Jem Cohen
Jem Cohen is a Brooklyn-based director and cameraman. His work over the past 17 years has been built from his own ongoing archive of street footage, portraits, and sound. For a given project, Cohen often shoots in hundreds of locations, with little or no additional crew. His works depend on the collision between documentary, narrative, and experimental approaches.
BENJAMIN SMOKE, (co-directed with Peter Sillen) premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, was picked up for theatrical distribution by Cowboy Pictures, and won 1st prize at the DoubleTake Documentary Fest. LOST BOOK FOUND won 1st prizes at Locarno, the Bonn Videonale, Film + Arc (Graz, Austria), and the Festival Dei Popoli (Florence). Earlier works include THIS IS A HISTORY OF NEW YORK, JUST HOLD STILL, and BURIED IN LIGHT (originally commissioned by the High Museum in Atlanta as a 3-channel video installation). INSTRUMENT, the feature-length documentary on the band, Fugazi, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Fest and screened at venues ranging from squats in Italy to the Whitney Biennial.
AMBER CITY, an Italian city portrait, won 1st prize in the Video Competition at Locarno '99. Recent releases include BLOOD ORANGE SKY, a commissioned portrait of a city in Sicily, and the short, LITTLE FLAGS. Cohen has worked extensively with musicians including Godspeed You black Emperor!, Elliott Smith, R.E.M., Patti Smith, Sparklehorse, Jonathan Richman, Miracle Legion, Vic Chesnutt, and the Orpheus Orchestra with Gil Shaham. Cohen's works have been broadcast by the BBC, PBS, Planete, and The Sundance Channel and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. He is a Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellow, and has received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.
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"Jem Cohen." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/jem-cohen.
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Jem Cohen is a Brooklyn-based director and cameraman whose 17-year practice is built from an archive of street footage, portraits and sound; he shoots in many locations and blends documentary, narrative and experimental approaches. BENJAMIN SMOKE (co-directed with Peter Sillen) premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won 1st prize at the DoubleTake Documentary Fest, and LOST BOOK FOUND won prizes at Locarno. His work has been broadcast by BBC, PBS, Planete and The Sundance Channel, is held by MoMA and the Whitney, and he is a Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellow.
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Last modified 17 June 2011