Experiencing Interruptions?

Exhumation (Dirt: Part Four)

Exhumation is an extended poetic meditation on our relation to the soil, and the energies buried within it. Centuries of history, of conquering and re-conquering, lie beneath our feet, and the return of the vanquished is inevitable. There has also always been an alternative possibility, within the American landscape, of a more peaceful relationship with the soil, the resting place of our ancestors.

A collage of poetic imagery, music, and invocatory language, the film follows two men in a series of esoteric experiments. Their words take us to unexpected landscapes, deep under the earth’s surface, floating along a jungle river, and to a mountain peak crowned with an electric guitar. A postmodern video opera, Exhumation bathes the viewer in music, language, and visual spectacle.

  • David Finkelstein
    Director
  • David Finkelstein
    Writer
  • Ian W. Hill
    Writer
  • David Finkelstein
    Key Cast
  • Ian W. Hill
    Key Cast
  • David Finkelstein
    music composed by
  • David Finkelstein
    Animation and visual design
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    20 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    January 1, 2025
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    miniDV
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Made Here Festival
    Burlington, Vermont
    United States
    April 10, 2024
  • Videoformes
    Clermont-Ferrand
    France
    March 13, 2025
Director Biography - David Finkelstein

DAVID FINKELSTEIN is a Guggenheim Fellow in film/video. His video work has been featured in numerous film festivals around the world and has won awards at 28 of them. In 2013, he was an invited artist at the Traverse Vidéo Festival in Toulouse, France. His two feature films premiered at New Filmmakers in New York. He has had solo screenings of his films in Bilbao, London, Porto, New York, Chicago, Portland, Austin, North Carolina, Minnesota, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. His work has been funded by The Fund for Creative Communities, The Field, Movement Research, Meet the Composer, The Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BACA, and other sources.

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Director Statement

My video work is constructed in layers.

To begin a new piece, I first videotape a completely improvised text, typically using two actors. I have been developing my technique of improvising text since 1993. I am interested in improvisation as a way of generating language directly from an actor's intuitive discovery of what each performance is about, as it unfolds spontaneously. A subtle and intimately physical experience between two people is thus made into audible language.

For the next layer, I listen repeatedly to the text, clarifying for myself the emotional undercurrents and musical flow which formed the underlying structure of the original spontaneous performance. During this phase, I compose a musical score for the video, which clarifies this flow for the listener.

In the final phase, I listen to the text even more (now enhanced with a musical score), and gradually develop many layers of meticulously crafted digital imagery, to further clarify the emotional and musical threads which run through the improvisation. The carefully constructed nature of the images works as a counter-dynamic against the spontaneous, liquid flow of the original improvised material. Like a dream, an improvisation seems on the surface to be full of volatile, unpredictable changes, but it is actually a completely unified form of composition, in which often every line of text can be seen to be simply a new way of looking at a single, unified idea. The images and music thus help the viewer to perceive the tremendous thematic and emotional unity which underlies the seeming changeableness of the improvisation.

The full process of creating the video in three layers (text, music, images) typically takes from six to ten months.