Kobland's quiet, meditative video is a philosophical investigation, a travelogue of sorts, and, ultimately, a probing essay-film in the tradition of Aleksandr Sokorov or late Godard. Buildings and Grounds pairs lingering, beautifully framed shots of urban scenes, industrial installations, deserts, and other evocative landscapes with a series of fragmentary ruminations drawn from film luminaries such as Fassbinder, Fellini, Bergman and Tarkovsky. Presented as a unified diaristic accompaniment to the image, the text comes to us both as English-language 'subtitles' and, simultaneously, as voice-off appropriated from the original films. Floating over an image track virtually evacuated of all human form or movement, Kobland's questions and digressions call up a beautiful and melancholy world.

The skin of a teddy bear and its synthetic insides....

A fine example of guerrilla translation. This version of George Bush's latest State of the Union speech dispels all doubts.

Tea time will never be the same! This tickling thriller about an afternoon tea features Holly Brown, who spontaneously transforms into several female personas that startle and entertain her surprised guest. Brown’s character’s are obsessed with formalities of etiquette, pedigree and hospitality while spoofing sex roles and stereotypes.

Six educational films of the 50s and 60s face sex. It's all a matter of pipes: "The sperm is half the man in a baby," says one teenager. Other films associate sex with crime and decay: there is danger for the unwary ("Judy had done nothing wrong, just was neglected) and we must be careful because homosexuals prey on the innocent ("Jimmy didn´t know that Ralph was sick, he had a sick mind ...").

California Company Town deals predominantly with the landscapes of 14 towns created and then abandoned by the industries that created them. The film contemplates the idea of the American landscape as historical and political space and the gaps between the ideology and reality of the spaces in which we live. History is always marked upon the land; a state whose very geography has been radically reconfigured to serve specific use. While sold as a limitless land expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its beginning, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and state interests. My work is associative, combining personal memory with the supposed objectivism of history, thus questioning both. All of my work begins with landscape, the experience of living in a particular place at a particular time. The reality of our world was born out of very specific moments and choices, a construction that is neither organic nor inevitable. The film is shot on 16mm, and the use of film itself is of central importance, as it documents time within space, the way history hangs in our experience or image and light. The haunted loss of the American promise is tangible in the material of both the towns themselves, and the film that documents them.

California Company Town deals predominantly with the landscapes of 14 towns created and then abandoned by the industries that created them. The film contemplates the idea of the American landscape as historical and political space and the gaps between the ideology and reality of the spaces in which we live. History is always marked upon the land; a state whose very geography has been radically reconfigured to serve specific use. While sold as a limitless land expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its beginning, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and state interests. My work is associative, combining personal memory with the supposed objectivism of history, thus questioning both. All of my work begins with landscape, the experience of living in a particular place at a particular time. The reality of our world was born out of very specific moments and choices, a construction that is neither organic nor inevitable. The film is shot on 16mm, and the use of film itself is of central importance, as it documents time within space, the way history hangs in our experience or image and light. The haunted loss of the American promise is tangible in the material of both the towns themselves, and the film that documents them.