Nobody's Business

Screen
03/21 9:00 1 hall  

1996 /color/16mm/60min/ USA
Filmmaker : Alan Berliner

 "I'm just an ordinary guy who's lived an ordinary life. I was in the army, I got married, I raised a family - worked hard. I had my own business. That's all. That's nothing to make a picture about."

Director Alan Berliner takes on his reclusive father as the reluctant study of this poignant and graceful study of family history and memory. His father protests throughout the film that his son's questions and discoveries about their common past are insignificant, unimportant and uninteresting.

Ultimately this complex portrait is a meeting of the minds - where the past meets the present, where generations collide, and where the boundaries of family life are pushed, pulled, stretched, torn and surprisingly, at times, also healed.

A follow-up to Alan Berliner's previous films Intimate Stranger , Nobody's Business explores the other half of his familial heritage - the Berliners. Using both his nuclear and extended family as a kind of living laboratory, Berliner attempts to unravel the mysteries of family history, genealogy and heredity. By transforming the private and personal into a story of universal resonance, Nobody's Business will touch every viewer with a warm shock of recognition.

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ALAN BERLINER
Filmmaker/Media Artist

Alan Berliner has achieved recognition as one of the leading independent filmmakers working today. The New York Times has described Berliner's work as "powerful, compelling and bittersweet... full of juicy conflict and contradiction, innovative in their cinematic technique, unpredictable in their structures... Alan Berliner illustrates the power of fine art to transform life."

A recipient of Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Jerome Foundation Fellowships, Berliner has received multiple grants from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA and in 1998, won his third career Emmy Award (he has also received six nominations) from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He was also the recipient of a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association in 1993. His experimental documentary films, Nobody's Business (1996) , Intimate Stranger (1991), and The Family Album (1986), have been broadcast all over the world, and have received awards and prizes at many major international film festivals.

Selected retrospectives of Berliner's films have been presented at the Museum of Modem Art (NYC), the International Center of Photography (NYC) and at film festivals from Norway and Finland to England and Australia . Several of his films are routinely rented for filmmaking and film history classes at universities all across the United States , and are in the permanent collections of many film societies, festivals, libraries, colleges and museums.

Berliner first achieved recognition with a group of innovative avant-garde films made between 1975 and 1985. But it was his first hour-long experimental documentary film, THE FAMILY ALBUM (1986), winner of awards and prizes at film festivals around the world, which placed him at the forefront of experimental documentary filmmaking. In THE FAMILY ALBUM, which was included as part of the 1987 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition, Berliner used a vast collection of anonymous 16nun home movies (belonging to more than 75 different families) from the 1920s to the 1950s to create a universal yet intimate composite portrait of the American family. Hailed as "the most intriguing film" of the 1987 Edinburgh International Film Festival by critic Roger Ebert, the film was shown on PBS as part of the P.O.V. series, as well as on The BRAVO Network and The Learning Channel.

INTIMATE STRANGER (1991) explores the extraordinary life story of Berliner's maternal grandfather joseph Cassuto, a Palestinian Jew raised in Egypt whose lifelong passion for Japan created confusion and conflict in his post-World War II Brooklyn home. Following its premiere at the 1991 New York Film Festival, it was invited to many film festivals, museums, universities and film showcases all over the world, winning several awards and prizes, including an ENIMY nomination by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and a 1993 Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association. The Washington Post called INTIMATE STRANGER "a brilliant, one of a kind film... funny, probing... so wholly original in both style and substance as to seem completely without precedent... intoxicating to watch... a spectacular high wire feat by a master."

In addition to his work in film, Berliner has also produced a substantial body of photographic, audio and video installation works. His early "para-cinematic" photographs, scrolls and collages were exhibited at the Hunter College Art Gallery , The Collective for Living Cinema, and The Munson Williams Proctor Institute in the early eighties. CINE­ MATRIX (1977) part of an exhibition titled, FRAMES: Two Dimensional Work by Film Artists, held at the Hunter College Art Gallery in 1980 was reviewed in Art Forum.

In 1987, during a two month artist-in-residency at Sculpture Space in Utica, New York, Berliner premiered a sound performance work titled MICROFILM AND OTHERS. His video sculpture, LATE CITY EDITION (1993) was shown as part of a curated exhibition titled, The Concrete Signal: Video as Sculpture at Gallery 148 in October, 1993, and at the Fine Arts Gallery at Wake Forest University in February, 1995. A selection of his audio/video installation work was included as part of the curated exhibition, Body & Technology: International Technology Art in June of 1995, held at the Dong Ah Gallery in Seoul , Korea .

AUDIOFILE (1993) and AVIARY (1993), both ground-breaking interactive audio installations were exhibited at the Walter Reade Theater Gallery at Lincoln Center and at Anthology Film Archives (SeoulINymax) in 1994. His first one person exhibition, FOUND SOUND: Audio & Video Installation Works featuring the premieres of CRITICAL MASS (1996) and THE RED THREAD (1996), was held at Sculpture Center Gallery in New York City in March, 1996.

Berliner's interactive video installation, GATHERING STONES (1999), based on the tradition of placing rocks on tombstones when visiting Jewish cemeteries, was commissioned for the exhibition, To The Rescue, Eight Artists in an Archive, which premiered at the International Center of Photography Midtown in New York City in February, 1999, and will travel to art museums in Miami, Houston and San Francisco. His second one person exhibition, THE ART OF WAR, held at The Stephen Gang Gallery in March, 1999, featured an innovative interactive sound/image interface using images projected from the ceiling onto a "screen" composed of 150 small white audio speakers arranged in a grid on the gallery floor.

Berliner was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens and lives in Manhattan . He is also currently a faculty member at the New School for Social Research in New York City , where he teaches a course entitled, "Experiments in Time, Light and Motion."