Film still, THE SECRET WORLD, 2023. Courtesy the filmmakers.
Join MOCA for a screening of The Secret World, 2023, followed by a conversation with directors Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny.
The Secret World, 2023, is the first full-length feature film by Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny, following two earlier collaborative film projects in 2008 and 2021. The film was initially conceived as an exploration of how to create a portrait of a mutual friend, Christine Burgin, through the lens of her unique personal library. The result is a phantasmagoria of structural and intuitive methodologies. Throughout, Burgin is heard informally leading a guided tour of extraordinary books, while the images that appear on the screen, constructed out of polychromatic layers, are scrambled and reformed into a riotous mélange. Everything seen in the film has been transmuted through a process of “re-filming” on a hand-held 16mm Bolex camera, ultimately unifying the incompatible formats of film, VHS video and 35mm slides.
Taking form as a shifting clockwork of thirty, short chapters, the film responds to the library's matrix of visionary ideas. Looked at another way, it is a home movie, a record of the friendships between the filmmakers and the film’s central subject. The physical nature of the library—a collection of books in which the authors have each created their own self-contained universe—is re-envisioned as a labyrinth larger than the space that contains it.
Alternating chapters shift between short visual essays built out of an arsenal of hallucinogenic color transformations and an intimate narration describing 19th and 20th century iconoclastic figures, from Dinshah Ghadiali, Eva Carrière, Charles Ford, Richard Shaver, to Wilhelm Reich. This mostly forgotten cast of characters —while often famous or infamous in their own time— engaged in wildly diverse enterprises, including photographs that purported to directly visualize thought emanating through the skull, or histories of the lost Atlantean people discovered inside of rock formations, to creating perpetual motion machines and photographic documentation of the manifestation of “ectoplasm” during historic performances. The musical cadence of Burgin's voice grounds these mysteries, suggesting that together they constitute a necessary way of thinking about collective reality.
Jeff Preiss has been widely active since the 1980s as a filmmaker, cinematographer, curator and visual artist. Through the 80s and 90s he was co-director of the East Village venue Films Charas and a board member of The Collective For Living Cinema. His films from this time were restored and preserved in 2014 by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and have been screened internationally. Highlights include: the Rem Koolhaas commissioned 33 SEQUENCES SPANNING 4 TRIPS TO THE DUTCH EMBASSY IN BERLIN (for the OMA retrospective CONTENT), the 2012 experimental feature STOP, a 50th NY Film Festival selection, 2014’s feature film Low Down, winner of the Sundance award for cinematography and Karlovy Vary, Best Actress, the 2019 MoMA premiere of 14 Standard 8mm Reels, as well as collaborative works made with artists including Joan Jonas, Andrea Fraser, and Anthony McCall. Preiss's influential work as a Director of Photography includes Bruce Weber's 1989 Oscar-nominated Let’s Get Lost, and the 1984 Rosa Von Praunheim produced Vampire Film, DER BIS. In 1995 Preiss co-founded the production company Epoch Films, directing for clients including Iggy Pop, Malcolm McLaren, REM, B52s, Nike, Coke, etc. In 2005 he co-founded the experimental gallery ORCHARD. Recent solo exhibitions include: More Than I Looked For (2020), Stedelijk Museum, and ORCHARD Documents (2023), Celmentin Seedorf, Köln. In 2023, Museion Bolzano presented Time Frame: Jeff Preiss / Dan Graham. Preiss’ work is in collections including MoMA, MOCA LA, and the Hessel Museum of Art. Currently, Preiss sits on the board of Light Industry, a venue for cinema in all of it’s forms, in Brooklyn, NY.