Recent Shorts: Dominic Angerame

I recently had the pleasure of watching some of the more recent shorts by Dominic Angerame, a San Francisco-based artist whose expressive films have been captivating viewers since 1969.

Ronald Sauer in Have Yourself Another Espresso

Have Yourself Another Espresso, a music video, set to the 1963 Shel Silverstein song of the same name, features a man who was a fixture of the North Beach poetry scene in San Francisco, the late Ronald Sauer. Sauer’s bio described him as “musician, collagist, art collector, teacher of film history and literature, polymath critic, and compulsive talker.” Born in 1950, which is too late to be a bona fide beat poet, he presided over the art and literature scene in North Beach and carried on its spirit. In his beret and dark glasses, ogling the “chicks,” he looks here like the quintessential Beat hipster.

The song, a slight, satirical talking blues, is a portrait of a hipster manqué who uses endless cups of espresso both to give himself the courage to approach women and to comfort himself when they inevitably turn him down.

The film acts as a wistful, whimsical tribute to the beatnik ambience that hovers over North Beach, providing both inspiration and nostalgia in generations of bohemians that inhabit San Francisco in the decades that followed the heyday of Kerouac, Corso and Ferlinghetti.

Luminæ

Luminæ, a four minute short from 2022, is a poetic celebration of the radiating bodies in the solar system, and the planets which reflect their light. Angerame assembled the imagery from NASA footage of the sun, moon, earth. Beautifully constructed, the film is a kind of ecstatic visual hymn to the splendid radiance of the universe. The piano music, by John Cale, is almost like a gospel hymn, adding to the prayer-like feeling. The piano is accompanied by an underlying rumble of cycling, harmonic notes, which sounds like the “prepared piano” version of the sound which might be made by solar wind. The track comes from A Crash Course in Harmonics, an obscure B-side to a single from 1985. The rumbling corresponds nicely to the eternal nuclear reactions of the sun, while the piano corresponds to our awed response to the wonders of our solar system.

Prometheus

In Prometheus, a three minute short from 2022, Angerame shoots footage of welders using extremely high contrast film, which turns their sparks into a completely abstract composition: an image field that is literally just black with splotches of white erupting into the darkness. There are no grays or intermediate tones. The white streaks almost look they could have been a hand-painted animation, but the sense of spatial relationships always makes clear that these images were made with a camera. The welding sparks are transformed into bursts of white star shapes, raining showers of light. The forms resemble exploding galaxies, so the images indeed have a Promethean quality, depicting tools that seem to harness the powers of the gods. Occasional reverse sequences show the sparks being sucked inwards towards the central star, an equally compelling way to view them. Angerame also composed and performed the excellent percussion score. There is an affinity between these bells, chimes and drums and the high contrast imagery. Percussion music, leaving out precise melodic pitches and harmony, seems to lay bare the structural skeleton of music, as this photography does to the night-time imagery.

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