Gregg Biermann - Experimental 2006  5min  Hackensack, NJ.

"Happy Again" is a digital age motion study inspired by the "chronophotographic" work of Etienne-Jules Marey. The signature scene from the Hollywood musical "Singin' in the Rain" is split into seven layers. Each layer is moving at a different speed and is visible equally in superimposition. At the temporally central point all visual and audio elements coalesce in a single frame. The result uncovers a new cinema, music and dance that are buried within the familiar iconic sequence. 

My work comes out of the avant-garde tradition of film as visual art. Avant-garde cinema is an important and relatively young artistic project.  While it maintains its scrappy integrity, and while many significant works have been created in subsequent decades, current practitioners have not fully moved out of the shadow of the prodigious 1960's and 70's.  Consequently I've looked to new technologies to discover as unspoiled frontiers no longer available to small gauge filmmakers. The development of new instruments has often determined the important aesthetic developments in artistic and musical composition. Its capacity to alter, mask, fragment, re-mix, super-impose, mutate, reflect, transmit and reframe are its prime currents. My recent work most often deals with the power of cinema to transform the familiar into the unfamiliar and unseal production and editing strategies. These strategies often reveal unexpected and obscure qualities of the subject matter, as well as the interchange between conceptual ideas, the production process and aural/visual sensations.