contemplating color
Damaged Visions 9:00
In Gorewitz’ mirroring of the traumatized mind, “The war never stops,” and “everything is filtered” through a montage of Nazi warfare and familial loss. The past has so little regard for its place that Nazi soldiers continue to march—a march of time that doesn’t go anywhere and keeps the horrors stomping at the back—and sometimes the front— of the speaker’s mind. In memory-like footage, images of village life slide over each other, a close up of barbed wire could double as flames and Hebrew letters as well as the barriers of the killing camps, and a sung Yiddish lullaby only unnerves us; in damaged vision, little remains just itself. Setting us in his mother’s birthplace, Szeged, Romania, its 60,000 Jews decimated by the Nazis, Gorewitz wonders whether his grandfather’s death was a suicide or a murder, and whether part of his grandfather lives in the filmmaker, and whether part of the filmmaker has been buried with his grandfather. Through this barrage of conscious and subconscious knowing, Gorewitz asks, “Are others feeling this?” This liminal space might be dreamlike, but as Gorewitz says, the haunted person becomes “an exile to dreams.” How then, we wonder, can the filmmaker follow the famous rabbinical teaching mentioned early in the film: “The world is a narrow bridge, and the important thing is not to be afraid.” Damaged Visions is both why such instruction is so difficult, and why art—which Gorewitz reminds us was once thought “barbaric” after the Holocaust—provides the handrails.- Jessica Greenbaum, Poet, Editor
Offering to Yemaya 6:00
Offering to Yemaya is riveting from the first notes drawing awareness to the sensory and natural world. This piece is welcoming with genuine respect to how ritual evolves over time. Rachel Hadas’ poem enriches the symbolism to a rich restoration from the maiden white, to mother red and the crone’s ever guiding witness the elements and blessings of Orisha carrying one through prayer and performance. The collaboration elevates simple salt to a surrealist sensation of tumbling toward unimaginable colors. Throughout this short film Gorewitz harmoniously blends seemingly two opposing elements conveying the cleansing of natural as well as metaphysical acceptance.-Attorious Renee Augustin, Poet
Goat's Head (Italian version) 4 :00
Picture yourself in a skull cap flying kites against a marble sky. Birds fly out like suds along a pixie stick. Thoughts meander a restless wind stumbling blindly making their way across. Do you hear the winter star coming down into decadence into excess? It's the atmosphere of Obeah VooDoo. It's California. Itself didn't take long. And myself recorded an awful lot.Aphrodisiac and delicious for the most part making the most out of parts most people discard. Mannish water makes the bamboo strong. The man only the male called ram-goat legs head intestines testicles. Goats Head Soup Super Deluxe Unboxing Summersalt The Long Torso Marina Leopard lemon pimiento green banana pieces cut function zoom glitch eclipse. Bruce Jenner Caitlyn Jenner Wheaties Jenner Jenner Visitor Center. Highly recommend on a nice day for a picnic or sunset view with surf and sea. Equally as lovely as the profusion of wildflowers. Also it was very cold and windy so dress warmly. Unlike Mick and the boys in makeup Marilyn Monroe see-thru fabric a bowl of stew with eyes. This landform is a sub-unit riptide frequented by beachcombing mammals. There are restroom facilities a parking lot and picnictables. Inciting inviting the binocular world an electric blender. Jai guru.--John Peffer, Art Historian
Other Truths 13:00
Shape-shifting, distracted, distracting, diachronic, synchronic, the truth in this video is always plural, always other. It’s also ubiquitous. In scenes from Aigina and Corfu, from Kolonaki and the First Cemetery and the Jewish Museum in Athens, Other Truths offers a provocative slide-show, now skimming, now diving, into Greek history and culture. Graffiti and the Acropolis, marble tomb sculptures and magazines on a kiosk, dancing figures in a museum: we keep moving. Guiding voices include Socrates’s Apology, read by Moses Hadas; there are also uncannily relevant passages from Euripides, Seferis, and others.
Many of the Muses are put to work here, as dance and music, poetry and art and history all contribute to Shalom Gorewitz’s signature collage of images. Other Truths refuses to simplify. Instead, it offers a feast for the senses and for reflection. - Rachel Hadas, Poet
Past Present 3:00
Past Present captures something of what we can imagine it must have felt like for Moses atop Sinai receiving the Torah, the Ten Commandments — winds wailing, thunder cracking, light and shadow shifting across a solitary landscape. The roiling heavens are at once both near and threatening, and remote and serene. The mountains stand still as the sky moves vertiginously around them, and then the mountains themselves move through darkness. You can hear glaciers splitting off into the sea. And against all this cosmic duality — mountain/sky, howling/silence, light/darkness — the letters of the Hebrew alphabet clamber across the face ofthe mountain, first large and then smaller and smaller, more and more numerous. I love how the aleph-bet seems to be emerging from the void into consciousness — much as all knowledge emerges, piecemeal, fragmentarily. Yet, just as the title Past Present implies, letters are ultimately capable of coherence, of creating a unity that transcends time. These letters are like living things going out to populate the universe with the divine speech. They recall for us that during revelation, the letters came together on the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. I’m reminded of the story in Jewish tradition of the child who prays by reciting the aleph-bet. Hecan’t read but he knows his letters, so he does what he can. In Past Present the viewer is that child, just at the dawn of language — through language, developing consciousness; and through consciousness, coming to know holiness in this human world. — Linda Stern, Poet, Editor
Blue Swee 4:00
Shalom Gorewitz’ “Blue Swee” (Jamaican patois for the “indescribable”) shows the paranoia for power and ideology so evident in today’s divisive society and also as the horrible cause of the new cracked “United” States. Shalom’s Shakespearean vision has turned this recurrent human fear and insecurity universal.
Shalom Gorewitz has felt the deep pain of the Holocaust running in his veins. He has witnessed the excess of force against blacks in the Bronx and so could feel the misery and pain of Grenadians when their little island was invaded by the most powerful army on the planet acting in the framework of fear, insecurity, power and ideology.
Real art can only emanate from a real feeling. That’s what “Blue Swee” is, regardless of media and technology.
From the beginning of “Blue Swee” you feel the mountain, the nature, the people working and playing, living life at its best, when these images are interrupted by orderly and neat monster-like automata hiding in their uniforms, they are machines trained to kill. But the islanders keep dancing until their lives are taken away.
The music fights to echo the deep rhymes in Shalom’s visual poetry to become the emotional partner of this extraordinary journey of Shalom’s masterful imagery. Shalom Gorewitz stands high in the scope of the Modern and Post-modern art symbiosis. -Blue Swee, Franz Vila, Artist, Theorist
Run 4:00
Run is the exposure of the human conflict between the ill ambition for overpowering everything and the resilience resistance to it, between insatiable greed and the starvation. For some, another person’s death is only a number that ignore the love ones’ suffering, because that suffering is an extension of their joy, and for others for whom the born life is a treasure. How can something really horrible be expressed so beautifully without losing any of its reality?
Shalom Gorewitz feels the pain of every human being and this profound feeling allows him to use words in search of meaning, to dissolve in new meanings, --art of textuality--, leads him to capture and select images with an eagle eye and pan the camera right to unveil and read images from the left, then, those motion layers intertwine just like reality. His free imagination flows in a visual poetry that absorbs us in it. There is a ballet of rhyme in Shalom’s imagery, rhymes that spark like music and parallels in texts. That’s the unique talent and virtue of Shalom Gorewitz. His videos are lessons on humanity, a warning of what turn humans into monsters and others into heroes; a lesson on the need of human coexistence, understanding and unity. - Franz Vila, Artist, Theorist