Short Films by Ari Marcopoulos
A program of selected short films by Ari Marcopoulos, a photographer, filmmaker, and tireless chronicler of subcultures in New York City and points further afield. Includes "Roma," a portrait of daily life in the Italian capital; "Sketches for #PUNK," intercutting choreographer Nora Chipaumire’s rehearsals for a performance with the kinetic footwork of basketball players on a neighborhood court; "Alone Together," documenting a poetry reading and saxophone performance by avant-garde jazz legend Joe McPhee at LAXART in Los Angeles; two shorts attesting to Marcopoulos’s ongoing engagement with hip-hop culture; "Hammons Flute," in which musician David Hammons is seen playing a traditional Japanese flute, the shakuhachi, in his Harlem studio; and further surprises.
-
Alone Together
Directed by Ari Marcopoulos | 24 mins | 2021
Marcopoulos’s vital document of jazz multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, filmed in an empty gallery with three cameras recording the raw behind-the-scenes set-up, captures the avant-garde legend in all of his improvised splendor, his poetry reading and a... -
Not a Lot to Fear
Directed by Ari Marcopoulos | 3 mins | 2021
A multi-generational portrait starring skateboarder, rapper, record producer and artist Sage Elsesser, his mother and grandmother, Marcopoulos’s short film bears witness to the bonds between three eras of Black America, with the elder matriarch, regally... -
Sketches for #PUNK
Directed by Ari Marcopoulos | 15 mins | 2019
The rhythms of tribal dance and street basketball commune in this diasporic summit, in which studio footage of famed Zimbabwe-born, New York–based choreographer Nora Chipaumire is intercut with teenagers hitting jump shots on a Manhattan court. The cit... -
My Hands Are Full
Directed by Ari Marcopoulos | 2 mins | 2020
A prime example of Marcopoulos’s up-close-and-personal portraiture, this unguarded slice of storytelling brio catches the Houston-born, Nigerian American rapper Maxo freestyling alone on a sofa, dragging on a spliff and spitting infectious rhymes while—... -
Roma
Directed by Ari Marcopoulos | 14 mins | 2016
Evoking the spirit of postwar neo-realism, Marcopoulos sketches an impression of the Italian capital with unvarnished detail, capturing the quotidian life of a city where past and present collide. A lone roller-skater pirouettes beside an ancient canal... -
Hammons Flute
Directed by Ari marcopoulos | 9 mins | 1991
Marcopoulos’s intimate video portrait of David Hammons finds the artist casually resplendent in a beret and mock turtleneck and playing a flute in his cluttered New York studio, surrounded by the ephemera of his practice: paintings, sculpture, and the i...
