Alfred Guzzetti


Alfred Guzzetti is a maker of documentary and experimental films and videos. His work has been shown at the New York Film Festival, the Margaret Mead Festival, and other festivals in London, Rotterdam, Germany, Spain and France, as well as in installation settings in New York, Copenhagen, and Santa Monica.

Education

Alfred Guzzetti was born in Philadelphia and attended the public schools there. He earned a BA from Central High School and a second BA from Harvard College. He studied at Birkbeck College, University of London, as a Marshall Scholar, and received a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard University, where he now teaches.

Career

Following a series of films for theatrical productions, Guzzetti's experimental short film, Air, won first prize in its category at the 1972 Chicago Film Festival. Afterwards he embarked on an autobiographical cycle that included the feature-length Family Portrait Sittings and Scenes from Childhood, both premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art. These led to further autobiographical films, including Time Exposure and The Gifts of Time, and to collaborations with the photographer Susan Meiselas and filmmaker Richard P. Rogers, with whom he co-directed Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family and '. These were political and historical documentaries and prompted later collaborations with Susan Meiselas on Reframing History and ', which includes Living at Risk plus a set of 20 short films entitled The Barrios Family 25 Years Later. In the late 1980s he began a series of conversations with anthropologist Ákos Östör that resulted in Seed and Earth, a portrayal of life in a Bengali village, and Khalfan and Zanzibar, which poses the question of an individual's relation to his culture. Both of these were made collaboratively with Östör and anthropologist Lina Fruzzetti. Around 1993 Guzzetti became interested in the experimental possibilities of the new small video formats and began a series of videos that included What Actually Happened, Under the Rain, A Tropical Story, The Tower of Industrial Life, which was shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Down from the Mountains, Calcutta Intersection, History of the Sea, and most recently, Still Point and Passage. This experimental strain is related to his collaborations with composers, including his contributions to Earl Kim’s Exercises en Route, as well as to Kurt Stallmann’s SONA. He also worked collaboratively with Kurt Stallmann on Breaking Earth, a gallery installation for 11 channels of sound and 5 video projections; Moon Crossings, for 15 instruments, electronics and video; the single-channel ; Among Rivers for 7 projectors, 28 loudspeakers, and four performers; and Open Air with Kurt Stallmann and wind player Eric Mandat. With composer Ivan Tcherepnin he created the 16mm film Sky Piece.

Selected filmography

  • Against the Light 12 minutes
  • Passage 16 minutes
  • Daybook 24 minutes
  • The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer 15 minutes
  • The Gifts of Time 78 minutes
  • Renewal 5 minutes
  • Time Present 17 minutes
  • Time Exposure 11 minutes
  • The Barrios Family Twenty-Five Years Later 131 minutes
  • Still Point 15 minutes
  • Reframing History
  • Night Vision 2 minutes
  • América Central 7 minutes
  • History of the Sea 15 minutes
  • Calcutta Intersection 10 minutes
  • Down from the Mountains 9 minutes
  • The Tower of Industrial Life 15 minutes
  • Khalfan and Zanzibar 25 minutes
  • A Tropical Story 9 minutes
  • Under the Rain 10 minutes
  • What Actually Happened 9 minutes
  • The Stricken Areas 9 minutes
  • Variation 5 minutes
  • The Curve of the World 8 minutes
  • Seed and Earth 36 minutes
  • Rosetta Stone 10 minutes
  • Pictures from a Revolution 92 minutes
  • July 12 minutes
  • Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family 58 minutes
  • Chronological Order 4 minutes
  • Scenes from Childhood 78 minutes
  • Family Portrait Sittings 103 minutes
  • Evidence 16 minutes
  • Air 18 minutes
  • Notes on the Harvard Strike 38 minutes

    Collaborative projects with composers

  • Open Air, approximately 35 minutes
  • Among Rivers, approximately 45 minutes
  • Time Present 17 minutes
  • Moon Crossings 16 minutes
  • Breaking Earth 26 minutes
  • SONA 6 minutes
  • Sky Piece 10 minutes
  • Exercises en Route 6 minutes