Movies: Jamie Nares

Exploring the pre-fame years of the celebrated American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and how New York City, its people, and tectonically shifting arts culture of the late 1970s and '80s shaped his vision....

In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of thei...

A “sci-fi povera” film shot on Super 8, Men in Orbit features musician Lurie and Eric Mitchell as chain-smoking astronauts in a decrepit New York living room that has been transformed into a spacecraft....

Face Addict tells the story of a unique and unrepeatable experience, that of the artistic community in New York between the late '70s and early '80s, known as the downtown scene....

Nares mocks up Ancient Rome by shooting in faux-classical sites like Grant's Tomb and Tribeca's American Thread Building, where a decrepit penthouse loft with a peeling-paint dome serves as an echoey stand-in for the imperial palace. The latter locat...

Collage of faces taken from television by James Nares...

After Rome 78, Nares made a political documentary—a controversial 1980 video interview with an IRA member titled No Japs at My Funeral—but turned to other forms of art for much of the remaining decade, never realizing projects like a feature script h...

An exploration of social schizophrenia in which terrorists consult their mothers before planting bombs, and the head of the New York City bomb squad succumbs to his dominatrix....

STREET is an unscripted 61-minute high definition video filmed by artist James Nares over one week in September 2011. The final video is a mesmerizing experiment in the nuance and beauty of everyday people and people-watching; providing a global view...

This hybrid of diary and documentary was shot on Jamie Nares’s first trip home since her arrival in New York three years prior. While the cultural upheaval of the 1970s has a presence (not least in its title), Suicide? No, Murder! shares the formal l...

Wind currents on a debris-strewn street corner....

Tracking a storm in the bedsheets....

Observing the trajectories of falling rocks....

Mini-document of sculptural activity, involving the effects of gravity on weighty objects....

Rhythmic video music made by dropping stones on stones....

A young girl in the last summer of her childhood, alternates between solitary play and the discovery of her power to influence the world around her. “One of the most beautiful cinematic works I've ever seen.” Lucy Sante....

A wandering being in search of sustenance in a wintry wasteland experiences a strange transformation, eventually learning that the best way to get is to give....

Choreographed and orchestrated, a rhythmic video music, made by hurling lengths of plastic pipe against a cinder block wall....

A hand descends, as though from the heavens, to manipulate a length of ribbon....

A pendulum swings among old NYC buildings....