People / Faculty

Emeriti Faculty

Jeffrey Skoller

Associate Professor of Film & Media

Specialty areas

Activist and other counter-media practices, Experimental/avant-garde film and video art, Film/video production, Tactical, Theory & Practice of documentary/non-fiction media, Third Cinema.

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Bio

Jeffrey Skoller is a filmmaker and writer. He teaches film/video production and courses on the histories and theories of experimental/avant-garde film and video art, documentary/non-fiction film, Third Cinema, activist and other counter-media practices. “In research and image-making, I explore relationships between film and contemporary art, the radical aesthetics and praxis of the political avant-garde; representations of history and time in experimental film and video, and contemporary cinematic hybrids such as the essay film, experimental documentary, animated documentary and expanded cinemas.”

Courses taught include: Documentary film; Avant-garde film; Committed Cinema: Film/Media, Art and Social Change; The Image of Time: Cinematic Temporalities, From History To Entropy: Making History n Cinema; Political Modernism and Beyond: Radical Formalism in Film and New Media, “Mediatized War: Vision, Technology and the Spectacle of Violence in Contemporary Non-Fiction Media; Graduate Production Seminar in Video and Moving Image Media Production; Documentary Film Production

Skoller’s films have been exhibited in museums, universities and festivals internationally. Screenings and exhibitions include: The Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Portland Art Museum, OR; The Gene Siskel Film Center, Art Institute of Chicago, The SF Cinematheque; Museum of the Moving Image, NY; JP Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Whitney Museum, NY; P.S. 1, NY; Anthology Film Archives, NY; Flaherty Film Seminar, NY; Arsenal Kino, Berlin; Mannheim Film Festival, Germany; The Latin American Film Festival, Havana; National Film Theatre, London. His essays and articles on experimental film and video have appeared in Film Quarterly; Discourse; Afterimage; Cinematograph; New Art Examiner, Art Practical among others. Skoller was part of the founding faculty of the Dept. of Film/Video/New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was Director of the Cinema and Media Studies Program at Wellesley College. 

Books

Skoller_post war
Skoller shadows

Select publications

Recent Articles, Book Chapters & Catalogue Essays:

“iDocument Police: Contingency, Resistance and the Precarious Present”  World Records, Journal of Contemporary Documentary film. Inaugural Issue. pub. UnionDocs Brooklyn, NY.  December 2017. 

“Present-Time: The Art of Resistance in the age of Cinematographic Ubiquity”  Representations, 136, (2016)   Berkeley, UC Press.2016.

“Unlived Histories and Life Longings” Shadowed. Caroline Picard, Ed. Chicago: Green Lantern Press. 2017. pp 90-104

“Introduction” and sub-theme editor “WAR” The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film Eds. Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell. In press.
“ReAnimator: Embodied History, and the Post-Cinema Trace in Ken Jacobs’ Digital Composites” Pervasive Animation AFI Film Reader, Routledge 2013

Guest Editor Special Issue: “Making it (Un)real: Contemporary Theories and Practices in Documentary/Animation.” Animation: An interdisciplinary Journal. Vol 6, No. 3. London: Sage Press, Nov, 2011

“Fragments of an Inheritance: Contingencies of History in ‘Cooperation of Parts’” POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg, Skoller, ed., London: Blackdog Press. 2010

“Memories of the Revolution: Filmmaking as Mourning Work” Spanish Translation in the book: Los Fantasmas de Ñancahuazú Buenos Aires: Viper’s Tongue Books, 2010.

“The Place of October: An Exchange with James Elkins” The State of Art Criticism James Elkins, ed. Routledge Press. 2007

“Greg Sholette: Do It yourself Art Action Kit!” Gregory Sholette Selected Projects 1980-2003 catalogue essay, Clifford Gallery, Colgate University 2004. (Translated into Russian for publication 2008)

“Landscapes at the End of History: Tony Sinden’s Installation Dichotomy” Tony Sinden: Everything Must Go-Installation, Video and Film London: The British Arts Council. 2003.

“The Domestic Lives of Lynn Marie Kirby: Some Notes (with interruptions) on Six Films” Discrete and Continuous Boundary Problems: Lynn Marie Kirby Retrospective Monograph. SF. Foundation for Art in Cinema 2002.

 

Selected Film, Video & Photographic works:

“You did not See Hiroshima.” Digital film, 30 minutes. 2017 

“The Promise of Happiness: Stranded Images from the Age of Revolution” 4 screen film installation with 16mm film, analog video and digital video. 24 minute loop. Southern Exposure Gallery, SF, CA. 2016

Mother (after Bellini) Photographic Installation 24’x16’, 32 individual prints, Worthryder Gallery, Berkeley, Ca. 2014

Private Commons, and the Ends of Public Space 60 mins video (in-progress) 2014

“Eisenstein’s ‘Das Kapital” Photo Installation: In The Imaginary Archive and The Wellington Collaboratorium, New Zealand, 2010; Galway Ireland, 2011; Graz Austria, 2013; Kiev, Ukraine, 2014

Movie-drome: the Island on the Edge of Forever in the exhibition Fifteen Islands for Robert Moses. Queens Museum, NY 2012
The Promise of Happiness Pt 1. Vietnam 32 mins. Video, 2007

Please, Please, Please, (For JB) w/Mark Bartlett. Photo & text installation, 2007

The Weather is Clearing Up! 4mins. Video 2006

The Unquiet: Speaking Mauscheln* 3-1/2-hr. segments. Video,1997

The Malady Of Death, 43 Mins., 16mm, Color, Sound, 1994

Gulf Crisis TV Project, Paper Tiger/ Deep Dish, Segment On U.S. Jews Opposing Gulf War 1991

Nicaraguan Video Series, Prod. With Xchange TV Collective 1986

Nicaragua: Hear-Say/See-Here, 65 Mins., 16mm, Color, Sound. 1986