" Deconstruction Site "

1990, 14 min, black and white, sound
Directed,  Filmed  and  Edited by Dominic Angerame;
Sound Design  by  Amy  Leigh Hunter;
Music by Ray Guillet and Kevin Barnard


"Since the industrial revolution our civilization
has suffered from a growing discrepancy
between ideological potentiality
and actual realization".

"With this quote from Laslow Moholy Nagy, Angerame begins an investigation into the excavations that are supposed to help the city into the twenty-first century. The 'time lapse' images radiate a pre-cinematographic purity that sharply contrasts with the industrial hell evoked by the excavators.

"A somber, gong-like tone opens DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT: the first image is a small light in darkness, a delicate flicker that grows to become a welder’s torch.  We are led into the film by suggestive imagistic shorthand: ‘the rise of man’  is attended by the building of structures, and cities, a montage of the emblems  of civilization.  The  end  of the film brings a series  of  unnerving  images—one reminiscent  of  an  eerie jack-o-lantern from childhood  memory:  a  skyscraper looming in the night, a bank of windows lit up like its gaping mouth. As fog and clouds  rush  in fast frame across the sky for a dizzying,  synthetic  effect, Kevin Barnard’s soundtrack pounds an urgent wail to the rhythm of climax  spending  itself  in  question, in philosophical ambiguity, not  release.  An  almost palpable  centrifugal force seems to move the final moments of the film  into  a spinout.

"This  is history without narrative, an abstract summation of what happens  when human  beings  move stuff around and make something of it, grow  tired  of  what they’ve made and demolish it using other things they’ve made, and then start all over again. What we build, what we destroy, what we find useful to do both,  how we let our interaction with them describe what we call human—these are some  of the  ideas Angerame’s DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT suggests."—excerpted from an  essay by Barbara Jaspersen Voorhees, 1990

Awards:

Charlotte Film and Video Festival "Deconstruction Sight", March, 1992

Louisville Film Festival, "Deconstruction Sight", February, 1991

Ann Arbor Film Festival, "Deconstruction Sight", March, 1990

Oberhausen Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany, 1990

Cork Film Festival, Cork, Ireland, 1990

Denver International Film Festival, Denver, 1990

Ann Arbor Film Festival, Prize Winner, March, 1990

Humbolt Film Festival, First Prize, Best of Festival, 1990

Director's Choice Award, Black Maria Film Festival, 1990

Screenings

 

Available for sale on videotape.

 

to "City Symphony"