History in Hell (2023)
Installation Views from The Locker Plant, Chinati Foundation. Marfa, Texas.
About:
An open edition of unique graphite drawings that depict the pages of an imaginary book about the underworld. This series comprises personal documents collaged with other printed ephemera culled from the artists own collection of newspaper clippings, religious texts, novels, archeological catalogues and rave flyers. Each piece of printed matter is hand copied and arrange into a publishing layout to imagine an archaeological compendium about the material and spiritual basis for hell.
Victory of Light Over Darkness…Harmony and Achievement (2021)
video preview. sound, color. 26 min.
Synopsis:
The Needle Trades theater in New York is reconstructed as a film set in Germany for a big-budget battle sequence between historic characters and invisible forces. The specter of Hollywood, a fake Guggenheim museum, artifice, and delusion are combined to render the auditorium as both a prison and landscape.
The story follows a set designer as she recounts her final industry gig: a massive scale replica of the Needle Trades Auditorium in New York. This space provides an echo chamber of associations for two formative events in New York City: The Triangle Factory Fire of 1911 and the controversial avant-garde film society known as Cinema 16, operated by Amos and Marcia Vogel from 1947 to 1963. The Needle Trades Auditorium was the primary screening venue for Cinema 16, and currently houses New York’s largest WPA murals that depict the Triangle Fire and the labor rights that were born from it. However, recent findings have concluded that the mural is not an authentic WPA commission, but was painted in such a style by an artist in 1941. The narrator’s unreliable testimony interrogates the authenticity of these artifacts, leading to a catastrophic event foreshadowed by an earlier incident that occurred in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany.
Credits:
text & edit: Mike Crane / camera: Ryan Balton / assistant camera: Dan Fridman / voice: Marlen Ulonska / Translation: Isabelle Kress
production assistant: Kevin Kelly / 3D modeling: Kristian Tot / animation: Vladimir Kolesnik / sound mix: Josh Allen / colorist: Mishel Hassidim
Cutting the Mushroom (2021)
video preview. sound, color. 22 min.
“New modes of relating, communicating, and projecting ourselves in virtual space give rise to new ways of expressing our fractured identities cinematically. The film is an exploration of technologically mediated communication based on correspondence between the filmmaker and an art dealer in the Baltic region.”
Logline:
“Everybody dreams. Everybody travels, sometimes into countries where strange beauty, wisdom, adventure, love expects him.”
About:
An email correspondence between the filmmaker and a mysterious online art dealer in the Baltic develops into a strangely intimate exchange about art and authenticity, media of questionable provenance, digressive Wikipedia research, and—to borrow the title of Hans Richter’s 1947 film—dreams that money can buy.
Credits:
voice: Jurgis Damaševčius / mix: Josh Allen / studio engineer: Regina Gedgaudaitė / text: Mike Crane, D.V. / edit: Mike Crane / vfx & compositing consultant: Vladimir Kolesnik / grading: Kevin Kelly / Support provided by: The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, The University of Pennsylvania & Wavefarm MAAF
Current Affairs ( 2019 / 2023 )
video preview
4k video, sound, color. 82 min.
note: this is a feature length edit of a six-episode serial drama that was presented as an installation at Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2019 (below).
Logline:
The employees of a besieged television station navigate the financial and spiritual channels of a developing city.
Synopsis:
Current Affairs is a dramatized reenactment of a six-day work week at Wattan TV, an independent television news station based in Ramallah, Palestine. For this production, Crane worked with the writer and crew members of Wattan's original crime drama, In The Presence of Justice, which is the first narrative series to be produced by a news agency in the Middle East. Executed in the style of a daytime drama staged by Wattan's crew and staff, Current Affairs revolves around the production of a news segment on the issue of rampant consumer debt throughout the West Bank in 2017. As the deadline approaches, the crew splinters into a debate over the merits of spiritualism, solidarity and self determination, all of which are being increasingly subsumed by the ubiquitous logic of finance and debt.
Cast:
Wafaa Arouri as The Journalist, Kamal Odeh as The News Manager, Sara AlAdra as The Producer, May Marei as The Writer, Hamza Al-salayemeh as The Anchor, Arkan Dawoud as The Editor, Ibrahim Badwan as The Camera Operator, Atheer Niem, Ala Zeid and Raneen Khaldi as The Staff Interns
Credits:
Direction & Editing: Mike Crane / Assistant Director & DP: Amjad Shoman / Writer: Khaled Faqeeh Art Director: Atheer Niem / Script Supervisor: Samia Hirzalla / Translators: Mustafa Zeno & Ramy Zeno Field Producer: Airida Poskute / Lodging: A.M. Qattan Foundation
UHF42 (2019)
About:
UHF42 is a dramatic restaging of a nine-to-five work week at Wattan TV, the longest running station in the occupied West Bank City of Ramallah, Palestine. Each episode portrays one day of a continuous week, blending scripted performances with documentary scenes of office life. For the production of UHF42, Mike Crane worked with the writer and crew members of Wattan's original crime drama, In The Presence of Justice, which is the first narrative series to be produced by a news agency in the Middle East. UHF42 instead turns the cameras inward, employing the managers, journalists and staff to perform as themselves in a news segment on the rising levels of consumer debt in Ramallah. As the deadline approaches, the workers splinter into a debate over the merits of spiritualism, solidarity and self determination, all of which are being increasingly subsumed by the ubiquitous conditions of finance and debt.
Exhibitions & Publications:
Refracted Realities, February 21 - April 14, 2019 Kunstmuseum Bonn, DE.
documenta 14, ERT2, Athens, Greece
Forum Expanded, Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, DE.
Promissory Note, Triple Canopy
Credits:
Director: Mike Crane / Assistant Director: Amjad Shoman / Writer: Khaled Faqeeh / Script Supervisor: Airida Poskute / Art Director: Atheer Niem / Field Producer: Samia Hirzalla / Translators: Mustafa Zeno & Ramy Zeno / Lodging: Qattan Foundation
Cast:
Wafaa Arouri as The Journalist, Kamal Odeh as The News Manager, Ibrahim Badwan as The Camera Operator, Sara AlAdra as The Producer, Mai Marei as The Writer, Hamza Al-salayemeh as The Anchor, Arkan Dauwood and Atheer Niem as The Interns, Ala Zeid and Raneen Khaldi as The Lovers