"... CONTINUUM, though a film only 15 minutes in length, is one of the more remarkable works within recent cinematic history. In it, the world, the workers within the world, and the labor of making the film itself are equated through montage and a brilliantly concentrated filmic ‘painterliness’. The result is an experimental film which is at the same time a document of propaganda in the sense that, at its conclusion, one finds oneself closer to the science of the motion of society in its monumentality, with streets, buildings, the building of them, and the workers and their instruments (drills, tar) creating a constructivist poetry within the eyes.
"Without sloganeering, the filmmaker has nevertheless organized harmonies and dissonance’s of people and objects to the extent that aethestics leads to the threshold of revolutionary consciousness, so that CONTINUUM is a film that can be received with enthusiasm in both union hall and Cinematheque. And that is no mean achievement in a time when sophisticated cultural forms are often so removed from the real needs of the populace, hiding behind masks of liberty that do not get out of the prison of the tyrannies of individuality, and therefore opportunism.
"The Filmmaker’s work...everywhere is informed by a collective sensing that takes hold of the ordinary and makes it mighty in perception...for his latest film is a major event."—Jack Hirschman
"...the images of CONTINUUM certainly haunt me: there was the softest continual casualness of editing (beseeming "casualness", I should say; for I certainly DO know how difficult this is to accomplish), and a steadiness-of rhythm, always moving/moving but never as anything ominous to me, or inexorable—something more like very heavy water lapping. Then the blacks and whites, evolving from some gray ‘cloud’ into the stark sharp glistens of ‘stars’ in the deep black of ‘tar’—for the ‘tar’ too seemed more night that what you’d photographed. It was amazing to me how little evidence there was in the film of the Time in which it was made, or even the location: I found myself tending to forget that these were City-chores, that this was rooftop work, soforth: just the labor, the continuity of labor, timeless, and ongoing, withOUT inexorable. Bravo."—Stan Brakhage
"In a superb manner, CONTINUUM builds from the bottom up a complex and finely woven picture of a day-in-the-life of labor, or a work, in progress, and without end, microcosmically reflecting a history of any labor and many an art.
"Through elegantly overlaid, constructionist windows of geometric form, we see into the turgid furnace of man’s multifarious tasks, and, as in a vision, behold the ballet of his tools and accouterments: steaming tar, turning pulleys, swishing mops, changing lights and sewer-plates, acetylene torches and sandblasting serpents, snorting sting of jackhammers and gleaming jewels amid grime where undinal heat makes the atmosphere buckle.
"And in the midst of it all—the streets, the bridges, the roads, the roofs, the endless river of communication cables and the windowed monoliths of jutting superstructure—there stands man, that somewhat Sisyphian, but irrepressible beast; not so much brawny as dauntless, to wit, wired for the thing-at-hand, welded to the task made a titan in collective will.
"The film is like a dream you can’t put your finger on and can’t forget, because the very truth of it is so evasive, suggestive, labyrinthine. And then it dawns on you, or rather circumnavigates you: the very fact of life is heroic, makes heroes of each of us, every man, woman, and child, from the carpenter unto the architect, and the whole of it is so thoroughly interdependent, so very closely interwoven."—Ronald Sauer
Black Maria Film Festival, May 1987
San Francisco International Film Festival, Best Experimental Film 1986
Seca Award, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986
