About — Julie Perini

I am a filmmaker, daily videomaker, diary keeper, community-based media maker, artistic descendent of time-bending mentors like Tony Conrad and the Buffalo Avant-garde, product of the suburbs of New York City and DIY culture of the 90s. My involvement with the post-9/11 “War on Terror” spurred my work with prison and police abolitionist movements. I am the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and residencies and I exhibit work in theaters, community spaces, galleries, campgrounds, storefronts, the sides of bridges, and many other venues. I see movies in actual movie theaters. I like old cameras. I eat pancakes at a diner at least once a week. Originally from Poughkeepsie, New York, I earned an MFA from the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, and a BS in Communication from Cornell University. I am currently a Professor of Art at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

Contact

Julie’s email: julieperini@gmail.com
Arresting Power is distributed by Collective Eye Films (info@collectiveeye.org) & streaming on Kanopy and the Internet Archive
The Gentleman Bank Robber is booked through: gentlemanbankrobber@gmail.com

Artist Statement

I work with moving image media, primarly digital video but at times I use analog film (16mm, Super8mm, handmade film). I also create installations using a mix of video and photography, and I create events and gatherings. I am fascinated by time and my work revolves around several questions about time: How do we experience time, on individual and collective levels? How does our culture inform our understanding of history, the future, the present and everything outside of that? How can we represent something so intangible, slippery, and invisible as time? How do we grapple with the residue of time, such as photographs, films, and videos, as well as rocks, relics, and artifacts from the past? My projects range from personal, diaristic video art to community-based media projects highlighting lesser-known histories of struggles for social justice. All of my work takes a relational approach: whether I am interviewing a community impacted by police violence or interrogating my own mindful practice of recording quiet moments from my life, I remain curious, inquisitive, critical, and open to the many directions a project might go. With the encounter of making, I create moments of heightened presence for myself and anyone else involved. The same is true for viewers engaging with the finished works.

I wrote the following manifesto early in my filmmaking journey, and it still resonates with me today.

Relational Filmmaking: A Manifesto

Relational filmmakers do not make films about people.
Relational filmmakers make films with people.

Relational filmmakers do not interview subjects.
Relational filmmakers have conversations with other people.

Relational filmmakers do not know what the final film will look like.
Relational filmmakers make formal decisions that address the aesthetic, ethical, technical, and personal problems encountered throughout the making of the film.

Relational filmmakers do not adhere to established modes or conventions.
Relational filmmakers make films that are abstract, factual, and fictional, all at once.

Relational filmmakers do not fuck around with these tools of representation and power.
Relational filmmakers use their tools to experiment with new ways of being and to emancipate new forms of subjectivity.

Relational filmmakers believe that reality is the consequence of what we do together. Their films carry and conduct traces of this belief. Relational films are co-created through careful and playful interrogations of the roles performed by the people and materials involved with the film’s production and reception: artists, subjects, passers-by, audiences, environments, ideas, and things.

Written By Julie Perini
while in Edinboro, Pennsylvania
September 2009

Creative Comrades: my frequent collaborators

Erin Yanke: radical documentarian & punk rocker
Jodi Darby: photographer & general butt kicker
John Frentress: modern surrealist painter & far-out groovy man
Max Swanson: fearless performer & thoughtful being
Cynthia Nelson: poet & rock ‘n’ roller

Julie Perini is a filmmaker and artist in Portland, Oregon.