Mark Street

Mark Street graduated from Bard College (B.A) and the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA). He has shown work in the New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series (1991, 1994), at Anthology Film Archives (1993), Millennium (1990,1996), and the San Francisco Cinematheque (1986, 1992). He has shown and lectured on his work at Syracuse University, University of Colorado--Boulder, Cornell University, Bard College and Pratt Institute. His films have been shown at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (prizewinner, 1990 and 1993), the Athens Film Festival (prizewinner, 1991 and 1996), the Humboldt Film Festival ("Best of Festival", 1994), the San Francisco Film Festival (honorable mention, 1990) ,Rotterdam Film Festival (1999) and the Sundance Film Festival (2001). His film Winterwheat was part of the London Filmmaker's Coop travelling exhibition New American Makers 1980-1989.Sweep (1998) is part of the European Media Arts Festival (Osnabruck, Germany) touring exhibition. In 1991 he received a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works grant to make Missing Something Somewhere. In 2000 he received a Maryland State Arts Council Grant.

Mark Street's work ranges from abstract hand-manipulated material to work that
recontextualizes found footage, to films that involve written texts. Each film attempts to investigate new terrain, and he avoids being confined by a specific look or mood. He has made a graphic silent film for three projectors (Triptych, 1992), a diary film (Lilting Towards Chaos, 1991) a documentary about travel in Central America (Excursions, 1994), and a reworking of pornographic footage (Blue Movie, 1994). His 1996 film Why Live Here? explores three characters’ relationship to place. Sweep (1998) explores the shimmering world of an infant and father on a neighborhood walk. The Domestic Universe (1999) presents three Brooklyn, NY fathers discussing the vicissitudes of fatherhood as Street’s own daughter grows up. Sliding off the Edge of the World (2000) considers the passage of time in a frenetic visual poem. Happy? (2000) also confronts notions of change through street interviews in NYC around Jan.1, 2000. The result is a hybrid of documentary and anthropological film, part time-capsule and part taped performance piece. Happy? attempts to show how people are struggling with issues of decay and transition in a famously unreflective age and country. In 2002 he completed his first narrative feature called At Home and Asea that explores the vagaries of community and place. The film follows a group of young adults in Baltimore as they struggle with conflicting notions of how to live in and around the city.

At present he is at work on a short abstract film called Guiding Fictions , and a longer experimental documentary about New York’s Fulton Fish Market. In the process of completing Fulton Fish Market musicians Zeena Parkins and Marc Ribot performed live to edited footage on June 18, 2002 at Tonic in NYC. Street’s short reaction to 9.11, Brooklyn Promenade, aired on Channel 13 (WNET) in June, 2002.

Title: Brooklyn Promenade
Show: The Wounded City





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