Harry Dodge

A blending of documentary and experimental narrative strategies, combining stunning 16mm landscape cinematography with a bold, lyrical voice-over to share two San Francisco stories: the history of the Golden Gate Bridge as “suicide landmark,” and the story of a butch dyke in San Francisco searching for love and self-discovery. The Joy of Life is a film about landscapes, both physical and emotional.

Winner is a fictional interview gone awry, featuring a reticent sweepstakes winner who doggedly avoids receiving her prize and manages to morph an ad spot into a mini documentary about her art work.

Shy is a transgender man who leaves his small town after the death of his father, and heads to the big city to live a life of crime. Along the way, he encounters Valentine, a quirky adoptee, in search of his birth mother. An immediate kinship is sparked between these men and they become partners in crime.

A young lunatic director and his devoted cult of cinema terrorists kidnap a Hollywood movie goddess and force her to star in their radical underground movie.

The Fudgesicle, a solo performative video in which Dodge, playing a fudgesicle, parries with an unseen interlocutor in a stripped-down, monochromatic setting. The deceptively puerile premise eventually serves as a container for an effervescent (and existential) meditation on shape, legibility, and the limits of articulation.

In Big Bang (Song of the Cosmic Hobo), Harry Dodge appears as a low-rent automaton in an urgent quest to launch a small group of cosmic particles back into a state of pure potentiality. In this film, a cyborg (a shirtless Dodge with a Chroma key green cardboard-box robot head) purchases a particle board cabinet at IKEA and, after gloriously smashing it to bits with a sledgehammer, heads out to scatter the dust at a Grand Canyon scenic overlook. In swift order, the work invokes questions about consumerism, materiality, and the possible fecundity of dissolution or destruction.