Show and Tell: The Work of Dani Leventhal

About This Screening

Dani Leventhal’s videos are the result of a commitment to constantly recording her immediate world, carrying her camera with her every­where, often mounted on her bicycle. From this process she stitches images together in a loose essayistic or diaristic style—a montage that takes us on a journey, but with a destination that is anything but clear. The individual shots seem mundane, but together become hyperreal, giving fresh insight into a personal contemporary world. In the award-winning Draft 9, Leventhal cuts between skinned animals, well-fed pets, her grandfather’s Holocaust-tattooed arm, and her own romantic liaisons to create, in the words of critic Genevieve Yue, “something that is extraordinarily immediate, both fresh and painful, hard to watch and yet impossible not to watch.” In Show and Tell in the Land of Milk and Honey, Leventhal juxtaposes bucolic shots of farm life with tales of sexual harassment and sick chickens while living and working in Israel while in 9 Minutes of Kaunaus, she captures the fanta­sies of a wide-eyed boy whose older brother serves in the Israeli army. While Dani is often tagged as a diary filmmaker, the works as a whole complicate that term so much that it becomes ultimately rather unhelpful for understanding her project. At times, her videos can recall the way that Nathaniel Dorsky’s films spin the majestic from the mundane. Like Dorsky, Leventhal seeks out images with singularity and weight, alive to the imme­diacy of the moment—a moment that will never return. —Chris Stults