Films
These are a selection of film and video works I made from 1975 through 2002. It’s not a comprehensive list. At the time, I showed in art-film showplaces such as the Millennium Film Workshop, The Center for Living Cinema, and the Anthology Film Archives, as well as in clubs and lofts. I also toured colleges and art theaters around the country. In 1980, I showed Just Sprouts as well as an early cut of Concern for the City at the now-famous Times Square Show in NYC. Several of the films are represented in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Included in this list is Prom Night in Kansas City, a feature-length documentary I made with my wife, Hali Lee, in 2002.
Prom Night in Kansas City (58 min, color, sound, 2002)
At the dawn of the new millennium, my wife Hali Lee and I began filming a documentary feature about a remarkably diverse set of high school kids getting ready for that vexatious annual ritual called prom. We were a two-person crew, with myself on camera and Hali on sound, sharing the work of directing and producing. At first, we edited for storytelling in the pure cinema-verité mode. Later, we added a voiceover that represented Hali’s ambivalent point of view: she had grown up in Kansas City watching the prom kids come out every spring and had enjoyed the pageantry but wondered what the point was. Prom Night premiered in New York at Lincoln Center, as part of the Independent Feature Project, and in Los Angeles at the 2002 AFI Film Festival.
“Strikes an audience chord of collective nostalgia.” --Variety
“Mostly you'll find yourself falling for the film's young subjects: Smurf, an irrepressibly optimistic kid determined to become Westport High's prom king; Oliver, a brainy dissident who regards prom as a meaningless waste of time but as an interesting sociological phenomenon; a lesbian couple going to the "Passages" prom (one wears a dress, the other a tux); and students at the conservative and highly religious Center Place Restoration School, where each girl's prom outfit must conform to specifications regarding spaghetti straps, cleavage, slit skirts and bare midriffs.” --Robert E. Butler, The Kansas City Star
Concern for the City (16mm, 30 min, color, sound, 1982)
Concern for the City presents a scenario in which nature promises to overwhelm and engulf the city—the opposite of the conventional environmentalist take, in which an out-of-control, urbanized mankind threatens to poison and lay waste the natural world. Photography, much of it time-lapse, took place from 1979 through 1982, at which point I edited the film to a synthesized soundtrack by German composer Klaus Schulze. In the film, I sought to portray New York as much as possible as a living organism, in which humankind and his works are a small presence within a much larger encroaching ecology.
“Concern for the City is a memorable film. A portrait of New York City in the tradition of Ruttman’s Berlin, Symphony of a City, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y….full of stunning and remarkable moments.” --Scott MacDonald, film historian, author of A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers
“The sense of place that emerges from the film evokes the island as the early Dutch settlers must have encountered its material presence within an envelope of mist and light.” --Patrick Clancy, writer, multimedia artist
“A number of filmmakers, from Peter Hutton and Godfrey Reggio to Peter von Ziegesar and Jem Cohen, seek to recast the city as an ecosystem by re-emphasizing or reimagining the city as part of nature and vice versa…. By cinematically accelerating the passage of time von Ziegesar defamiliarizes the city and reasserts an ecological agency. Quickly shifting patterns of cloud shadows impart a sense of movement… static architecture seems to undulate... flocking pigeons distract the viewer’s focus from recognizable urban structures. The film's final shot (frames) the Statue of Liberty from the shore of New Jersey’s Liberty State Park, with its back turned to the camera. An abrupt tilt downwards reveals driftwood and garbage…” -- Cortland Rankin, Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York (2021)
Alchemy of the Word (video, 16 Minutes, color, sound, 1987)
https://vimeo.com/394466071 (password: history)
Twelve years after making the experimental black-and-white 16mm film, Alchemy of the Word, I ran the film through a prototype digital video synthesizer called a Chroma-Chron, and added a soundtrack by the East Village band, Liquid, Liquid and the German electronic music composer, Holgar Czukay. The result is a pulsing, meditational, almost tribal film containing lurid colors and dense, finger paint-like qualities. In a sense, the video is closer to what I’d intended when I made the original black-and-white film and follows the same Rimbaud-esque disordering of the senses.
Wheels over Indian Trails; A Neo-Constructivist Comedy (10 min., color, sound, 1987)
Wheels/Trails draws inspirations from John Cage’s cut-and-splice sound collage, “Williams Mix,” which he composed using chance operations by throwing I-Ching sticks. Wheels/Trails juxtaposes actors speaking inane commercial dialogue that was randomly gleaned from television by means of a recorder programed by weather statistics, with film projection of native beans, feathers, and squash in slow motion, to make the point that the roads and highways of our urbanized civilization are built over ancient footpaths worn by Native peoples. Ultimately, the performance expresses the idea that we live in a mashup of cultures, where the present is a thin veneer stretched over the past. A droning electronic soundtrack by the band Short-Term Memory also suggests a missing presence.
Alaska (16mm, 10 min, sound, black-and-white, sound, 1980)
https://vimeo.com/359115796 (password: summer)
I photographed Alaska during a trip I made to Homer, Alaska, where my sister was marrying the son of a homesteader. I filmed my brother-in-law Otto Kilcher (now ironically one of the stars of the reality TV series, “Alaska, the Last Frontier”) as he shot and killed a steer for his wedding feast and kayaked across the bay during stormy weather.
“Alaska is a very successful film, as much to hear as to watch. Its cacophony melds with the anarchic, Brakhage-like camera work to mirror the seemingly unintelligible force of nature. By showing people in the act of killing another animal for food, von Ziegesar undermines our notions of ‘civilization.’ It’s not man against the elements, it’s man within them.” --Doug Frost, The New Art Examiner
A History of Dancing (16mm, 12 minutes, silent, color, 1977)
Existing Elements: digital scan, 400’ original edited 16mm film, original ink-splatter films, wipes, 16mm high-contrast transitions, hand-painted calligraphy on film.
(password: alchemy)
A History of Dancing combines hand-painted calligraphy, shadow puppets and paint-splattered “direct animation,” with camera footage of suburban women playing tennis and the slaughter of a chicken on a farm in Iowa. My intention was to marry some of the techniques of abstract expressionism (i.e. direct action, brush strokes, splatters) with the kind of heightened personal filmmaking I’d seen, for example, in Stan Brakhage’s Window, Water, Baby Moving. In visual-poetic terms, the film follows the transmigration of the soul after death through several heightened levels of change and regeneration before reaching a destination of stasis and rest. Ultimately, A History of Dancing explores trauma I’d gathered from a childhood growing up in suburban Connecticut, during which two of my siblings died violently. The lesson for me was to come to terms with death that always nearby, even among the sheltered and well-to-do.
None Saved (16mm, 16 min, sound, black-and-white, sound, 1976)
Based on Indonesian shadow puppet plays, which combine popular songs, mythology, political satire, and broad comedy, None Saved satirically plays off the events and mass emotions surrounding Jimmy Carter’s drive for the presidency in 1976. In the film, a Javanese-style monster rises through several incarnations until it reaches a kind of shadow-cultural Nirvana. I based some of the paper shadow puppets on images of Caucasian people I found on Chinese and Japanese toy packaging, thus answering a trend in American animation to stereotype Asian features. None Saved was strongly influenced by Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic, which presented similar tactics of disassociation and, according to the artist, presented a trek to heaven and back.
“Striking political commentaries based on Indonesian shadow puppetry.” --Robert Trussell, The Kansas City Star
Alchemy of the Word (16mm, 12 min, sound, black-and-white, sound, 1975)
Alchemy of the Word is a hand-made film in which I applied Zip-A-Tone patterns directly to 16mm clear film stock, including the optical edge, so that the dancing shapes onscreen created their own soundtrack when projected. The film also features the artist David Saunders, as the 19th-century French Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, reading from one of his most famous works, Alchemy of the Word. The film, as well as the poem, are about synesthesia, the artist’s transformation of one sense into another, turning light into sound, sound into emotion, and words into images.
“Direct filmmaking in the truest sense…” --Doug Frost, The New Art Examiner, March 1986
“A virtuoso display.” --R. Greenwald, 10 Years of Living Cinema Retrospective Exhibition Catalog, 1982
The Alphabet (16mm, 12 min, sound, black-and-white, sound, 1975)
A particular favorite of mine, this film takes Rimbaud’s words one step further into the arena of “inane refrains and artless rhythms.” I used a Bolex with an extreme macro lens to flip and roam through the pages of Chinatown pamphlets, Victorian erotic novels, and American pulp fiction, zooming in on lines and phrases and grasping at the truth that the pages can talk and that the words have their own independent lives. The Stravinsky soundtrack sets the pace for this restless proto-literary journey. I also used a shadow puppet for the first time, a year before None Saved.
Just Sprouts (16mm, 12 minutes, black-and-white, sound, 1976)
In Just Sprouts, my goal was to make a film completely divorced from the camera and from such concerns as composition, lighting, camera placement and exposure. To do this, I sprouted alfalfa seeds at stepped intervals on a large piece of glass, made a contact print, then cut the resulting negative into strips and taped the strips onto clear 16mm film stock, always aware of Stan Brakhage’s 1963 film, Mothlight, in which Brakhage glued moth wings directly on film. A second inspiration was Man Ray’s Rayogram film, Le Retour à la Raison, in which pins, salt and pepper and thumbtacks cavorted wildly on the screen and caused a riot when first shown in 1923. In another section I cut negatives of magazine advertisements into strips and taped them onto film stock, thus hugely magnifying the Ben-Day dots with which the ads were printed. A third section was feathers. When the film was projected, sprouts seemed to dance on the screen, gradually grew tails and disappeared, Ben-Day dots and feathered tines, gyrated, expanded and waned. I project the film to Miles Davis’ Calypso Frelimo, whose crazed rhythms seemed to match the film’s anarchic imagery pretty well.
Who Shall Remain Nameless (16mm, 16 minutes, black-and-white, sound, 1978)
Who Shall Remain Nameless aimed to document the tide of occultism I saw as beginning to envelop the country in the late 1970s. For this film, I built an ant farm and filmed in extreme close-up the activity of the insects in their in tunnels, setting their interactions to a narration of tape-recorded letters of a man named Archie Olson, speaking to his daughter in Minnesota on the effects of the planets and the stars on urban riots and crime and all human activities. Other scenes involved actors reading texts from Joan of Arc and Eldridge Cleaver. Patterns of falling beans and feathers, Harry Partch percussion music and imagery of multiplying bacteria supplied visual glue between segments. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver had come out a year or two earlier and I was very much aware of, and paying tribute to, the scene in the erotic movie theater when close-up scenes of sperm and eggs conjoining were pictutred instead of actual scenes of sex.