“I make movies, sometimes using a computer. Not always, of course: that would be maddening.”
‒James Otis

Of course weirdo art film languishes on the periphery of conventional film, but why has one James Otis, clearly brilliant yet oddly invisible, languished on the periphery of weirdo art film? Some fault lies in the stars, some in Otis himself, the confessed worst promoter of his own work. Contradictions emerge almost immediately with Otis, a polymath educated in math, sculpture, computer science, film studies and artistic practices he calls “gesturing” and “finger twiddling.” He’s a lucid dreamer of the mundane, a timeless anachronism, and a skeptic of certainty. Otis displayed remarkable perceptual abilities at an early age. Concerned about the seven-year-old’s description of binocular vision, his parents took him to a doctor who prescribed a series of eye exercises—exercises that only heightened his acuity. At the age of 19, too aware of his reliance on vision, he blindfolded himself for 9 days.

In the late 1970s, he was a “student” of Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado Boulder—though that’s somewhat misleading, as Otis took a single course Brakhage taught on Charlie Chaplin. He later became Brakhage’s teaching assistant, befriended the monolithic avant-garde figure along the way, managed the department’s equipment room, and taught filmmaking classes. While making films, he contributed to Criss-Cross Art Communications, the journal of the Boulder avant-garde art cooperative that included talents such as Fred Worden (who received his Spectacle due late last year). And if maintaining a lifelong friendship and correspondence with Brakhage wasn’t enough to certify Otis as an “experimental filmmakers’ experimental filmmaker,” he soon became close with Ken Jacobs—once even hitchhiking from Colorado to Jacobs’ loft in New York just to visit.

Otis’ early, revolutionary computer films, such as FROM THE FAMILY OF EGGS and GRIDROSE, stand in tension with his general indifference toward the machines—though perhaps “indifference” isn’t quite right; what they can be persuaded to do, what he can produce with them. He’s an artist at heart, plain and not simple—as Ken Jacobs wrote, he’s “a central terminus of radical departures.” It’s been a little over two decades since his last solo show, which was around the time he retired from film work. Now, after nearly a quarter century, Otis is primed and ready to unleash his artistic energies upon New York’s micro-cinema-going public.

For one weekend in mid-June, Spectacle is pleased and proud to offer James Otis some long-overdue recognition—and is also exceedingly honored to host and introduce a new generation to this elusive and truly singular Colorado-based film artist, presenting the first major screening of his visionary work in over two decades.

Playing back-to-back on the evenings of June 13th and 15th, two programs will encompass twenty of Otis’s films across the spectrum of his mythical and mathematical forays into computer animation, found footage, landscape, hyper-stereoscopic, and handmade filmmaking—all on 16mm prints from Canyon Cinema and Otis himself.

Otis will be present at each screening to speak and entertain—if not answer—questions during both mid- and post-show Q&As.

Co-programmed with Paul Attard. Special thanks to James Otis, Mark Toscano, Zachary Epcar and Ashley Rose Tacheira (Canyon Cinema).

Series title and requisite knowledge of James Otis indebted to “Rocky Mountain Formalism: Avant-Garde Film in Colorado” by Dale Jamieson (Millenium Film Journal #12, 1982).