THE CONEY ISLAND AMATEUR PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY - DREAM FILMS 1926-1972
16mm B/W and Color 40 minutes
These films come from the archvie of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and were first exhibited publically in an exhibition to celebrate the centennial of Freud's visit to Coney Island.

This elusive Society has often been thought of as anurban myth. Each year memebers held a competition in which members re-enacted their dreams on film. These films can be thought of as a record of the hopes fears and fantasies of a changing cross section of those that made up the fabric of Coney Island, from immigrant Jews and Italians to wealthy bohemians to young gay men exploring their sexuality in the 1960’s. More information on the Society and a DVD of the films can be found in this book available through Amazon

Click here to see see the films online

Augustine was the most extensively photographed of the young women hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris of the 1870's She was 'the Sarah Bernhardt' of the asylum. This is her story.

Read More about this project.
A demo DVD (not in 3D) may be purchased from Amazon.

A projection performance that lurches between the monstrous and the ludicrous. Guided by sounds from two 1949 psychology films: HYPNOTIC BEHAVIOUR and UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVATION wafting over the airwaves, Claire and Don find themselves uncontrollably acting out post war America’s fears and anxieties.

Read more about this project.

A 3D film based on the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth D’Espérance, a materialization medium who could produce full body apparitions.

Read more about this project.

A demo DVD (not in 3D) may be purchased from Amazon.

Few people know that Edison spent the last ten years of his life attempting to build an apparatus to communicate with the dead, in his words, a mechanical medium. Though his device was never found, we will attempt, in the spirit of his enquiry to do the impossible, to conjure up phantoms, to glimpse the hereafter.

Read more about this project.

A performance for stereo slides, hand-cranked projector and 78 rpm gramaphone records. 20 minutes 1995

A document of everyday life on New York's Lower East Side. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin; a spectacle not of life remembered but of life forgotten. Like dream images these cinematic fragments are hieroglyphic clues to a past illuminated at the very moment of its disappearance.

Read more about this project.

A young girl escapes from her drab black and white reality into Kodachrome fantasy only to find herself face to face with her worst fears. Juxtaposing documentary footage of my old high school in Scotland with found home movies and staged melodrama, the film describes what if feels like to be anadolescent girl. Pressured by parents and teachers, she refuses to fulfil their expectations experiencing the scary awakening of sexuality as her body grows out of control.

"There is the mariner. Ready for the sea. Where his footsteps will not beheard, nor leave their mark, so much lost in time...." So begins Cale's story of a sailor forever in flight from his youth. The imagery is very much inspired by the frozen landscape of 19th century stereo views, and the birth of cinema; a vain attempt to recapture those first moments when the depiction of the world began to move.

Lured by a lonely writer, Alice finds herself falling into a wonderland ofdecadence and despair; a New York nether world of lost souls and cut-rate charlatans hawking broken dreams and cheap perversions. Set in the ruins of Coney Island and Times Square, the film brings to life the underside of Lewis Caroll's classic.

A film inspired by J.G. Ballard's novel Crash.