# A Filmmaker Elevates His Home Movies



## Revelation_old (Aug 9, 2004)

*A Filmmaker Elevates His Home Movies*
Elliott Malkin
By A.L. GORDON
January 21, 2005

These days, anyone with a camera can be a filmmaker. Elliott Malkin, a New Yorker who grew up in Lincolnwood, Ill., credits the digital age with creating "a new American folk art" - although his own body of work relies on relatively old-fashioned Super 8s.

One example: Mr. Malkin's "Bris," six minutes of unedited footage of his own circumcision on the dining room table of his family's home, is part of this year's New York Jewish Film Festival. The only mark he made was to add a title screen with the date of the event: June 28, 1973.

"Luckily, it's not graphic," he said. "Some people think it's perverted. I consider it a cultural treasure."

Even though he has made a film out of his bris, he himself is not religious. "I don't believe in God. I'm a typical secular Jew, but I'm fascinated by religion," he said. Jewish rituals intrigue him, and so does Jewish food. He selected the Second Avenue Deli for the interview, gobbling up two pieces of gefilte fish, some potato latkes, and a bowl of matzoh ball soup, which he orders whenever he has a cold. He lives a block away and plans to take his parents there this weekend.

Mr. Malkin's "Family Movie" screens at the festival this weekend. It presents split-screen footage of his parents, Leonard and Roberta Malkin. One side shows them in their 20s; on the other, they reenact their earlier antics. They were fully cooperative subjects - the couple even headed down to Miami Beach to reshoot scenes from a family vacation "on location." The images are of the stock home-movie variety - a mother waving to the camera, a father wrestling with his sons.

"I wanted to make it special for everyone, to recontextualize it in a way that made it a larger story. 'Family Movie' is not about me anymore. It's not about my family anymore. It's the way we grow old and meet the past," Mr. Malkin said.

In fact, Mr. Malkin cut himself right out of his own family movie. "I saw this peppy child running around at birthdays, on vacations. It was me, but I didn't identify with it. I had a strong depersonalization, and that was a strong motive in making the film. The continuity of the self is something I really call into question," said the 31-year-old.

"This is my ode to mom and dad - it's the greatest gift I could give them. They're going to see themselves on the screen at Lincoln Center! They're just regular people from the suburbs of Chicago. What did they do other than be great parents to deserve that?"

As a teenager, Mr. Malkin salvaged piles of Super 8 home movies from the flooded basement.

"I was very nostalgic all my life," he said.

He had them transferred to videotape and watched them a couple of times with his parents, but soon after they were collecting dust as he went off to college at University of Texas at Austin, and then spent two years wandering through Latin America.

He returned home for a while and earned a master's in cognitive psychology at Northwestern in Evanston before taking off again for a tech job in London.

But after a few years, he longed for home once more. "I was feeling very estranged. I didn't like being on another continent. I got to the age when I wanted to be close to my family," he said.

Approaching 30, he moved to New York and enrolled in the interactive telecommunications program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He still works in technology to support himself and also teaches freshman writing at New York University, which covers his tuition. Last semester, that meant 80 to 90 hour workweeks, but he enjoys it.

"I'm a workaholic. I love it. I love working. It's my favorite thing," he said, "I'm doing 10 projects at once."

Soon after setling into life at NYU, he retrieved the original Super 8 reels and the videotape versions and brought them to his East Village apartment, determined to create.

A quick tour of his apartment allows a glimpse into the other elements that have crept into his work. "Circuitry is gorgeous," he said, holding a piece of a disassembled VCR. His end table holds a sculpture he made out of circuit boards named Lucy.

A plastic green bag of empty medicine bottles is in his closet - it's all the asthma and allergy medicine he's taken during his time in New York. His refrigerator shelves are empty except for one, which contains chocolate syrup and a bottle of maraschino cherries. Those were leftovers from a video he did called "Shaving," in which he built an ice cream sundae on his head, then "shaved" it off and ate it.

Now he is beginning work on the third film in the family trilogy: "Mother's History of Birds," which will tell the story of his mother through eight of her pet birds. It will be his first film with sound.

"If I ask my mom what her life was like at a certain time, she won't say much, but when I ask her to tell me about Squeaky, she talks and talks and talks," Mr. Malkin said. "So this is my way of creating a portrait of my mother."

His mother is an artist who taught art for 30 years, and he identifies closely with her. "She gets bored very easily. I'm very much like her. She calls it the schpilkes - she's always got to do something, make stuff. I'm the same way. It's genetic," he said.

Mr. Malkin is also exploring religion again in the installation "Crucifixi NG." It is a cross Mr. Malkin made out of a circuit board, which broadcasts the Lord's Prayer. He didn't build a receiver and the signal is inaudible to the human ear, but the body can't help but act as an antenna.

"It's this very literal anointing of space," he said. He created a fictional organization, the Faith-Based Electronics Group, to make more such objects.

"I remember my father watching TV with his channel-changer, and Jesus comes on, and he goes, 'yeech' and changes the channel quickly. That's my experience of Jesus, this noise of repulsion. I'm very interested in that. I'm drawn to learning about this guy: Who's this character who makes Jewish people repulsed?"

Yet even as he explores abstract topics, there's an archivist in him. He maintains a Web site, dziga.com, which stores examples of his work. He's been working with his father to identify relatives who appear in the Super 8 films, collecting their death certificates, and taking photographs of their graves. He keeps them all in a folder marked "Genealogy."

In the same filing cabinet, he keeps a select few documents from his childhood: his seventh-grade science project on butterflies, a leaf collection.

"I used to have nostalgia O.C.D. - obsessive compulsive disorder," he explained. "But I've gotten over it. Now I'm very particular about what I keep."

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News Source: http://www.nysun.com/article/8077

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