film Festival. A Piece of Skin takes its title from a sentence fragment in anthropologist Ashley Montagu's book Touching, about the sense of touch and how it is expressed in human culture.

pleasures of the blinking eyelids (1991)

A 35mm print used as source material for a 16mm film

A 16mm film about contact improvision, movement and the body. This film incorporates 16mm black-and-white and bathtub-solarized footage, optical printing, 35mm still photography and other 35mm still stock that Barry Kapke shot using a 35mm Nikon camera with a bulk-loading back and a 12fps motor-drive. The 35mm stock was cut into and shot in 30 foot lengths, about the maximum that the bulk-loading back would handle. The pieces were then taped together and processed as film strips at a motion picture lab. Because the emulsion of film stock is thinner than that used for still photography, there were some unforeseen complications in applying cine lab processes to still film stock and much of the 35mm film that was shot was underdeveloped. After the processing of all 16mm and 35mm film stock as rolls or film strips, and after the bleaching and solarizing of selected frames and frame sequences in the darkroom, the prints were shot onto 16mm film using the Oxberry Filmmaker animation stand to incorporate dissolves and camera movements. The title of this film is taken from a sentence fragment in the lyrical work of phenomenologist Alfonso Lingis, Excesses.

A solarized 35mm print used as source material for a 16mm film

The following stills show two out of three darkroom-printed images that were registered for perfect alignment and reshot on the Filmaker stand as a sequence with dissolves between them. The third of these was a bleached print. The sequence was used in a transitional manner between different sounds and different types of manipulated imagery, for example, between optical printing and normally timed footage.

Variations on a Trim Bin (1988)

A 16mm found footage film taking rhythm and sound from The Pretenders' in-your-face Up the Neck, in a Dr. Strangelovian coupling of missile silos and masculinity.