An Evening with Jeff Preiss

Experimental filmmaker Jeff Preiss joins us to present his newest film, 14 STANDARD 8mm REELS 1981–1988. Preiss has been making films and living in New York City since the 1980s, when he was working with the renowned Collective for Living Cinema and Films Charas. A selection of his 8mm works from that period was included in The Museum of Modern Art’s 1999 survey of the medium, Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Films. A few years ago, Preiss had the rare chance to salvage a selection of 8mm reels from his archive; 30 years after it was first shot, this lovingly refashioned material returns as both a luminescent ode to the friends, filmmakers, and artists with whom Preiss lived and worked during that time, and a considered meditation on the evolution of diaristic filmmaking.

The original 8mm reels used to make this film were preserved by Anthology Film Archives with the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.