OLDER WORK

1998 and before

PLEASE READ BELOW TO CLEAR UP ANY ISSUES FROM WATCHING THOSE STRANGE OLDIES BUT GOODIES.

MEET ME BY THE PAVILION
1997, 16mm sound, 8 mins

The motivation behind this film was to re-stage various 8mm movies that my father took of my mother. Stripped of context, an actress portraying my mother recreated these filmed moments on an empty soundstage. Meet Me by the Pavilion is a film about my parent’s troubled marriage, reinventing recorded moments of my mother as isolated and lost in a landscape of 60’s architecture and music. This was my first attempt to use Salisbury Beach, one of my favorite places on Earth, in a film. I revisited the location with my camera once again for The Tanti Man.

YOOL IS BLOO
1996, 16mm silent, 5 mins

A 16mm remake of the five minute Castle film from the 40’s, The Night Before Christmas, Yool is Bloo is a slightly more angry movie that shows the frustration of an obsessed elf left behind by Santa Claus.

GOSSIP
1995, Sound Piece w/ Video, 5 mins

I started off working in sound and performance long before film and video. Gossip was a quick sound piece I made from a recording of Dorothy Parker stories and some bargain bin jazz LP. I can't remember why, but I decided to paint my face with whiskers and shoot myself gossiping on the phone. I took my crappy 8mm tape to the video lab and sat there almost over night, having no idea how to control the damn video mixer – I still growl at them to this day. The resulting tape has almost 50 live mixes of this video. If you look close, you'll wonder if it was worth the time. I projected this video once at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Mass. There it was double projected as mirror images using two outdated and broken down video projectors that did not register correctly. There were 6 ghosts of the video playing at the same time in red green and blue. Yes, I did it on purpose – and it looked pretty cool. The version on this website is the original – hot off the Super-VHS tape I mixed to. Super VHS? I didn’t know any better.

KITTY'S NITE IN
1994, Sound Peice w/ Video, 3 mins

Kitty's Nite In marks one of the first times I snuck up the video lab at MassArt and started playing with the video mixer. I had this great bossanova sample sound mash that desperately needed some seriously sexy visuals. Around this time, I also purchased a rare VHS copy of "A Party at Kitty and Stud's", Sylvester Stallone's debut 1970's porno flick. I found Kitty's lonely dance so hypnotic and interesting, I decided to marry it with my new sound piece. This definitely did not go over well in the overly-PC early 90's - but it's gobs of fun now.

SELF-PORTRAITS
1993, VHS, 2 mins

Around this time, I was drawing hundreds of tiny little self portraits in my sketch books. There were five in a row per page, each numbered. I drew myself as a magician, a viking, a lamp, a devil, a vase -- everything. So one night, I decided to sign out a VHS camera from school, and with my friend's help, dress up in costume and shoot a bunch of these portaits. Of course, I had no clue how to edit (or shoot) video back then - but I've always been interested in the portaits as a raw thing. I've tried to edit them into videos over the years, but they seem to want to stand alone. The original tape of these portraits is over 40 mintues, but I've excerpted a few shots - minus the most emvbarrassing ones.

PERFORMANCE VIDEO
1993, Video, 2 mins

In undergrad, I was a performance artist, a sound artist, a sculptor, and finally a filmmaker. This is one of the first videos I ever shot as a backdrop to a performance or installation. I can't even remember what the performance was anymore, but I still think the video shows a little but of what I was interested in back then: Breaking things and dressing like a creepy bunny rabbit.

STILLS for YOOL IS BLOO:

720x480x72ppi
1mb / TIFF

HOW TO DOWNLOAD: Right-click (PC) or control-click (Mac) your mouse on any still and use "Download Link to Disk" / "Save Target As" to download the still to your disk. If you use "Save Image to Disk" you will only be downloading the thumbnail of the image!

Stills are copyright Bobby Abate. Do not use stills without permisison. All images should be credited to Bobby Abate unless otherwise noted.