SPYING AND OTHER PROVOCATION
Works of Joe Gibbons
“One of the ten best films of the year. A silent exercise in applied voyeurism, Spying is a hilariously perverse ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ in which the filmmaker secretly observes his neighbors (and their pets) sunbathing, gardening, or gazing out of their windows.”. --J Hoberman, Village Voice
2002 41 min. Video
“Scary and hilarious...Mr. Gibbons has assembled bits and pieces of super-8 films to compose a chronicle of petty larceny, drug abuse and general irresponsibility, all of which he characterizes as research. Mr. Gibbons’s persona, if not his actual personality, is at once guileless and entirely untrustworthy, as if the distinction between lying and telling the truth had never occurred to him.”
– NY Times
“Scary and hilarious...Mr. Gibbons has assembled bits and pieces of super-8 films to compose a chronicle of petty larceny, drug abuse and general irresponsibility, all of which he characterizes as research. Mr. Gibbons’s persona, if not his actual personality, is at once guileless and entirely untrustworthy, as if the distinction between lying and telling the truth had never occurred to him.”
– NY Times
about:
Joe Gibbons
is a singular figure in the history of American experimental cinema. He
is widely regarded for the incomparable, dryly humorous works that he
began making in the mid-1970s. At the time, Gibbons was considered a
pioneer of Super 8 filmmaking, however he left this intimate home movie
format behind in the late 1980s to work in 16mm and video. His dynamic
output has been featured in four Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1995,
2000, 2002, 2006) and he is the recipient of fellowships and awards from
the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NY State Council on the Arts,
the Creative Capital Foundation, The LEF Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and
Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Over the years
Gibbons has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pratt Institute and most recently at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The majority of Gibbons’ films and videos center on a protagonist named Joe Gibbons. This guy looks, speaks and even behaves like the filmmaker, however you might say that he is an intensified, more performative and fictionalized version of the artist. Existential, megalomaniacal, paranoid and ultimately doubtful of the direction that life is taking him, Joe tends to live on the margins of society. He hates working and instead makes ends meet through less legitimate means. Whether avoiding parole officers, dreading the day ahead or contemplating another scheme, Joe’s self-reflective monologues break the fourth wall by being addressed directly to the camera. Critic J. Hoberman noted that Gibbons “invented a new mode of psychodrama which might be termed the ‘confessional’". Possessing a razor sharp sense of comic timing and an uncanny improvisational imagination, Gibbons miraculously turns his distressing self-indulgence into something compelling and deeply amusing. His slippery sense of narrative and faux-diaristic leaves one wondering if Joe is simply documenting his life on camera or instead living his life for the camera. Discussing his approach to filmmaking, Gibbons comments that:
I guess in most drama there’s some kind of flaw that drives the drama and I think by exaggerating things—I mean, I play pretty messed up characters, but there are aspects that everybody to a greater or lesser degree exhibits, especially the psychopathic ones; people can identify with that. So many movies are made involving these characters. I started out making more abstract films or structural films and it wasn’t until I discovered using myself as material that I thought I had something. But I had to keep making more—I needed content. By finding flaws and working on those—that was a goldmine.
-Andrew Lampert, Anthology Film Archives
The majority of Gibbons’ films and videos center on a protagonist named Joe Gibbons. This guy looks, speaks and even behaves like the filmmaker, however you might say that he is an intensified, more performative and fictionalized version of the artist. Existential, megalomaniacal, paranoid and ultimately doubtful of the direction that life is taking him, Joe tends to live on the margins of society. He hates working and instead makes ends meet through less legitimate means. Whether avoiding parole officers, dreading the day ahead or contemplating another scheme, Joe’s self-reflective monologues break the fourth wall by being addressed directly to the camera. Critic J. Hoberman noted that Gibbons “invented a new mode of psychodrama which might be termed the ‘confessional’". Possessing a razor sharp sense of comic timing and an uncanny improvisational imagination, Gibbons miraculously turns his distressing self-indulgence into something compelling and deeply amusing. His slippery sense of narrative and faux-diaristic leaves one wondering if Joe is simply documenting his life on camera or instead living his life for the camera. Discussing his approach to filmmaking, Gibbons comments that:
I guess in most drama there’s some kind of flaw that drives the drama and I think by exaggerating things—I mean, I play pretty messed up characters, but there are aspects that everybody to a greater or lesser degree exhibits, especially the psychopathic ones; people can identify with that. So many movies are made involving these characters. I started out making more abstract films or structural films and it wasn’t until I discovered using myself as material that I thought I had something. But I had to keep making more—I needed content. By finding flaws and working on those—that was a goldmine.
-Andrew Lampert, Anthology Film Archives
