By Kaila Mack
Gallery Bergen’s newest installation, “Personal Effects,” is a collection of stills and video from Bergen faculty member and experimental filmmaker Gregg Biermann. This is part of a collaboration with the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, where Biermann’s latest film, also titled “Personal Effects,” screened on Sunday, Oct. 19. The film is centered around a near-death experience Biermann had after suffering sudden cardiac death while playing tennis in October 2020.
Biermann’s educational career began at Binghamton University, where he initially set out to study painting and photography. However, there he discovered that he took more interest in his film classes and teachers. His professors at Binghamton, including experimental filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs and Larry Gottheim, were an inspiration to him and his own films. He chose to continue his education at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he sought out like-minded individuals and filmmakers. He took an interest in flicker films, an experimental film style from the 1960s characterized by strobe-like changes between light and dark frames.
In his early films, Biermann would take a second of film and loop it for 45 minutes with slight changes made to each frame. He would eventually incorporate more sophisticated aspects into his films, such as appropriated imagery. In a similar way to musical artists sampling other artists’ works, appropriated imagery takes images or film and recontextualizes them to give them new meaning. Biermann’s films often resemble collages, as the screen is divided into multiple squares or columns, each playing a slightly different version of the same scene. In other films, he uses editing to distort and warp a scene. He compares his work to Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music” piece, a project in which microphones were suspended from the ceiling and swung like pendulums over speakers to produce a peculiar and fascinating array of feedback sounds. He also compares it to Marcel Duchamp’s dadaist work, “L.H.O.O.Q.,” in which Duchamp drew a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa. Biermann does something similar: he takes scenes from classic films and draws a metaphorical mustache on them.
“Personal Effects,” however, is different from his other works. Biermann reflected on some past experiences where he had been asked about where he was in his work, but was not able to answer. Unlike his earlier works, “Personal Effects” is just that — personal. Even the medium which he chose to use, rotoscoping, is much more personal than his usual warped and sliced films. Rotoscoping is an animation technique that uses live-action footage that is traced frame by frame. “Personal Effects” includes scenes that are traced over from over 80 films and materials, including footage of him being given CPR after his collapse. Also unique from Biermann’s earlier films is a voiceover in which he details the events that occurred after he suffered sudden cardiac death, and also uses a British accent to monologue about the philosophy of death. He describes his other works as “video art pieces,” whereas “Personal Effects” is a “personal essay.”
In the weeks after Biermann’s sudden cardiac death, he experienced hallucinations, which he discusses during the voiceover portion of the film. Once he recovered from the event, he was left to reckon with a myriad of complicated thoughts and feelings that arose after his confrontation with his mortality. He turned to philosophy in an attempt to make sense of some of them, and took a course on the philosophy of death offered through Yale’s Open Course program. Under the guise of his more philosophy-savvy British alter-ego, Biermann shared musings on philosophy throughout the film. The film discusses life, death and time, and the idea that “our finitude is our identity.”
A central concept of the film is Biermann’s belief that death is “the problem that eats all other problems.” He feels this is so because when we die, we cannot have any reaction or feelings about it. Once we cease to exist, it is only the things we leave behind that we can exist through. Biermann finds this fact to be integral to life’s value and meaning. In his British accent, he contemplates what life would be like as an immortal being. He concludes that it is our finitude that motivates us to create things and to leave a mark on the world. Furthermore, if we had infinite time to try all that there is to do, everything would lose its meaning. The fact that we do not have time to do everything is, as Biermann sees it, what gives life value. In other words, it is death itself that makes life worth living.
