PRESS ROOM

• Senses of Cinema, Midnight at the Oasis by Ioannis Mookas, Oct 2004
  
  Cinematexas 2004: “Lite-Brite Blowup: A Video Art Showdown”: Leading the program was one of the best works in the Festival, Bobby Abate's video Soothsayer (2004). Also represented in Cinematexas by Certain Women (2004), his feature-length collaboration with Peggy Ahwesh, Abate constructs Soothsayer as a digital breviary ­ in Christian tradition a chapbook of hymns and prayers for the canonical hours, but here a volume of terrifying omens. Quoting from tabloid mystics whose prophesies read like Dada fortune cookies (“Head for the mountains - The cities will not be safe”), Abate exhumes Jeanne Dixon's famous augury of JFK's assassination and recalls Nancy Reagan's consultations with Joan Quigley following the 1981 attempt on President Reagan's life. But he reveals that the crystal ball is clouded with cataracts. Soothsayer's darkly humorous eschatology traces a lineage to Craig Baldwin's well-loved found footage epic Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991). Both artists enjoy a superbly paranoid imagination, and Abate shares some of Baldwin's fluency at integrating historical source material into a vigorous, richly graphic, but primarily fictive overall design. Whereas Soothsayer nods to Baldwin in its confident use of found footage, Abate transforms its effect by splitting it onto two, three, or four segmented screens within the frame, and with percussive editing ­ memorably, using industrial footage of a crash-test car mounted on a rotating arm, rhythmically pistoning back and forth. And the candy-coloured tableau of a yard-sale acrylic landscape, out of which fly two animated red cruise missiles hurtling directly at the viewer, is a flourish entirely Abate's own, as are the amber searchlights ­ raking the barren skyline of a digitally rendered city ­ that reveal the inert forms of humanoid figures, horribly but bloodlessly slashed on their childish faces and anatomically correct genitals.
  
  Full Article: Full Article
  
• Strictly Film School, New York Video Festival Journal by Acquarello, July 2004
  
  Excerpting text passages from several renowned celebrity psychics (among them, the infamous Jean Dixon whose claim to fame was the seeming prediction of John F. Kennedy's assassination) set against formally posed, digitally-rendered doomsday scenarios and caricatures of human casualty, Soothsayer is a respectable, well-conceived, and accomplished tongue-in-cheek short film on the folly of political irresponsibility in an age of weapons of mass destruction.
  
  Full Article: http://www.filmref.com/siteinfo.html
  
  

• Film Comment, Some Women by Amy Taubin, March 2004
  
  A collaboration between Ahwesh, who teaches at Bard College, and Abate, who was one of her graduate students, Certain Women is based on Erskine Caldwell's 1957 novel Certain Women. Caldwell's novels functioned as soft-core porn for middle-class suburban women in the years after World War II, and the film captures the novel's seedy atmosphere and prurient effect. It was made with the apparently enthusiastic cooperation of Bard's film faculty and student body, who make up much of the cast and crew. There's an outstandingly creepy turn by Adolfas Mekas as an abusive farmer who wants his daughter to bring home the bacon by becoming a prostitute.
  
  Ahwesh and Abate shot in small towns near Bard, about 90 miles north of New York City, where gentrification hasn't completely taken hold. As in David Lynch's films, the mise-en-scène is anachronistic, suggesting that nothing much has changed in America in the past 50 years and that the aught decade has more in common with the Fifties (particularly in relation to power dynamics between the sexes) than we like to think. With its intercut story lines about teary-eyed, big-breasted girls-in-jep, its cheap motels, roadhouses, crumbling Catskill palaces, and a not-so-secret whorehouse where the working girls and their customers act out seamy S & M scenarios, Certain Women owes as much to Twin Peaks as it does to Caldwell. Ahwesh and Abate's approach is less romantic than Lynch's, however, both in terms of what they depict and how they depict it. The filmmaking is as blunt as in the Doris Wishman exploitation pictures Ahwesh cherishes and as filled with heartfelt fakery as Cindy Sherman's black-and-white movie stills. (Certain Women premiered in the New York Underground Film Festival. Midnight-movie programmers couldn't ask for more classy trash.)
  
  Full Article: http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/artandindustry/somewomen.htm
  
  
• Senses of Cinema, Been Underground So Long... by Ioannis Mookas, April 2004
  
  Certain Women NYUFF's triumphant opening night feature, Certain Women, adapted from a 1957 novel by the neglected American pulp author Erskine Caldwell, happened to integrate both of these thematics, engaging an oppositional feminist consciousness through the vehicle of a Gothic potboiler. Still dewy from its unveiling at this year's Rotterdam International Film Festival, Certain Women was on the face of it a curiously downbeat opening night film, but made for a lively premiere just the same thanks to the assembled glittering retinues of its large cast packing the first of NYUFF's many sold-out shows. Tough, colourful and hugely atmospheric, this feel-bad fiesta starts with violent homicide and spirals implacably downward from there. Young Clementine (Wendi Weger) is jolted awake by a gunshot in the night, and fearfully encircles her home to discover a primal scene ­ her mother's body on the floor of their porch, inexplicably slain by her father, who looms above her cradling the rifle. She flees barefoot and wailing into the night, and survives by seeking refuge at the local brothel, eventually to become an accomplished dominatrix and the ranking whore. The other protagonists hardly fare better. Louellen (Martina Meijer), in the full bloom of her adolescent sexuality, yearns for romantic deliverance, only to be seduced and discarded by a travelling salesman. Dodging an abusive father, Hilda (Jessica Watson) tries to assert her economic autonomy, but is defamed by the mayor, whose advances she rejects. And piteous, cowering Nannette (Phoebe Reilly), afraid of everything and alien to herself, is brutally violated and permanently maimed. Certain Women distils the schematic conception of its source material into an old-fashioned spectacle of women's suffering that, paradoxically, enables a complex, authentically female subjectivity while raising troubling questions for contemporary feminism. The film's despairing representation of mothers, for instance, suggests a vast, abysmal rupture, with Clementine, Nannette and Hilda orphaned by maternal death or abandonment, and Louellen straining under the watchful eye of a mother who inadvertently colludes with the patriarchal order.
  
  All evidence points to a remarkably sympathetic collaboration between Ahwesh and Abate, resulting in a seamless fusion of their individual styles. Both directors have explored similar terrain before ­ Ahwesh with the gothica rustica of Nocturne (1998) and Abate with the horny teen hijinks of Chisolm (2000) ­ but their obvious affinity with the source novel, to which they secured the rights with the approval of Caldwell's widow, and from which they draw most of the dialogue, has endowed them with a new impetus. The self-financed project was shot on a weekend schedule over a year's time in the towns of Hudson and Tivoli, New York (home to Bard College, where both Ahwesh and Abate teach), utilising low-end video formats such as VHS, spycam and DV; the spycam in particular gives much of Certain Women an overripe, cross-processed sheen and lyrical distortion. Certain Women's aesthetic strategy depends crucially on a modernist, self-referential performative mode that can be fiendishly hard to pull off, but which the filmmakers achieve here surpassingly well. The capacious cast is filled with Ahwesh and Abate's friends and colleagues from New York's film/art/performance worlds, or what their own website describes as “non-professionals chosen ... for their unique personalities, stock character looks and on-screen magnetism”, including fellow experimental filmmakers Peter Hutton, Jeanne Liotta, Joe Gibbons, and memorably, Michelle Handelman. This device is of course one of the most durable in the American avant-garde cinema, routinely associated with Warhol and his superstars but running all the way from Maya Deren's self-mythologising right through Cecilia Dougherty's recent video masterpiece Gone (2001). Far more knowing than their characters, Certain Women's performers stand outside their roles and “quote” dialogue or adopt an opaque behaviourism. This third-person approach, combined with the supplementary connotation of the actors' real-life personae, produces a disjunction integral to both the film's gender critique and its perspective on the past. Carrying the heaviest burden as the eponymous women, the four leads deliver spanking performances. Wendi Weger is exquisitely modulated, lightly wearing her shopworn angel's glamour; Martina Meijer radiates a plaintive, vulnerable sensuality; and in the film's most unambiguously feminist stance, Jessica Watson locates the determination within her character's prim shell. Even the somewhat discordant Phoebe Reilly transforms Nannette's mute abjection into a vivid symptom of engulfing, uncontrollable hysteria.
  
  Full Article: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/festivals/04/31/nyuff_2004.html
  
  
• CinemaTexas Catelog, Spencer Parsons, Sept 2004
  
  You know the little slot in the seat in front of you…full of goodies… I always go rummaging for some new treasure: a half-eaten sandwich, perhaps, or a forgotten Erskine Caldwell novel. Though I don’t know how anyone could forget an Erskine Caldwell novel. I don’t know why that man bothers seeking success when he could have so much fun just sitting around thinking.—comic Shelly Berman, “Airlines,” Inside Shelley Berman, 1959
  
  With covers like those old paperback editions had, how could anyone forget an Erskine Caldwell novel? Most probably painted under deadline, but executed in a blotchy, semi-abstracted pulp style to make perfunctory speed look like a white heat of passion, the post-expressionist, pre-Leroy Neiman brushstrokes depict something like fully-clothed obscenity.
  
  Look closely, and it appears that the paint has picked up actual grime; in front of you may be a picture of a woman in a pink dress looking distraught, but in every dab of color, there’s dirt and insinuated hair, probably a little sweat, and more than a little despair. It’s the despair that allowed these pulps to sell the sex in such brazen colors, with literal filth to serve as a warning that would temper and, in so doing, stoke desire. They’re the dirtiest pictures around, and some of the saddest, making them quite beautiful.
  
  It was the lurid covers that originally drew Peggy Ahwesh and Bobby Abate to the world of Erskine Caldwell, whose largely out-of-print oeuvre has in fact been forgotten since the age when he was the bestselling novelist of all time. A Southern Gothic writer whose early triumph, Tobacco Road is sufficiently big-L-literary to rate on the Modern Library’s 100 great novels of the 20th century, his work was also sexually graphic and socially inquiring enough to make it the respectable mass-market smut of its day, perfect for reading on airplanes or keeping in a drawer next to the bed.
  
  In adapting Caldwell’s novel interweaving squalid tales of working-class women in peril, Ahwesh and Abate do not attempt an imitation or pastiche on those gorgeous cover paintings. More imaginatively, and to greater emotional purpose, they work all the angles of that style’s most pungent contemporary analogue: video.
  
  They shoot as if the image always and forever contains the grime and despair of pornography, video’s most prolific and tenacious genre. Without quoting or re-enacting styles, they work from a palette of low-end cameras from DV to spy-cams, effortlessly evoking and capitalizing on the animal opacity of the medium’s gaze on professional, amateur and stolen sex, the alienated life-and-death of home-movie peek-a-boos and documented executions.
  
  Relentlessly 3rd person even when most iconic, and especially in closeup, Certain Women’s exquisite compositions frame a melodrama without romance or redemption to achieve a stirring pathos. Its performers, decaying diners and cheap hotels typecast for ‘50s resonance against a contemporary surface of brightly metallic color, Certain Women bluntly uncovers a small town’s shameful secrets only to yield even greater mystery in revealing its persons. Somehow cathartic and open-ended at once, its grimy brushstrokes paint an image of heroic endurance, a story of women’s bodies at the mercy of minds that have too much fun just sitting around thinking—
  
  Full Article:
  
  
• MoMA Program Notes, Liza Johnson, March 2004
  
  With Certain Women, Bobby Abate and Peggy Ahwesh have elegantly adapted Erskine Caldwell’s 1957 short story collection into a highly tactile feature. As a contemporary reconsideration of the social and sexual mores of 1950’s America, Certain Women is as sustained and as successful as Todd Haynes’ acclaimed Far From Heaven. But Abate and Ahwesh take an almost opposite approach from the hard gloss and distancing critical ironies of Haynes’ suburban surfaces, offering us instead a textural, proximate entry into the lives and world of four certain small-town, working-class women.
  
  The film’s narrative emphasizes the kinds of scandal and vice that one might expect from its origins in pulp fiction. Clementine trains as a prostitute and Louellen gets a reputation for sleeping around. Nannette is punished for saving herself for marriage, and Hilda’s business suffers when she refuses the wrong man. Ahwesh and Abate treat these potentially turgid topics with a lightness of touch and an absence of moral judgment, and in so doing they stake out more subtle ground. For example, one scene shows the shy Clementine training as a dominatrix. If more sensationalist discussions tend to represent prostitution and s/m practices as shocking perversions, Certain Women puts aside these usual, limiting treatments of transgression, reaching instead for more delicate expressions within Clementine’s actions. She flogs her client reluctantly, badly, without control or authority. Her apprehension does not emerge from moral judgment, or from surprise or distaste at the acts she is asked to perform. Instead, the filmmakers show a more particular, more subjective reluctance. They are less interested in seeing Clementine break taboos than they are in showing her teenage self-consciousness, her relation to her own body, and her learner’s clumsy hesitation, all in an environment filled with the familiar dissociations of alienated labor. Utterly unshocked, the bored inhabitants of the bordello lay about nearby. Similarly, the film’s several dramatically heightened acts of crime and vice are rendered with an everyday quality, a sense of the normal. Even the film’s most violent acts are less suggestive of transgression than of a cultural logic being followed out to its conclusion. Within that everyday quality, the film locates finer and finer registers of the women’s subjective experiences.
  
  Throughout Certain Women, the precision of these moments is reinforced by the film’s immensely tactile use of surface. Styling a fictional world is a painstaking process, one by which filmmakers traditionally attempt to efface the realities of the actual people and places in front of the camera in order to produce the surfaces of the world of the film. Here, each woman is hairsprayed and lipsticked, and each location is dressed, allowing the story to unfold within a coherent fictional setting. Simultaneously, though, Certain Women explores the real-life surfaces of the actors and environments that sustain that fiction. Details like the concrete sidewalk outside the Truckwise tire store, the plastic waterfall in the motel lobby, or the faux wood paneling of the films’ various interiors all work together as component parts of the film’s average American mise-en-scene. At the same time, each location is scarred with its own specific textures, redolent of its referent in reality. Even more emphatically, the surfaces of the actors are familiar markers of the cultural types they perform, but also bear the singular traces of the real person who has stepped in front of the camera. No attempt is made to restyle the real tattoos of the actor who portrays the rakish lover, or the real nylon bra that wrinkles because it fits differently while the actress is lying down, or the real pockmarked back of the actor who plays the rapist, or the real stomach of the actress upon whom pantyhose marks out its own waistline. These insistent links between the 1950’s world of the film and the 21st century reality to which its surfaces bear witness are a source of much of the film’s considerable impact. These links function not as anachronisms, but as points of contact, binding these highly gendered stories and sexual values from a previous era to a contemporary moment in which they remain sadly relevant.
  
  
• Filmmaker Magazine, Women's Studies, Michelle Handelman, Feb 2002
  
  IT’S 3 AM, and I’m stranded in a furious snowstorm with the cast and crew of Certain Women, Peggy Ahwesh and Bobby Abate’s adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s 1958 pulp-fiction novel. Ahwesh is further up the road caught in a snow drift, while Abate shuttles back and forth between us making sure we have enough cigarettes and water as we wait for the tow trucks. A crew of four, a few makeup smeared actors, a couple of DV cameras and too many cell phones without reception… it all seems rather appropriate for this re-creation of Caldwell’s original story of feminine distress in a world rife with pathos.
  
  “So many weird things have happened on this shoot,” says Mike Albo, who plays diner owner Joe Rand. “It feels very gritty and dirty, and that’s always a good sign.”
  
    The film is being shot in upstate New York near Bard College where Ahwesh and Abate first met when he was a student of hers in the Bard MFA program. “The first time we talked we discovered a mutual love of the writings of Erskine Caldwell. We both had a collection of his novels, which we initially picked up at thrift stores for their lurid, melodramatic covers,” says Ahwesh. “After realizing how similar we were in our love of genre, we started talking about doing a project together, and then settled on Certain Women, a collection of tawdry tales that follows the lives of five women doomed to a fate of misery and suffering colored by typical small-town morality. Without overt political posturing, Caldwell uses the plight of women [in the ’50s] as a metaphor for all of human suffering.”
  
  Ahwesh and Abate are translating the gritty feel of the original novel through a no-budget production shot on miniDV and an assortment of spy cameras and low-end VHS cameras run into a miniDV deck. Dialogue is taken straight from the book, and the two directors take on almost all roles of production. “The entire cast is made up of people we know, people we chose because they had a certain look or personality trait that merged with Caldwell’s characters.” says Abate. “We have a cast of over 100 and have used only one professional actor.”
  
  In true Warholian fashion the film is cast with an array of cultural luminaries such as painter Amy Sillman and conceptual artist Nayland Blake, along with students of both Ahwesh and Abate, and Mary Mary, one of the original members of The Living Theater.
  
  I’ve been cast as Jenny Rand, a slutty sports-bar tramp out to revenge her husband’s infidelities. Earlier in the night, when I arrived at the designated location, a truck stop off of Highway 9, I’m told we can’t shoot there because the manager got pissed off the previous night, so now we’re heading toward an abandoned motel up the side of the road. Without permits, risking arrest, relying on friends to double as actors one day, crew the next — these are the kind of challenges that seem to appease the guerrilla-filmmaking nature of both Abate and Ahwesh.
  
  Ahwesh, whose Super-8 work from the ’80s helped shape a new generation of experimental makers, is no stranger to the collaborative process. Her 1987 film The Deadman, based on a George Bataille novel, was a collaboration with Keith Sanborn, and she’s recently released a CD of experimental sound work with photographer Barbara Ess. Abate is a young videomaker whose work has been featured in the New York Film Festival and is quickly garnering the attention of the avant-garde film and video community.
  
  The tow trucks arrive and we’re back at the house by 5 AM preparing for the next day’s shoot. This is the final story of the film, and after a year of weekend shooting Ahwesh and Abate welcome the post-production process. “Both Bobby and I direct through shooting,” says Ahwesh. “We lead the action through the camera. But editing is a whole different process. Who knows what direction the film will take now. That’s the challenge of working with two minds.”
  
  Link: http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/winter2002/reports/womens_studies.php
  

• Palm Beach Art, Critical Views of our Cultural Terrain by Marya Summers, Oct 2004
  
  Some "landscapes" are mesmerizing like the swirling whirlies on One Mile per Minute, which takes us through product-laden, TV-hypnotized, culture jammed suburbia. Bobby Abate’s video opens with a song whose lyrics assure "I'll be right here waiting for you" before it segues into the theme music of Titanic, whose heroine swore to her beloved "I'll never let go." The songs extend the embrace of the corporate media to catch us as we fall--though they are the ones, the video suggests, that pushed us. Soon, like the famous ship, the viewer will be plunging as the world speeds by sideways, the projected images running down the screen. This is one of many visual metaphors that artist Bobby Abate uses to suggest our culture is plummeting in the pursuit of--ironically--an improved lifestyle.
  
  Full Article: http://www.palmbeachart.com/News.html
  
  
• DispactkéFilm: 2002, Douglas Singleton, 2002
  
  One Mile Per Minute is a dizzying computer generated and live action video contemplating the ghost-like hold TV and corporate images play in our conscious (and subconscious) lives. In many segments hundreds and hundreds of corporate logos float through the spatial background of the scene before us, old, new, international, the affect is dizzying. A computer simulated image of what looks like the twin towers with a digital "explosion and fire" circling one of the buildings is panned along until we find a lone, digital man standing on top who proceeds to jump off into the sky. This man later morphs from a computer generated image into a real person (the filmmaker?) who proceeds to look into the camera and recite his favorite television shows, many of these NBC Thursday night "Must See TV" entities. The film finally explodes into a succession of all of these images, scenarios, logos, and sound bites until it is a psychological terror ride throughout modern media culture. Spooky, beautiful.
  
  Full Article: http://www.dispactke.com/content_text_2.html
  

• Review of compilation show @ San Francisco Cinematheque
  SFB Guardian, Downlaod Down Low by Ray Houston, 2002
  
  BOBBY ABATE IS young, but he's enough of an old soul to know that nothing soundtracks gay teen melancholy quite like a secondhand pop symphony. Abate's early videos are haunted by the lonely singing souls of '60s pop. The Fleetwoods drift along toward an elusive dream date, and Skeeter Davis likens a breakup to the apocalypse, in his Tanti Man (1999). Nancy Sinatra wonders what she'll do with just a photo to tell her troubles to in Real Videos 1,2,3 (1999-2001). Little Peggy March's teenage castle comes tumbling down during 1999's Chisholm, though if the visuals accompanying her cries are anything to go by, Abate's castle is a motel where he and a friend meet to shoot a lo-res porn memento of their graduation day.
  
  There's a catch to Abate's early-'60s symphonies: he's hardly the first underground filmmaker to make use of secondhand blues. In resurrecting Little Peggy March, he's also invoking the formidable Kenneth Anger, who wound up March to obediently follow the sadistic biker boys of 1963's Scorpio Rising. The relative complexity of Anger's aesthetic ­ Scorpio Rising's a cultural critique that verges on historical hex ­ makes Abate's early, mock-diary approach seem simplistic. The Tanti Man and Chisholm are more like gay brothers of Sadie Benning's first Pixelvision shorts. The nude centerfolds on the floor and the couple groping on top of a Candy Land board are expressions of a bedroom-bound romantic imagination. The only travel is from a solitary present into a vision of the past.
  
  A hand-me-down sensibility still dominates Zero Order (2000), which explores an obsession with Holly Golightly. Once again, Abate's marking familiar territory: created by Truman Capote, Holly has had her share of fey huckleberry friends over the decades; just a few years ago, Morrissey crooned "Moon River" to more thoughtful and swoon-inducing effect than Zero Order's pantomime. But identifying with Holly's untamed status (hilariously, Abate slows down Audrey Hepburn's "You mustn't give your heart to a wild thing" speech so that her hoity-toity voice takes on a more masculine tone) is certainly more liberating than the movie's other option, heterosexual reprogramming. The world of Zero Order is a mean red one in which "real" lives messily spill out of mirror reflections. Tiffany's ­ and the capitalist security it represents ­ is just out of reach.
  
  Abate's approach becomes more distinctive, critical, and contemporary with the Real Videos trilogy, the first personal artistic response I've seen to the Internet-ization of sexual identity. Voyeurism is a recurrent motif in Abate's videos; more than one features close-ups of the director himself staring wide-eyed. In this case, Peeping Tom pleasure gives way to paranoid terror. Abate edits live cam stripteases, chat room emoticons, 'N Sync RealPlayer clips, and "CIA animation" renderings of airplane accidents to create a streaming Craven-era Scream of Munch-like intensity. At one point he French-kisses a modem, but that rather literal image doesn't express alienation as well as his montage techniques.
  
  The Pac-Man-yellow skies of One Mile per Minute (2002) signal a venture into digital animation. Over time Abate's work has grown more playful in terms of form, and his soundtrack choices aren't quite as Anger-y. Debbie Gibson's "Electric Youth" provides a coda to the Real Videos trilogy, and One Mile per Minute's creepy score splices and loops instrumental passages from Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting" and Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." Swelling synths and oh-so-wistful pan flute accompany animated images of two towers. A body swan-dives from one, and then the towers collapse. The clouds that float through those Pac-Man skies are corporate logos: Mattel, Xerox, Panasonic, CNN, and many others.
  
  One Mile per Minute's noncartoon passages flaunt telltale influences. A faux-confessional I-heart-TV segment brings back the Benning aspect of Abate's early work, but he's grown more wry and performative. Close-ups of a hand against a white backdrop are reminiscent of shots from Todd Haynes's Superstar and Poison, in which that part of the anatomy is symbolic shorthand (yikes) for personal desire and societal punishment; Abate's car-window tracking shots of suburbia are also Haynes-like, but he changes the angle, so the houses he passes all seem to be falling down. In this portrait of the United States, the click of a car's turn signal sounds like a bomb ticking.
  
  Link: http://www.sfbg.com/37/26/art_film_abate.html
  
  
• Review of compilation show @ San Francisco Cinematheque
  Bright Lights Film Journal, Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror) by Gary Morris, 2002
  
  In his online bio, queer avant-garde filmmaker Bobby Abate compares himself to Britney Spears. Like her, he says, he’s “a slave to ritual, commercialism, self-reflexivity and contradiction. Not a boy, not yet a man — you might say he's painfully wedged under pop culture with his little head sticking out and screaming for help.” This thumbnail self-portrait captures Abate’s whimsical side but not the complexity of his work. The San Francisco Cinematheque’s one-night retrospective in 2004 — one night because his films are all shorts so far — showed an intriguing and very queer talent at work.
  
  The earliest selection is 1999’s The Tanti Man, an 11-minute evocation of a summer romance between Abate (who stars in much of his work) and a handsome drifter. Shot in Salisbury, Massachusetts, this sweet work deftly interweaves love scenes with memories of the melodrama of being a tortured high school homo, complete with wounded poetry and threats of suicide. Skeeter Davis’s mournful ditty “The End of the World,” excerpted in endlessly repeated loops, provides the hypnotic soundtrack to what is ultimately a bittersweet idyll. Among the arresting images: the boys making love sprawled over a Candyland gameboard.
  
  Chisholm, made the same year, ups the artistic ante with striking images of a porn film shot on high school graduation night at a cheesy motel. “All we wanted to do was get fucked up and party all night,” a voiceover repeats against flickering, half-lit images of tits and asses and hard-ons, again accompanied by the homely looped refrain of an early ‘60s teen-girl tune, this time Little Peggy March wailing about lost innocence, presumably that of the mysterious stars: “My teenage castle is tumblin’ down …”
  
  “What would happen if Truman [Capote] had followed his original intention” of having Holly Golightly be male? That question was the inspiration for The Zero Order (2000, right), Abate’s longest work to that time at a little over a half hour. In this striking rethinking of Breakfast at Tiffany’s he (and several others) plays Holly, rediscovering the true queerness in Capote’s original novel. A clever touch is a voiceover of a 1950s-style psychiatrist trying to cure Abate’s homosexuality.
  
  One Mile Per Minute (2002) wittily portrays a literally topsy-turvy world (the camera is on its side for much of this one). In this fractured dreamscape, robot-consumers mouth commercial mantras, including such sacred cows as “hip” sitcoms — “I love Frazier, I love ER…” — and rest under a sun that’s a corporate logo.
  
  The three-part Real Videos (1999-2001) are a heady mix of Pixelvision beefcake scenes, airplane crashes, and webcam homosex that show cocksucking, buttfucking, and whacking off as sources of solace in a capsized capitalist world. Abate exploits the chilliness of the modern techno-landscape to clever effect, placing his sexy porn boys in scintillating scenarios of pleasure even when one is on a computer and the other is watching. Naked rough trade, sleepy rimmers, a man (the director, it appears) licking a modem — these are some of the denizens of Abate’s sensual, skewed world.
  
  Link: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/49/stabs.htm
  
  
• On Installtion "Vader"
  Miami New Times, Batter Up by Michelle Weinberg, May 2004
  
  A contender for one of the strangest artworks ever is Bobby Abate's Vader, a 3D animation/video hybrid depicting a nude male figure wearing a Darth Vader mask and seated in a woodland setting -- it all resembles a thrift-shop painting -- while a curious, stilted running figure darts among the trees in the background. It is thought-provoking, and grasps the imagination the way an incongruous dream image does.
  
  Full Article: http://miaminewtimes.com/issues/2004-06-10/culture/art.html
  
  

• A collection of 3 reviews
  
  The New York Press, "Views of the Avant-Garde"
  October 4, 2000
  "A couple of less established directors steal the show from the old school. Bobby Abate’s The Zero Order is a fractured narrative about a twentysomething depressive lad (played by the director) obsessed with Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Shot on moody 16 mm, The Zero Order engages in a complicated dialogue with the 60s, not just in its protagonist’s object of obsession, but in the director’s choice of film format and color scheme, the amateurish Factory-esque actor ensemble and central image of the tragically fey, sensitive, sad young man." - Ed Halter
  
  Village Voice, "Original Sins and Future Shock"
  October 3, 2000
  "Avant-garde festivals must deliver discoveries, and here there are at least two... Robert Abate's The Zero Order is an update on avant-garde psychodrama (its 21st-century sensibility signaled by low-end video effects) in which a gay man's sexual identity crisis is reflected in a kind of karaoke version of Breakfast at Tiffany's." -Amy Taubin
  
  Flicker, "Children, Nature, Fragmentation"
  November, 2000
  "Psychic confusion is expressed in Bobby Abate's THE ZERO ORDER, a very loose narrative about two men, a film director and an actor, who each try to will themselves into believing that they are Holly Golightly while collaborating on a Warholesque remake of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. ZERO begins with a ball swaying back and forth in the frame while a voice (possibly culled from actual "therapeutic" cassette tapes) addresses us directly about giving up conscious and unconscious homosexual urges. The voice tries to plant post-hypnotic suggestions, delivering lines like "When I count backwards from three, you will feel rested and at ease with yourself because you will have relinquished your homosexual desires. Three...two... one...zero." This is where the film's title comes from; Abate takes us to the ground zero of repression and shows how much our unconscious dreams are shaped by images and characters from popular culture. Abate's film operates as a witty gloss on Blake Edwards' original BREAKFASTúlingering shots of a horrified Asian actress are an implicit criticism of Mickey Rooney's monstrous, buck-toothed Mr. Yunioshiúbut perhaps Abate's most subversive move comes when he re-presents scenes from BREAKFAST at half-speed, making Audrey Hepburn's voice a bit deeper than James Earl Jones'. The protagonists of THE ZERO ORDER wish they were Holly Golightly, but Abate has his revenge on Hollywood by turning Holly Golightly into a man." -Craig J. Fischer